The Keys to Leadership · Rishab Academy

The Keys to Leadership

There are two main ways to demonstrate excellence in your extracurricular activities. The first way is through awards. It’s a great way of o show that you can be a part of some of the best of the best in your respective club or activity. However, in this post I’ll focus on the second method of enhancing your extracurriculars, leadership roles.

So, first things first, what makes me qualified to speak on the topic of leadership roles? Well, next year I’ll be representing my grade alongside 2 other students from my grade for what is essentially a student senate. More importantly, next year I’ll be the Junior class President for. Both of these positions that I’ll hold next year are voted positions that I was elected for. (I’m also a peer mentor in my school which means that I’ll help the newer students and as a part of NHS there are also leadership roles there, but those aren’t as important as the previously mentioned other two).

In this post I’ll explain important things to know in general about leadership roles, how to acquire those roles, and specific methods I used to achieve my leadership position.

Starting with the general pieces of information on leadership roles, these will suck up a lot of your time, but the reward is worthwhile. For clubs, having a leadership role means that you have far more responsibility that most other clubs members which means you are investing far more time into this activity than most other students. Exactly how much extra time you are spending on the club activity depends from club to club, but in general, you can assume that the extra time spent is about 1.5 to 2 times as much as the average club memeber. When you are spending so much time on one activity, you want to make sure that you are spending your time on something that is really important to you. If this activity isn’t something super important for you, it may be better to remain as a regular club member rather than spend more of your time on something which isn’t as worthwhile.

Now, the other side of this concept is that as an individual in a leadership role, the amount of impact and change that you can make to the activityis directly proportional to how much time you sink into the activity. As a leader, you will need to utilize more of your time in doing club related activities whether that may be inside of school or outside. Regardless managing your time is crucial to have a great time as a leader. Make sure you account for the rigor of your class, other extra curriculars (especially science fairs and competitions), SAT/ACT, college applications, etc.

Now, the harder questions to answer, how do you actually go about getting these leadership positions?

The first thing that has to be understood is that there are two ways to get a leadership position: election and induction.

In an election based role, basically anyone can run for the election where the position is given to whichever individual wins the election. This is the “standard” leadership position that most think of when they think of a leadership position. The main issue with this type of system is that it leaves power in the hands of a biased public so the election becomes a mix of luck and a popularity contest.

In an induction based role, the leadership role is given based upon experience and the judgement of the adults running the club (sometimes the students who are already in leadership roles may have a say). This role is “fairer” in the idea that it won’t be biased as much as an election based system, however, if you can use that bias to your favor then it is much more useful to have audience bias towards you. With induction, the relationship between students and the adults could bias the adults to choosing a student that they favor over a student who truly deserves the position.

So, how do you get these leadership roles? Well, one thing that works for both types is having awards related to the role. A personal friend of mine got a leadership role in DECA last year (sophomore year) in part because he went to the national competition as a freshman the previous year. The main issue with getting awards to show your prowess to both students voting for you and for adults choosing you if that not all clubs have awards and getting these awards is no easy feat.

Election based roles can be easily achieved by having the support of the public. How exactly you go about this varies from one club to the next. For smaller clubs, getting a small majority that will vote for you can get you in a leadership position. For larger activities, having a majority of your audience being familiar with who you are before you even start running will make the entire process much easier. Even if they are just more familiar with your name than your competitors, this will easily boost your chances at success.

Induction based roles will have more success by having high attendance and making a good relationship with the adults running the club. By having perfect or near perfect attendance for a club’s meeting will give you a better chance at receiving the role because you will have more chances to show your prowess and your potential. On top of that having a good relationship with the adults running the club will give you a boost to your odds just because they are biased towards you. Neither of these methods replace success in the club however, as the kid who won an award, made a massive impact, or succeed in the club activities will probably get the role over the kid who had perfect attendance and didn’t much of an impacts. These methods are meant to boost your chances which still rely upon your output in the club.

How did I achieve my leadership position?

To put it simply, failure + revision = success. What I didn’t mention previously is that I also ran for the presidential position in sophomore year as a freshman. Since I ran for that position, I learned what went wrong the first year one and how to fix it for the next attempt. What I realized is that the first time I ran, there were far more people running—which split the votes—and since we were all freshman, we didn’t have to much time to get to know all of (or even most of) the students in the grade as my school has a massive student body of 267 students.

For this year, the major change I made was increasing my publicity to make sure that more of the grade knew who I am before we even got to the election cycle (the end of May/start of June). I increased my publicity in two ways that I could control, one long term and one short term.

The long term boost was made by writing and sharing my APUSH study guide with every single student in APUSH (yes it is already post on skool, the link is here: https://www.skool.com/qurios/apush-study-guide?p=30b698ef). By that point in early may, at least 100-110 students knew who I was and knew that I am a good worker based upon the sheer volume of my study guide.

The short term boost was done literally on the speech/Election Day. Since I knew the rough schedule for the speeches, I knew that my speech would take place in the period directly following lunch. Therefore, the night before I designed stickers on photoshop based on my school’s logo with integration of my color scheme (green) and a logo. I then printed and cut out about 300 of these stickers and went around the gymnasium/cafteria/outdoor eating area to make sure that I could distribute as many of these stickers as possible to make sure that as much of the student body knew who I was by not just name but also by face and that I would be running for president.

For a position like the one I ran for, the next most important part is to make sure that you make and deliver your speech in the most effective way possible.

Linked here in this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10YK1QQLZGkpW51WyNULWAvr8So_-fSOvHsqHDAEcBiU/edit

is the speech that I had prepared and the actual speech I gave with annotations and what the goal is for each part of the speech is and which parts got the most audience response.

While I would say that there isn’t anything else I can provide, this time I do actually have something extra. A friend of mine since 5th grade recorded my actual winning speech, so feel free to listen to that as it gives a much better idea of how the speech went than any description I could give. (Plus you can now have a voice to associate with my posts).

Good luck on being a leader in your community! If you have any questions feel free to comment them down below and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability.

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