Search for leadership programs for teenage boys and you will find a crowded field: summer conferences on college campuses, weekend seminars, service trips, and school clubs with “leader” in the name. Many of them are well run and some are genuinely good. But a surprising number teach something closer to the appearance of leadership than the thing itself. Boys learn to give a confident presentation, work a room, and describe their accomplishments in the language admissions officers like. Those are useful skills. They are not what makes other people willing to follow a man when it counts.
It is worth asking, before you spend a summer and a few thousand dollars, what a program for teenage boys ought to be teaching.
Leadership is mostly character under load
The oldest writing on leadership is not about technique. When Xenophon wrote the Education of Cyrus, or Plutarch wrote his Lives, they were interested in what kind of man others would trust with their safety, and why. The answers they kept returning to were qualities of character: self-command, courage, justice toward subordinates, willingness to share hardship, keeping one’s word.
That emphasis is not quaint. A seventeen-year-old who can speak well but panics when a plan falls apart is not ready to lead anything difficult. A quieter boy who stays calm, takes responsibility, and looks after the weakest member of a group usually is, whether or not he has the vocabulary for it. Our essay on William Clark makes a version of this point about the less celebrated half of the Corps of Discovery.
So the first question to ask of any leadership program is whether it puts boys in situations that test character, or only situations that reward performance.
What boys actually need to practice
If leadership is learned mostly by doing, then a good program has to give boys real things to lead. That means a few specific experiences.
The first is responsibility for other people’s welfare. A boy should at some point be in charge of something where, if he fails, others go hungry, get wet, get lost, or lose. Planning the meals for a group camping trip, navigating a day’s route, running a work crew: these teach more about leadership than a week of workshops, because the feedback is immediate and impersonal.
The second is following. It is an old observation that a man learns to command by learning to obey. Boys who have never served under a good leader have no model for what good leadership feels like from below. Programs that let every boy be a leader all the time rarely teach much.
The third is failure with consequences that are real but survivable. A navigation error that costs an extra two miles, a fire that goes out because the boy in charge skipped a step, a group decision that turns out badly. The debrief afterward, honest and without humiliation, is where much of the learning happens.
The fourth is speaking to be understood, not to impress. There is a place for rhetoric, and we believe in teaching it; see our piece on ancient lessons in speaking. But the leader’s most frequent speech is short and practical: here is what we are doing, here is why, here is what I need from you. Boys should practice giving clear instructions under some pressure.
What to be skeptical of
Some features of leadership programs deserve a raised eyebrow.
Be wary of programs where every participant receives an award or title. Recognition that is guaranteed teaches nothing about earning trust.
Be wary of a curriculum made mostly of personality assessments and self-reflection exercises. Knowing yourself matters, but a sixteen-year-old’s self-knowledge grows faster through action than through questionnaires.
Be wary of programs whose main selling point is the résumé line. If the brochure spends more time on college admissions than on what the boys will do, you know what the program is for.
And be wary of any program that promises to make your son a leader. No honest program can guarantee that. The best it can do is give him opportunities to practice under good men and good conditions.
The role of older men
Boys learn leadership largely by imitation, which makes the adults in a program more important than its curriculum. Ask who will actually be with your son: their age, their experience, and whether they have led anything difficult themselves. A few days alongside a man who handles responsibility well will stay with a boy longer than any lecture about it.
This is also why fathers matter so much. Much of what a boy believes about how men treat those who depend on them comes from watching his own father at home, at work, and under stress. A leadership program can supplement that example. It cannot replace it.
Where Meriwether fits
At Meriwether Academy we think about leadership the old way: as character that shows itself under strain. Our outdoor trips, from father-son camping to overnight canoe voyages for boys fourteen and older, give boys real responsibility in the backcountry, and the conversations around the fire at night are about courage, integrity, and duty. The same conviction runs through the boys’ school we are working to found in Tennessee, which pairs classical study with wilderness work and boxing. If you want to read the lives of men who led well and badly, the essays on our site, many of them drawn from Plutarch, are a good place to start.