You Can Lead Before You Have a Title

Ask a teenager whether they are a leader and most will say no. They are thinking of a title — captain, president, the person at the front of the room. By that definition almost nobody qualifies, which makes it a useless definition.

So we use a different one. Leadership at CompassPoint is a set of things you do, not a position you hold. You can do them on your first day, with no title, at fourteen.

We teach this from a framework that has been around for decades: the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership, from James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner's The Student Leadership Challenge. What follows is our adaptation — the practice names are theirs, the examples are ours.

The five practices

None of these is more advanced than the others. They are not a ladder you climb. They are five things a team needs, and on a given afternoon you might be the person supplying any one of them.

Model the Way — name what matters, then let your actions show it. Inspire a Shared Vision — picture a better future, and build that picture together. Challenge the Process — look for a better way; learn through small tests. Enable Others to Act — build trust, and help someone else gain skill and choice. Encourage the Heart — notice a contribution, and celebrate what it means.

Read as a list they sound like posters. The interesting part is what they look like on a Tuesday, in an actual project, when something is going wrong.

Model the Way: the source you cannot verify

Students working on Wings of the Hornet — our book about the aircraft carrier, currently in draft — hit a version of this regularly. Your chapter reads well. One fact in it has no reliable source. The deadline is close.

Modelling the way here is not dramatic. It is telling your co-author which part is still uncertain, instead of hoping nobody checks. It is taking the question to the museum or the historian rather than letting a good sentence carry a weak claim.

If a team says it values accuracy, that is the moment the value is either real or decorative. Would a teammate see our values in what we actually do?

Inspire a Shared Vision: ask the people who use the park

CompassPoint has adopted Overfelt Gardens in San José, and our next clean-up there is Sunday, October 25. Beyond the clean-ups, there is a longer ambition for the park — cultural work, local stories made visible — planned for the years ahead.

The temptation with a vision is to arrive with one. The practice is harder: a shared vision has more than one voice in it. Students hope for a place to create, learn and contribute. Neighbours hope for a welcoming park that reflects their stories. Those are not the same sentence, and you only find out what the second one says by asking.

It also changes how you recruit. "We need more people to paint" is a task. "Help younger kids see their own ideas on a mural" is an invitation. Same afternoon, same paint — only one of them tells somebody why they would want to be there.

Challenge the Process: a useful result can be "not yet"

Our drone team has completed manual flights and is now working on indoor positioning. Our AI Builder teams are asked to keep their failed outputs, not just their best ones, so they can explain what actually changed between versions.

This is the practice most often taught wrong. Challenging the process is not having a bold idea. It is changing one thing at a time and reading the whole result, including the trials that went badly — because an average hides the attempt that tells you the most.

A team that can say "this did not work yet, and here is what we learned" is further along than a team with one good demo and no idea why it worked.

Enable Others to Act: the robot that is not working

CompassPoint mentors two community VEX robotics teams in Alviso, whose first competition is at the end of this month. Picture a younger teammate stuck on a build. You can see the problem. You could fix it in thirty seconds.

Fixing it teaches them that you are good at robotics.

The alternative takes longer: ask what they think the robot will do, offer one hint, let them test it. Show a step, do it together, hear their plan, let them try, then step back far enough that they are the one explaining it to someone else.

Every experienced person on a team knows the line where helping turns into taking over. Enabling others means noticing when you have crossed it — and handing back the tools.

Encourage the Heart: make the thank-you specific

"Good job on the chapter" costs nothing and lands as nothing.

"Your source check made our chapter more reliable" tells someone exactly what they did and why it mattered. "You stayed to sort supplies so the next team could start" names work that usually goes unseen entirely.

Ask who gets overlooked on your project. It is reliably the same roles: the setup crew, the translators, the quiet helpers, the people who check things. The person who let a beginner try again instead of doing it for them. Recognition is strongest when it is precise enough that the person knows you were actually paying attention.

Why we teach it this way

Nearly everything on this list is small. Flag an uncertainty. Ask one more question. Run a smaller test. Hand over the tools. Thank somebody by name for a specific thing.

That is deliberate. Leadership described as vision and charisma is a thing teenagers watch other people do. Leadership described as a set of small, repeatable actions is a thing they can start on Thursday — in a committee meeting, at a rehearsal, on a park path with a litter picker, over a robot that will not cooperate.

And it compounds. One student who checks a source changes one chapter. A team where checking sources is simply what people do changes the book.

Try it for a week

Pick one practice. Choose a real project. Choose one action small enough to be inside your own control, and decide how you will know whether it worked.

"At the next practice, I will coach one step without taking over, then ask the learner what helped."

Then try it, ask for feedback, and write down what you learned — including the days it did not go well. Trying again counts as progress.

That is the whole challenge. No title required.

Adapted from The Student Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner (4th edition, Wiley/Jossey-Bass, 2024). The Five Practices framework belongs to the authors; the cases and activities here were written for CompassPoint's own workshop.

CompassPoint Mentorship is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 46-2389059.