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- Leadership Values - Your Staff Training
Initiative -
4 Steps in Building
Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Yes,
– you can do it – this is easy to “get a handle on”. Start first by
working with the full support of your assembled team, including
parents, educators, and other professionals as appropriate. Next, we
will show, in four easy steps, how your team can conceptualize and
role out your own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative. Let
us start with the basics and take a building block approach.

In
doing so, in step one we will examine
Four Key
Personality Characteristics for Youth Leadership Development
Emphasis
which should be nurtured, grown, and become abundantly present in
order to form the foundation for a successful Youth Leadership
Values Training initiative.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 1: Emphasizing
FOUR KEY PERSONALITY
CHARACTERISTICS FOR YOUTH LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT EMPHASIS
Everyone, regardless of age, has a basic need to feel good about
themselves and their capabilities, have an uplifting and hopeful
view of life, and learn to relate to others in a moral and ethical
way. It is axiomatic that in order to do so we will need to acquire
a healthily +Self-Esteem, a balance of +Self Confidence,
an upbeat
and positive
“I can do” +Attitude of Expectations, and we must also learn
to develop and use key Core Values in order to “navigate” with a
moral conscience using our internal +Moral/Ethical Life’s View.
Think
of these enduring personality characteristics as the four legs
supporting the table from which we will do our life’s work. The
sturdy, firm, and level tabletop is comprised of our personal
values. Together, they
provide
structural integrity and support for the inner strength necessary to
rise above adversity; to strive, achieve, and accomplish our dreams;
to interact and to relate to our friends, family, loved ones,
teammates and co-workers. All of this provides a stable platform
from which we can deal with the many challenges that life inevitably
puts in our paths.
Not
only are these traits grounded in our self-definition of who we are
today, the degree to which they are present determines in large
measure who and what we will become tomorrow. Because of this, we
can confidently say that as the quantity and quality of these
Personality Characteristics are increasingly influenced by our
personal Core Values, together they become the benchmarks for
a self-fulfilling prophecy of how we will respond to life’s
challenges and opportunities.
In
step two, we will then show how these Four Key Personality
Characteristics fit into four Leadership Development
Quadrants,
which your
team will use to individualize the way you go about helping each
aspiring youthful participant. You can track their progress as they
move through each of these four Quadrants and they grow and progress
from LDQ4 Leadership Apprentices to LDQ3
Aspiring
Peer Leaders,
and then to LDQ2 Emerging Peer Leaders, and upward as they
arrive at the LDQ1 Leader/Role Model/Mentor Level.
 
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 2: Understanding The Conceptual Framework
HOW KEY PERSONALITY
CHARACTERISTICS INTER-RELATE WITHIN FOUR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
QUADRANTS (LDQ’s)
The
four Personality Characteristics of +Self-Esteem,
+Self-Confidence, +Attitude of Expectations, and
+Moral /Ethical Life’s View
was just explained
in step one. The obvious question before us now is: why does the
suggested format for a Youth Leadership Values Training initiative
begin with an emphasis on developing and strengthening these four
key Personality Characteristics? Why not just skip this and
go to the focus on Leadership Values Training?
The
answer is that these Personality Characteristics represent a
necessary and logical starting point for character development, and
they must be present to a significant degree as prerequisites in
order for the core Leadership Values to have fertile ground for
growth.,
Youth Leadership Values Training
further illustrates this point in considerable detail.
Next, in step three we will focus on knowing the Leadership
Core Values of Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage
and how they synergistically interact with the four Personality
Characteristics that we have targeted for development.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step
3: Knowing
VALUES THAT ARE KEY TO LEADERSHIP SUCCESS:
Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage
This step
introduces an important precept: The Interplay of
Leadership Core
Values
with
Key Personality Characteristics for Youth
Leadership Development Program Emphasis. Our goal on the following
pages is to assist the reader in:
-
Knowing: which Values are Key to Leadership Success.
-
Knowing: how the Leadership Core Values overlap and
interrelate as they overlay each of the four Leadership Development
Quadrants.
-
Knowing: how the Leadership Core Values of Integrity, Achievement,
Responsibility, and Courage synergistically interact with the four
Personality Characteristics that we have targeted for development.
These four Core
Values have been found to be critical components of Youth
Leadership Values Training for the Leaders of Tomorrow.
Last, but by no means least, is step four, and it is perhaps
the most important factor of all – Your Team’s Role and
Involvement in establishing & implementing an Action Plan in
order to make this goal of Youth Leadership Values Training for the
Leaders of Tomorrow an accomplished and successful reality.

Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step
4: Your Team’s Role & Involvement
IMPLEMENTING YOUR YOUTH LEADERSHIP VALUES TRAINING ACTION PLAN
Let’s
start off by explaining that How your team ultimately goes
about implementing your own Youth Leadership Values Training Action
Plan, and for whom, is entirely your decision in concert with team
mates, parents, and professionals supporting your efforts and
working with you in this endeavor. This step of How you go
about it can be approached as formally or informally, or as
ambitiously or modestly as you wish.
We
are not taking a side on which action plan is “Best” for you. That
is for you to decide, and the number of adults and youth involved plus the
depth of your resources and expertise may ultimately become
modifiers of how ambitious an undertaking you choose. To “get you
thinking” we will however, share with you, in brief outline format,
what some experts in the field of Values/Character education have to
say on the topic.
As
you read this web site, we have organized both with the assumption that
you are doing so with the intent of formulating your own approach to
Youth Leadership Values Training. To that end, we urge the reader to
supplement our admittedly brief outline approach by reading the
in-depth information provided by
the various quoted authors and researchers by going directly to the
listed resources and bibliography. By doing so, you insure that you
have positioned each author’s intent in the proper context, and to
the best benefit of your own Youth Leadership Values Training
initiative.
Armed with this “4 Step approach” for building your own Youth
Leadership Values Training Initiative, it is our hope that you will
be on your way and knowledgeable with not only What you need
to focus on, but also How you might go about it.
Choosing Your Approach to Youth Leadership Values Training
In our
research we identified patterns based on analyzing various combinations of the
following six methods of values training. As you review them, you might think about incorporating at
least some or perhaps all of these methods as you develop Action
Plans for implementing your own Youth Leadership Values Training
initiatives:
Youth Leadership Values Training For The Leaders of Tomorrow
©
v
Teaching Values by Role Model Example
v
Using
Stories, Skits & Songs to Communicate Values
v
Identifying Hero Examples to Teach Values
v
Leading Informal Small Group Values
Discussions
v
Values Taught via Challenging Outdoor
Activities
v
Choosing Mentors to Nurture and Tutor Values
to
help you get started, we have developed some
example
values training programs you may want to
consider using
which are matched up with the six Leadership Values Training methods
outlined above.
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