Throughout the Youth Camp, I made some interesting observations on the leadership and teamwork dynamics for the teams, and I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to coach these children - especially the more senior participants.
For my class of 16 Leads, since some of them a group leaders in their teams, I decided to offer them a short 1-hour Leadership class, hearing from their perspectives, and drawing some insights from leadership knowledge and experience I’ve gained throughout my experience from work, formal trainings, books, and family interactions. The kind of leadership insights I wish I got when I was younger.
Here are 5 of the topics we brought up together
1. Followership: Good leadership begins with being a great follower to begin with
I begin the sharing by asking: If you were a leader, what kind of follower would you like? What are the characteristics of an “ideal follower” in your mind?
You might list down things like: Listening to instructions, cooperate, be a team player, encourage and uplift others, to be the team to support & realize the vision of the leader, etc.
Food for your thought: are YOU that kind of follower to YOUR leaders?
Is it fair to expect your followers to be like that, but you yourself fail to uphold to those standards?
Message to leaders: If we want great followers, we need to talk the talk first.
The fourth caliph in Islam, Ali bin Abi Talib was once criticized by one of his citizens - he said, “ya Ali, why is it during your rulership, the land is full of chaos and turmoil, but in the time of Umar (the 2nd caliph), things were great?!”
Ali said, “because in the time of Umar, he had followers like me.
And during my rule, I had followers like you.”
Boom.
Sometimes, having a great follower tends to have a greater impact to the team and the organization, instead of a leader. During the time of the Prophet ﷺ, he had great people like Abu Bakr, Umar would be such great followers, they would inspire and rally up the others around him. When you’re a leader, these are the ideal followers you’d want on your team.
People always talk about leadership, but you almost never hear about the importance of being a good follower. Let’s call this “followership”. The reality is, no matter what role of leadership or responsibility we will be assigned to, we will always be answerable to another person - our bosses will also have their bosses, you gorup leaders are answerable to the camp commander, and so on. In other words: Sometimes, you DO need great leadership - but ALL the time, you will always need great followership.
2. Building relationship with your team members - Great leaders put in extra effort to get to know their team members what their strengths are, knowing how best to unleash their potential. Everyone is unique. As a leader, don’t just wait for them to come to us: it’s up to us to find these hidden gems - provide a platform to bring it out from them, and support them. This was the habit of our Prophet ﷺ: he had a consistent habit of spending quality time with his companions on all circumstances, and that’s what made him such an excellent leader - he knew how to leverage the strengths of his companions, and he would empathize with their flaws and shortcomings, and knew how to give specific guidance and advice.
3. Build Trust by showing generosity and kindness - The Prophet ﷺ said, “the best of leaders are those of you whom you love, and they too love you. Whom you supplicate for, and they too supplicate for you” (Muslim)
Contrary to popular belief among youngsters, leadership isn’t about exerting your dominance over others or barking orders.
One of the biggest challenges about being leaders at a youth camp or voluntary organizations: You don’t have formal authority, and unlike a boss at the workplace, you and your followers aren’t being paid. They aren’t obliged to listen to you, and there are no tangible consequences for disobedience. Barking orders just ain’t gonna cut the mustard.
The most important natural way to nurture genuine leadership is by building influence & loyalty: and the most organic, human way to do so it to build trust: you do so by getting to know them, active listening, showing encouragement, generosity and kindness, working together getting your hands dirty together with them, facilitating healthy interaction between them so we can build stronger bonds. These were all subtle things that the Prophet ﷺ would do with his companions - and it’s these small things that add up that increased in their loyalty and love for their leaders. This is the power of EQ: emotional intelligence.
4. Toxic Team members - One group leader in our class mentioned that he was struggling with having an uncooperative team member, who just wanders off and refuses to cooperate. I said, yes - this is the reality of life. In pretty much all circumstances, we cannot choose who we work with - group mates in our university, our colleagues, our bosses, our board members, government authorities, etc. And in these circles, there is bound to be difficult or downright toxic people. Even our Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had to confront toxic followers.
Who were they?
The hypocrites (Munafiqun): groups of people who were imitating to be companions, but showed open rebellion, refused to cooperate, poisoned other followers.
And the more we learn the sirah and leadership etiquettes of Rasulullah ﷺ, the more we learn how Allah teaches us to handle toxic followers. We can’t change people; what we can do educate, guide, manage, inspire - leave the rest to Allah.
5. Focus on efforts, not results: Learning to Handle and Accepting failure. When I asked the class, “what is leadership?” some of them said “driving the team to win”. But in reality, true leadership in Islam is about results: it’s about the effort.
Consider the case of Prophet Nuh. He was the first messenger sent to mankind - he called them to worship Allah Alone for 950 years (29:14), and scholars of tafsir mentioned he had less than 100 followers. That boils down to probably less follower every ten years.
Let that sink in: If you open a random YouTube or instagram account, you’ll probably gain more followers, way faster than that.
Yet, Nuh was among the most beloved people to Allah - among the top 5 ulul azmi of His Messengers!
On top of that, the Prophet ﷺ also said, there are prophets who have only a handful of less than 10 followers. And there are prophets with zero followers. (Al-Bukhari)
Are they failures? No - in fact, they are the most successful and beloved people to Allah!
In this camp, focus on the journey, not just the destination & end goal of "winning". It’s about the journey of helping and guide others, and creating the best experience along the way. If we fail, we fail together - we take it in stride and keep moving forward. We keep each other’s head up high, support each other, keep striving for the best.
And if we win? Alhamdulillah!
We finished at about 1:00am - but Alhamdulillah these kids were still very attentive and wide awake. Alhamdulillah am glad we could share some insights to our teenagers, and we hope that with these small nuggets of wisdom, we can plant the seeds to nurture future leaders
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