What makes effective leaders? In past times, you might have said it’s the ability to order workers to do your bidding along an assembly line. In today’s business world, leadership more often works by collaboration and inspiration, not by manipulation. At Kids Konnect, we foster leadership skills in our preschoolers through team activities.
Communicate
The experts at Psychology Today point out that leadership skills in preschoolers emerge by honing two skills:
- Delaying gratification — When your daughter works with others to achieve a common goal, rather than get only what she wants immediately, she learns emotional intelligence
- Communicating — By learning the basics of emotional and social skills, “reading” other children’s faces and using his words to convey his feelings to his teammates, your son quickly learns he isn't the only person to feel or understand things
Risk and Failure
The Leadership forum of Forbes magazine offers an important tip for parents of future leaders: let them fail. The child who does not learn to take risks and experience disappointment will be ill-equipped for future leadership responsibility. True success as part of a team or as head of a company always involves risk. Overly protective parents should not shield their preschoolers from the sting of failure. Leaders feel the pleasure of success more sweetly for knowing the pain of losing.
When your preschooler works with other children and the team does not succeed (a sport, building blocks, a floor puzzle), praise the perseverance and effort and ignore excuses that attempt to shift responsibility.
At Kids Konnect we do not consciously set out to ensure children fail when playing. But when failure happens, we comfort but do not always resolve the issue. Children learn by collaboration that everyone can succeed, and sometimes everyone misses the mark — and that’s okay!
Negotiation
Parents may be surprised how frequently children at Kids Konnect negotiate deeply serious issues such as sharing toy cars, constructing building block castles, or role-playing with props. Moving from parallel play to cooperative play, preschoolers learn to share, meld ideas, and create something meaningful to more than one child.
As Entrepreneur Media points out, negotiation is a learned skill, and a valuable one for preschoolers to begin building.
How are you grooming the future leaders in your home? What team activities are popular in your house? At Kids Konnect, we want to hear ideas from all our parents. Please leave a comment below.