What the written responses taught me about supporting student leaders

In the first two articles in this series, I looked at the numerical results from Teen Exec’s surveys of student leaders and adult advisors. Most respondents described a strong starting point. Students generally understood their roles, organizations had clear goals, and meetings and organizational systems were usually considered helpful.

Other results were harder to explain. Forty-two percent of students and 51% of advisors said tasks or responsibilities sometimes fall through the cracks. Twenty-nine percent of students said they often feel overwhelmed by their leadership responsibilities, while 38% of advisors believed student leaders often feel overwhelmed.

Those numbers left me with a question: If students understand their responsibilities and most groups have useful systems, why does follow-through still become difficult?

I hoped the written responses would help me understand what was happening between knowing what to do and getting it done. Because participants were told that individual comments wouldn’t be published, I’m not reproducing any responses. Instead, I looked for patterns across what students and advisors wrote.

The comments made me think differently about what it means to support a student leader. Having support matters, but so does whether that support helps with the situations students encounter while they’re actually leading.

Knowing the role doesn’t explain how to carry it out

The written responses helped me understand how clear expectations and missed tasks can exist in the same organization.

Students generally seemed to know what their positions required. The challenges they described appeared more often when they had to fit leadership into the rest of their lives, divide a project among several people, get classmates to respond, or adjust when someone didn’t complete an assignment.

Advisors noticed many of the same problems. They wrote about accountability, initiative, delegation, reliability, and the difficulty of leading peers. Their comments often focused on students who understood what needed to happen but were still learning how to plan the steps and keep track of shared work.

I began to see a distinction between understanding a responsibility and managing it. A student may know that she’s responsible for organizing an event. She still has to break the event into tasks, decide who’ll do each one, set deadlines, check on progress, and respond when plans change.

That process becomes even more difficult because student leaders are usually balancing schoolwork, activities, jobs, family responsibilities, and time with friends. The other students in their organizations have crowded schedules too. A task can be important to everyone involved and still be forgotten or delayed.

Reading the comments made the follow-through results feel less surprising. The problem didn’t seem to be that students lacked goals or didn’t care about their organizations. Much of the difficulty appeared in the everyday work of turning a shared goal into actions that several busy people would complete.

Communication and coordination aren’t quite the same

Most organizations represented in the surveys used group chats, shared documents, agendas, or other tools. Almost all respondents considered their systems at least somewhat helpful.

At first, that seemed difficult to reconcile with the number of students and advisors who reported missed tasks. The comments helped me notice that many of the challenges described as communication problems also involved planning and responsibility.

A group chat can make it easy to reach everyone, but an important assignment can disappear between messages. An agenda can record what a group discussed without showing who agreed to do each task. A shared document can hold useful information, but only if people know where to find it and remember to return to it.

This made me think that the question isn’t only whether a group communicates. It’s also whether the group leaves a conversation knowing what happens next.

A useful system should make a few things easy to see: what needs to be done, who agreed to do it, when it’s due, and when the group will check on it. Some organizations may need a detailed planning system. Others may only need to add names and deadlines to an existing agenda or spend a few minutes reviewing unfinished tasks at the beginning of a meeting.

The written responses didn’t point to one tool that every organization should use. They showed why having a tool doesn’t settle the larger question of how a group uses it.

Students and advisors saw the challenge from different positions

Students and advisors raised many of the same themes, including busy schedules, communication, delegation, teamwork, and follow-through. They didn’t always describe those themes in the same way.

Students wrote from inside the experience. Their comments showed what it was like to balance leadership with other commitments and depend on classmates whose schedules, priorities, and levels of involvement might differ from their own.

Advisors were more likely to describe what they could observe. They noticed whether students took initiative, met deadlines, communicated with one another, and shared work effectively. They also noticed when one or two students seemed to take responsibility for too much.

Reading the two sets of responses together helped me better understand the survey results on overwhelm. A student may experience a week as a series of competing responsibilities. An advisor may see the same pressure through late work, repeated reminders, or one student finishing tasks that were originally assigned to other people.

The students and advisors weren’t reporting on matching organizations, so I can’t use their comments to reconstruct the same situations from two sides. Their broader perspectives still added something when considered together. Students explained more about how leadership felt. Advisors drew attention to the behaviors and group patterns that became visible when the work wasn’t going as planned.

Both perspectives also showed that leading an organization requires more than organizing your own work. Student leaders have to ask peers to complete tasks, follow up without taking over, respond when participation is uneven, and decide when a problem requires an adult’s help.

Those are skills students may not learn from a description of their position. They usually develop through experience, but experience can be more useful when someone helps students think about what happened and what they might try next.

What should a student leader be able to expect?

The written responses also helped me reconsider the differences in preparation reported in the surveys.

Students described several ways of learning their roles. Some participated in formal programs. Others learned from advisors, coaches, outgoing officers, or experience. Some appeared to begin with little preparation and had to figure out important parts of the position as they went.

Advisors reported that many organizations provide some kind of preparation, although the form and depth vary. This may help explain why 89% of advisors said their organizations offered formal training or informal guidance, while 23% of students said they personally received neither. An organization may offer support that not every student receives, recognizes as training, or finds useful when a challenge comes up later.

I don’t think every organization needs the same leadership program. A national organization and a small school club have different responsibilities and resources. Formal training may work well in one setting, while conversations with an advisor and a thoughtful transition from outgoing officers may work well in another.

The comments did make me think that every student leader should have some practical preparation. Students should understand their roles and how decisions are made. They should know how their group records tasks and follows up on them. They should have guidance in planning shared work, delegating, communicating with peers, and asking for help. They should also have an adult they can turn to when a situation goes beyond what students should be expected to manage by themselves.

That support shouldn’t take leadership away from students. In their written responses, students described what they valued about leading: accomplishing goals, creating events and projects, helping their schools and communities, building relationships, becoming more confident, and seeing other students participate or succeed.

Those experiences depend on students having real responsibility. If adults step in whenever a project becomes difficult, students lose opportunities to make decisions and learn from the results. Leaving students to figure out every challenge on their own, however, isn’t the only way to give them ownership.

After reading the comments, I think a realistic foundation of support is less about creating one required program and more about making sure students aren’t beginning with avoidable gaps. They should know what their roles involve, how their organizations turn decisions into action, and where to go when they need guidance.

The surveys began by showing me that most student leaders already have clear expectations and useful systems. The written responses helped me see what those findings couldn’t show on their own. The harder part of leadership often begins after a role has been explained, when students have to plan shared work, depend on other people, and fit responsibility into already crowded lives.

Schools and organizations can’t remove all of that difficulty, and doing so would probably remove some of what makes leadership valuable. They can give students practical ways to manage it and adults who help them learn without taking over. That now seems like a reasonable place to start.

This is the third article in a three-part series about my student leadership research through Teen Exec. The first article examined what student leaders reported, and the second compared those findings with responses from adult advisors. These findings reflect patterns in responses from approximately 270 student leaders and 37 advisors. The two groups were separate samples rather than matched students and advisors, and the student respondents weren’t selected through a nationally representative process.