Via Twitter (@thatwhichmatters), I recently saw this video featuring a poem by Taylor Mali:
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
It made me think of the youth leaders that I work with in a leadership program. Individually, each young person is impressive, generating ideas that my aging mind would never come up with. I am in awe of their collective potential. When the occasion calls for it, they manage to speak eloquently. However, when they’re just, like, hanging out and stuff, some of them can be… bratty little punks. Sometimes.
Recently, I noticed a disturbing trend. While there are strong leaders from both genders, it is the girls that are more consistently professional, rarely lapsing into moments that cause me to cringe and long for the good ole days. Too often, the male leaders that our organization depends on become a little goofy, opting to prioritize making the cheap joke or getting the laughs over getting the job done or strengthening our community. (This is clearly not a scientific study and crunching the numbers might prove these occurences to be statistically insignificant, but just go with me on this for now.)

See what I mean?
The easy explanation would be that the boys aren’t as mature as the girls. They grow differently and girls are biologically supposed to start earlier. I haven’t seen the data myself and The Female Brain is still collecting dust on my shelf. (Delving into some works by Dave Eggers right now.) I doubt that’s the whole picture because you run into girls that, for lack of better description, do stupid things. Instead of getting attention through the comedy, they spend vast amounts of time trying to look pretty. I have no frame of reference in being a young woman, but in the context of serving our leadership program, certain things seem frivolous. So it would be really difficult to say that it’s just biology.
(I realize at this point that, especially for young people, there are many ways to enjoy life. Very few of these have to do with volunteering with a leadership program and doing what some old(er) guy thinks is good for the community. But in this part of their lives, I just see the potential to do better.)
My question is this: How much of it has to do with the fact that there are so few leaders whose examples we can follow? (I see many role models on The West Wing, but imitating fictituous characters can prove to be problematic.) Do my own poor speaking habits (and off-colour, ill-timed humour) make matters worse?
In any case, the boys need to keep up with the girls in this regard. I’m glad that we are in a position to allow our young women to contribute to the causes of their choosing in the manners of their choosing, but caliber of our young men is sometimes a little embarassing. Let’s remember to lead in a way that we can make our organization proud.



