What I’m learning from student leaders
Teen Exec’s student leadership survey has now closed, and I’ve begun analyzing what students shared.
About 270 student leaders from 44 states and Washington, D.C., answered questions about their responsibilities, organizations, challenges, and support systems. They represented academic, career, and competition-based clubs like DECA, HOSA, and FFA; service and leadership organizations like Key Club and National Honor Society; student governments; arts and performance groups; athletic teams; student media; and other student-led organizations.
I’m still early in the research process. So far, I’ve reviewed the quantitative results and compared responses across several types of organizations. I haven’t yet completed the qualitative coding of students’ written responses. Even at this stage, the numbers are helping me see the student leadership experience more clearly.
Students generally understand their roles
I first looked at whether students felt clear about what they were supposed to do.
The initial numbers were encouraging:
93% said they understand what’s expected of them.
93% said they know which decisions they’re responsible for making.
90% reported that their groups have clear goals.
Most respondents also said their organizations use agendas, shared documents, communication platforms, and other tools to coordinate their work.
Together, these findings gave me a useful starting point: most respondents understood their responsibilities and had systems available to help them manage the work.
At the same time, understanding a role doesn’t make every part of it easy:
42% said tasks or responsibilities sometimes fall through the cracks.
29% said they often feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities.
I wondered whether those experiences would differ depending on the kind of organization a student led.
Similar challenges appeared across different organizations
A student council, robotics team, service organization, and theater group can operate in very different ways. Their schedules, goals, and responsibilities aren’t interchangeable. When I compared responses across organization types, however, the reported challenge rates were fairly similar.
The percentage of students saying that tasks sometimes fall through the cracks ranged from 37% to 45% across the organization groupings. Reports of feeling overwhelmed were even closer, ranging from 28% to 30%.
In this sample, organization type wasn’t meaningfully related to either challenge.
That doesn’t mean every student had the same experience. It suggests that some parts of leadership may feel familiar across many kinds of organizations. Students in different settings still have to coordinate people, balance responsibilities, adapt when plans change, and keep work moving after a meeting ends.
The responses also raised another question: How did students learn their roles in the first place?
Support took different forms
Students described entering their leadership roles with different kinds of preparation and support.
Initial preparation
41% received formal training.
36% received informal guidance from an advisor or coach.
23% received no training or guidance.
Leadership transitions
42% described a formal process for helping incoming leaders learn from outgoing ones.
41% said transitions happened informally and were mostly left to the students involved.
15% said there was little or no transition process.
Formal and informal support can both be useful. A thoughtful conversation with an advisor or outgoing student may meet a need that a general training session doesn’t. Schools and organizations also differ in their size, schedules, resources, and traditions.
Seeing those different forms of support led me to think about the common foundation underneath them.
What should every student leader be able to expect?
I’m beginning to think about what schools and organizations might include in a useful foundation for student leaders, regardless of the type of group they lead.
That foundation might include a clear introduction to the role, useful information from outgoing leaders, practical guidance, shared ways to organize responsibilities, access to an adult when questions arise, and opportunities to reflect on what students are learning.
The quantitative results show me where students’ experiences differed. The written responses may help me understand what a useful foundation looks like in practice.
This is the first article in a series about my student leadership research through Teen Exec. In the next article, I’ll examine what adult advisors reported and compare their perspectives with what I heard from students. The third will bring in written responses from both groups to help me think more carefully about what a realistic foundation of support could look like.
Note: These findings are preliminary and reflect the experiences of the students who participated. Respondents weren’t selected through a nationally representative sample. Recruitment included outreach to officers in national student organizations and student leaders identified through LinkedIn, so the sample may include a higher proportion of highly engaged or connected student leaders than the broader student-leader population.