by David Emanuel Elcock | Laidlaw Scholar (2025) at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland for Localise Youth Volunteering at Claremont Avenue, Glasnevin, Dublin, D11 YNR2

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What is Leadership?

The Importance of Character

A good start in defining leadership might paradoxically be by listing what it is not:

• Authority
  • We think of a leader as having the authority to make decisions. But a good leader doesn’t lead through authority.
• Power
  • Yes a leader can use power, but it displays a weakness when used.
• Elitism
  • A good leader doesn’t think themselves as better than their team.
• Perfect
  • Without making mistakes, a leader hasn’t learned.

It is also helpful to remind ourselves that leaders don’t need to operate on a global stage before they can be useful. Often we find that leaders develop by working on a local level whether a class or city council before moving onto a larger platform. Reminding young people that leadership is a journey can be a helpful and fresh perspective.

Having given examples of common mis-interpretations of leaderships, what is it? We can use the following as a pragmatic definition of leadership:

‘To serve your team so as to secure the completion of the project.’

Let’s break down what this actually mean as the devil is in the details:

1. A leader is only a leader as long as a project is unfinished. Their leadership is thus connected by time to a project they seek to finish it. Paradoxically, this means that they try to cease to be a leader by doing their job.
2. A leader doesn’t think of himself as a driver of a car - a solo job. Instead they see themselves as a member of a team whose job is to ensure cohesion and synergy as the project unfolds and hits stumbling blocks.
3. The way a leader commits to a project isn’t by making the big decisions but to support their team. They identify what every team member needs to do their task, they resolve conflict, they mediate, they listen, they motivate and proceed to look ahead in time to smoothen the path of the project.

Exactly what a good leader looks like is somewhat a taste as different people will cite living and historical individuals of with wildly different methodologies as a role-model. Whilst this might sound contradicting, it helps to remember that a leader must adopt to their team. Just as some people don’t eat fish but eat pork due to their religion whilst others also cite a religion to do the opposite, a leader must learn to navigate the complexity of human psychology. A trait of a good leader is thus the ability to make any two individual work together. Can you?

What are you trying to achieve with climate justice volunteering? To get people to take interest in protecting and maintaining Earth’s climate. Those people are your team and they will come from backgrounds you might not even be familiar with. Before you can expect any productive output, it thus helps to get to know your team. Not the superficial ‘what is your favourite colour’, but deeper such as understanding what is more important to them? What do they dislike? Where are the boundaries? One approach that might work on one person might not work on another person and that is part of the challenge.

I don’t think there is a perfect leader, only an experienced leader. Not measured by the number of projects they had but through their genuine interest in working with people and actively learning from their and other’s mistakes. But, truth be told there is also a cultural component you can have young people work on such as dress code, pose, breathing and simple psychological models. For example, having a more stable pose can help project confidence in your body language which your team will pick up on even if you don’t feel any change.

A good exercise is to have young people film themselves giving a presentation and having them watch it themselves. What do the like and what would they like to work on? Is their voice to soft? Is their posture distracting? Hand wavering like a chicken? By repeating such an exercise the ability to project confidence improves which helps in leading projects.

Importance of Communication Style

With regards to models, some individuals like attention to details when you talk to them, others only care about the general picture. Knowing your audience is as important as selling products in a capitalist market. Hence familiarising young people with an overview such as the DISC profile is a useful skill for them to have later in life. In short, people can coarsely be divided into four categories and each social style will operate best using their preferred language:

• Analytical - prefers detailed and structured dialogue.
• Driving - prefers to see results and cares about efficiency.
• Expressive - prefers a general and creative overview.
• Amiable - prefers a supportive and relationship-focused environment.

The Laidlaw Scholarships introduces the importance of character through the Oxford Character Project which is utilised by professionals in multiple industries to help them with their leaderships. The program makes it clear that there is an aspect to leadership that is essential and requires constant monitoring. This is your character, akin to muscles in your body. It is easy to exercise only some of them which leads to imbalances. Similarly the dimensions of character need to be developed in tandem. The dimensions of character are:

There is an app you can install called Virtuosity which can offer young people a way into thinking about their character and help develop it. Unfortunately the app isn’t free, though it might be possible to take inspiration from and adapt it to a climate justice volunteering programme. This would involve implementing:

• Weekly assignment e.g. select a dimension you wish to develop.
• Reflection assignment e.g. how did you progress week in character?
• Reflective prompts on character such as identifying excess vices.
• See Management & Reflection for other practice examples.

Students could be asked to keep a diary and/or hold discussion sessions with a supervisor. I should note that the Laidlaw programme held sessions in groups but I didn’t find people to be open enough to hold such discussions in large groups. Hence keeping it private with a project supervisor or a personal journal would be more effective.