Small, Self, Semi, Suspended, and Separate Leading: Complexities of Youth Leadership and its Development

Abstract

Leadership development for youth is an increasingly large global business that has largely escaped critical scrutiny on either the nature of the leadership or development that constitutes and is constituted by it. Youth pose important questions about leadership and its relation to power and powerlessness that the larger segment of the leadership development market—those in influential roles or identifiable societal/ organisational levels—tend to evade. This inquiry is based on application, interview and reflection data from five years of successive university based youth leadership programmes and recounts a distinctive set of five discourses—small, self, semi, suspended, and separate—that constitute a distinctive form of leadership congruent with a distinctive paradox between power and powerlessness. Overall, this inquiry proposes that leadership development needs to rethink its relationship with power, to not only create more possibilities for youth and leadership, but also for adults and indeed the broader social world.