Children Leadership Challenges

My desire to join a football club where I could nurture my passion for soccer has been strong since I was a child. Most of my interest in coaching stemmed from my father’s management of a team when I was younger, which fueled my desire to lead a team of footballers as I grew older. My parents enrolled me in one of the best football academies in the town center on my eleventh birthday. During the school inter-club match competition, I was unfortunately chosen to lead the junior footballers team. The task was difficult for me because I had never previously led a serious team. Besides other teams had members and leaders who were well experienced and older than me. Therefore, I saw no possibility of my team performing better than other teams. At this point, I realized that leadership role was quite challenging for children especially in instances where they received limited guidance on their expected leadership roles.
All the same, I had to gather my team together to decide on the goals that we would achieve as a group up. Motivating my team members was my priority since I had to instill success qualities to ensure timely completion of tasks. Sadly, my team did not post the best performance despite the significant efforts invested towards goal implementations and communication. Leadership is a transformational process that requires diversity and proper guidance. Lack of this management tools may lead to team failure and lack of team concentration. For instance, I realized that other teams had succeeded due to team diversity as they had well-experienced leaders. My entire team consisted of new members of the same age. It was therefore difficult for me to set strategic plans and link team members’ objectives and mission to that of the talent school.
Another challenge that I experienced as a junior team leader at the talent academy was little of self-esteem. I failed to instill confidence in my team members due to competition from other team leaders. I felt discouraged and depressed for some days after realizing that others teams had defeated my team with a greater margin regarding points. As a child’s head, I had fears and doubts on abilities and potentials despite being so passionate about football. One of the most probable qualifications for a leader is self-esteem. Leaders need to be encouraged to confidently express and believe in themselves at all circumstances despite how difficult a situation may be. Leaders should also learn that it is from challenges that they can overcome their fears and become better people. For example, my primary problem as a child leader emerged as I lacked motivation which would build confidence in me; from the start of my leadership task, I had already expressed fear due to competition from other teams thus making underperformance inevitable.
From the event during the school inter-club competition, I learned that as a leader, creating a clear developmental plan for my group members is the catalyst for better performance. For instance, my team failed as I did not provide feedback for panel discussions to the members; neither did I conduct a performance assessment to determine our performance progress, thus leading to poor performance. I had assumed that communication with team members was the only appropriate mode that would enhance the better performance of the groups; I had ignored team performance management skills such as clear and effective goal setting. Most of my team members had several expectations of me as a leader in guiding them towards achieving the team mission and vision. My failure correlated with lack of proper guidance on how I can actively connect with team members as a leader. For example, my connection with group members was weak as I had put so much pressure on the members to perform, thus ignoring the reactions of members towards achieving the team objectives. Therefore, the lack directive on how to handle different situations within the group as the organization did not provide any guidance or coaching on how to manage the team I was leading.
Nevertheless, I believe that my poor performance was more linked to lack of proper support from my team and the school administrative team. Being new on the soccer field, I was assigned responsibility to carry out but lacked guidance on how to perform it efficiently. Such challenges associated with the absence of practical coaching skills. As an individual, I lacked proper communication approach; I did not ask for help nor support from my directors and other team leaders whenever I faced challenges. Over the years, I have improved on my leadership role and performances by developing proper communication skills and attending more training on performance. Also, being in the forefront in advocating for leadership training to all children who joins the talent academy is a vital approach. I conquer that organizational success can only occur in three ways; effective communication, teamwork and through training and mentorship.
In conclusion, leaders are either born or nurtured into leadership. However, it is impossible to make better leaders without proper guidance. Greatest leaders across the globe are believed to have garnered their leadership skills from their childhood; it is possible to note that most of this leaders received courage and motivation from either family or institutions they related to from their infancy. An example of an influential world leader who began his leadership from childhood is the former president of the United States, Barrack Obama. President Obama was a leader from his high school education and continued with his leadership journey to lead the most powerful nation in the world. The responsibility of the society is, therefore, to help children overcome their modern leadership challenges and nurture them in becoming better future leaders.