Consider this. Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple Corporation, the company that makes your fancy iPods, among many other products. What if he never took the initiative to make Apple products “cool”? What if he never prodded his engineers to make quality products? Oh no! What would you do with all your free time if you can’t post on Facebook, listen to music, and play games on your fancy iPod at the same time?

The same concept applies to a leader in a school environment—that is, you. Being a leader is not simply a title; it is a responsibility, and with that, a whole lot of work. And you have to realize that being a leader is not just about organization and division of labor: it’s about getting down to working yourself.

Imagine that you’re organizing a talent show for your high school, but you have a club of 20 members that you have to work with. You need posters to advertise, people to perform, manpower to decorate, teachers to supervise, MCs to announce, etc. In addition, you need money to fund the show, approval from the administration, and a place to host the show. How do you start? Well, you might think: since I’ve got people under me, I can just have one person to get approval from the administration, three people to make posters, two people as MCs, five people on a fundraising committee, and the rest of the people on the audition/recruiting committee. Done.

Hold on. What if the person that you designated to get approval never does? He’s too busy and couldn’t squeeze the time. Well, that’s easy. You’ll just do it yourself. But then, your fundraising committee never got a chance to get together, so you don’t have a fundraising plan. The next day, you find out that the people who were supposed to make the posters never got together to do that. Your MCs quit because they’ll be out of town. The talent show is just two weeks away.

At this time, you have two choices. Cancel the show (which is easy) or find other people/do the jobs yourself (not so easy). What do you do?

Wait, you say. This is an extreme example. Find trustworthy people to do all the jobs, and everything will be just fine. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough “trustworthy” people in a high school or college environment. Everyone is extremely busy, and those who aren’t busy… let’s just say you don’t really want them on your team.

This is when you, as a leader, come into play. In your school, you can’t simply assign jobs to your followers and expect them to do it—unlike in the business world. In some ways, your job is harder than that of Steve Jobs, because he can expect his employees to be responsible. Since you’re not paying them, you can’t.

As a leader, you have choices as to how to combat this problem—and this is what we’re going to explore.

This article is a part of the Effective Leadership series.
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