Let’s Talk About Leadership and Social Behavior

This is part two in a three part interview series with Leadership guru Kevin Sheehan. What are the most common questions you get asked about leadership? Boy, that’s a good question. Leadership is a life’s experience, like self knowledge. It encompasses what we believe at BecomeALeader to be a variety of competencies–from an ability to build teams, to an understanding of your place and context; from a powerful capacity for self awareness to a talent for motivating other people to a vision. And the questions that I get encompass all those things.rnSome people are most interested in theory; and others, focused on character and person issues. Some come to the table with inquiries about the 70 historic figures from my book; and others, working through the problems of leadership, and why people are hard to galvanize and get connected to a common end point. It’s a wonderfully rich process, and the questions are always provocative, and inventive in their take on the world and how we can risk and rise to work better as leaders. Do you notice a societal shift happening in the way we’re shaping our youth through the current media trends and social media outlets. If so, how is this impacting our leaders of tomorrow? Current media that is bite-sized and overwhelming in the number of incoming inputs can be distracting at best.rnI think that we all understand more than ever that media and outside influences pose a real threat to our young people. That is offset in important ways by the usefulness of what technology has created. Kids in this generation are Googling answers to questions and learning in real time in ways that earlier generations never had access to. The availability and instant access to classic texts, an unending library of important works–to video tapes of leaders and musicians and sports figures doing important and useful things is incredible. So, we need to help our kids learn how to use media, how to galvanize the incoming channels in good and inspiring ways. Some parents spend a lot of time with their kids now, helping them edit, leave things that are uncomfortable. We need to help them become leaders by internalizing a productive value system that lets them move through information in intelligent ways. The latest education research says that the best students (and then the best leaders) come to understand that the first part of learning is taking in information: the second part is developing a unique and valuable point of view from what they have taken in. That’s what people want to hear in class, in public settings–in the town square where leadership begins and young people can first have an impact. How can we get families talking about leadership and social behavior? We’ve got to get our families talking first. The number of families not having dinner every night together, and then discussing the news of the day, or friendships, or family issues is staggering. Statistics show that many that do eat together have the television on, if you can believe that. And that belies a critical developmental issue for our society as many studies underscore the important developmental and emotional impact of a steady diet of nightly and active dinners for families. Teens and kids who experience that thrive: those that don’t struggle in many demonstrated dimensions. Of course, it’s not just the dinners. Family dinner is a proxy for many powerful human, family interactions. If you look at famous leadership families, such as the Kennedys, lively, nightly family dinners and active discussions were a staple. Joe Kennedy, apparently, peppered his children with questions about events of the day, politics, social problems, how people interacted. Part of the message that the next generation came to understand was that active engagement and civic responsibility mattered a lot. We are what we eat in more ways than one. Leadership and an ability to engage on important levels as an adult begin with that kind of modeling and those kinds of interactions.