Leadership’s Future: Raising Our Future
by Miki Saxon
Teams aren’t allowed to win by a large margin, everyone likes everyone, no one plays favorites; wouldn’t you love to live/work in a place where that was the norm?
Last Thursday I wrote about a school where teams lost the game if they scored too much and said, “Great lesson to teach our future leaders—don’t excel, don’t try too hard, don’t strive too much, don’t field a winning team and, whatever you do, don’t follow in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Magic Johnson, Dr. Jonas Salk or any of those who surpassed their peers by a wide margin.”
Now, in line with teachers and administrators varied efforts to “level the playing field” for kids in school, which is an oxymoron (accent on the moron) if I ever heard one, comes the push to eliminate “best friends.”
Indeed, much of the effort to encourage children to be friends with everyone is meant to head off bullying and other extreme consequences of social exclusion.
But the professionals see it differently.
If children’s friendships are choreographed and sanitized by adults, the argument goes, how is a child to prepare emotionally for both the affection and rejection likely to come later in life?
There was a time when the first 18-22 years of life was focused on growing up, not just getting older.
Kids made mistakes, fell on their butts, picked themselves up and kept going; they learned about cause and effect—if they did X, Y would happen; they learned about accountability and consequences—if they did not do X, Y blew up.
All this was considered normal.
What’s happening to your kids in their first 18-22 years? Are they wrapped in cotton wool; life’s kinks smoothed out; fights fought for them, their wants satisfied immediately; protected, encouraged—entitled?
Now here’s the 64 dollar question.
Which do you want to hire? Which do you want on your team?
Image credit: http://atom.smasher.org
June 24th, 2010 at 12:28 pm
There are two ways to interpret your sport story.
Aside from yours, maybe that they simply try to avoid the bad behavior of generally humiliating your opponent and rubbing your superiority in his face. Maybe they actually try to maximize the learning experience of the kids by having a more challenging league. Maybe they try to teach all of them, included the good players how to lose gracefully and as importantly, how to win gracefully. All of these are important things to teach.
The second thing I want to note is that it is a difficult balance to achieve to be able to provide your kids (and employees) a safe way to make mistakes. If you don’t maybe they will learn how tough life is but you won’t give them the tools to fight back, innovate and improve…
Now don’t get me wrong, a lot of parent are way out there but it is a tough job that you rarely get trained for…
June 24th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
HI Denis, Everything is open to interpretation and the things you mention are of great value, but I wonder if they can really be learned in a controlled environment or if they need to be learned in real-world circumstances in order to stick.
I think the trick to learning through mistakes, whether kids or employees, is to have a safe situation in which to make them. That means a controlled space where they aren’t fatal and the opportunity to learn from them instead of being trashed for making them.
As always, than you for your input. You always push me and other readers to think further, which is a good thing!