Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gifted in Leadership

Gifted Leaders I haven't seen any threads about, granted, I've only been following the forums here for a couple of months so I could have easily missed many.

I have this pet peeve lately of people confusing a few terms:
1. Knowledge and wisdom.
2. Fair and equal.
3. Management and leadership

A great many companies and organizations have been "Managed" to death when what they really need is leadership.

What is done in your area / school or what services have you discovered to develop gifted leaders. Which ones have you found to be excellent? Just getting the topic rolling here, I really liked the description below......

Taken from the following website:

http://www.giftedleaders.com/leaderdevelopment.htm

Defining Leadership

Everyone wants to work in a place where there is a high level of trust and confidence, where employees feel valued, the work environment energizes and excites people, and where each person shares the company’s core values and is motivated by its vision and purpose. But what is the magic ingredient for creating a workplace like this?

Leadership! But more specifically, servant leadership. Servant leaders are motivated by a purpose larger than themselves and routinely seek to draw out the latent capabilities in others. Regardless of their position, they create a positive and upbeat work culture that yields higher levels of team member satisfaction, creativity, and productivity.

"Purpose always serves - it is the manner in which we use our gifts to make a difference in the world. Purpose is not purpose without adding value to others. It is not self-expression for its own sake; it is self-expression that creates value for those around you." - Kevin Cashman

As leaders, we lead by virtue of who we are. True leadership and success in life come from first knowing yourself, choosing your behaviors and actions based on this self knowledge, then serving in authentic and genuine ways that seek to develop others and build trust. Leadership success or failure is usually due to qualities of the heart. And emotional intelligence - the capacity to both understand and manage the emotions of yourself and of others - provides the foundation for all effective leaders.

Having answered the question, “Who am I?”, you must then focus on developing specific communication and leadership skills to address two additional questions, “Now, what am I going to do?” and “How am I going to do it?” Building on your strengths, personality preferences and values, you must learn how to leverage the power of relationships to achieve high performance, both individually and collectively. Success at work (and in life) ultimately boils down to the ability to connect with others and function as part of a team.

I don't personally feel that social skills, in any degree, qualify as giftedness in the way we usually discuss it here (intellectual giftedness, of the sort that entails increased academic potential). The website details some ways to develop leadership skills, perhaps by hiring the company for a fee. Are you involved with this website, out of curiosity? Your post seems an awful lot like spam. ETA: If it weren't for your other posts here, this post of yours would seem an awful lot like spam, due to being off-topic and linking to a commercial website. But I realize now that it comes up first or nearly so in a web search on terms like "gifted" and "leadership" or "leaders".

Well I can't say as far as what is done to develop leaders, other than it is nice there are a variety of clubs for the kids to begin to consider whether they want to lead...but I do recall one child I thought might be a 'gifted leader', nice looking, funny guy and just super friendly across the board with all kids including my own son, and just seemed to have something the other kids gravitated towards.
His mom was pto prez for a while and she sort of had that same ability to get non-joiners to become joiners, so to speak.

Usually spammers mention the same "resource" in all of their posts and never have anything substantive to say. Since Old Dad does not fit this profile, I think it is unlikely he is spamming.

No, I'm not involved in the website. It's just something I found that I thought is a good definition of leadership and wanted to give credit where it's due.

You're of course entitled to your opinion about leadership not being a form of giftedness, however, Hoagie's Gifted Page and numerous other well respected and researched sources would disagree with you. Leadership has been retained in the federal definition of giftedness, across major revisions, since its inclusion in the Marland Report (1972)

A couple of non commercial links to look over on the subject:

http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content/leadership_and_gifted.html

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/leadership.htm

http://www.education.com/reference/article/Ref_Leadership_Youth/

Hoagie's Gifted is not an authority, but in any event the Duke Gifted Letter and CTD reference at Hoagie's both refer to developing leadership ability in high-intelligence children. This is at odds with the vage consultantspeak from the website you've linked, which states that everyone is a "gifted leader", and that "gifted leaders" "work effectively with other people to achieve shared goals". Everyone can win a medal after all.

In my opinion, too, that aspect of a vague federal definition of giftedness has about as much relevance to the type of giftedness this site supports (i.e. intellectual giftedness) as Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. Sure, one can be "gifted" in animal husbandry, tiddly winks, or any other aspect of human behavior, if one defines "gifted" to refer to any trait that sets one apart on the higher end of any objective or subjective measure, but that's no help in discussing the intellectual giftedness we deal with here. I've never heard of a state mandating educational or development services for "gifted leaders", although there are many states that mandate educational services for intellectually gifted children.

What would perhaps be helpful is discussing personality traits in the context of giftedness. It's good for a gifted person who displays leadership interest to develop it, certainly, along the lines of those links from Hoagie's. I just don't find much value in trolling commercial consulting websites for the sorts of ad copy you've presented here, and I think that it's a mistake to muddy the waters by referring to leadership skill as giftedness, in the context of this website.

School districts with gifted programs are being pressured to identify about the same percentage of students from all races and economic strata as "gifted". There are large group differences on IQ tests, so some districts have grasped at "leadership" to make the numbers come out right, as Laura Vanderkam at the Gifted Exchange blog discussed:

http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/2011/07/making-numbers-come-out-right.html
FRIDAY, JULY 01, 2011
Making the Numbers Come Out Right

...

'How did this magic happen? "The new process uses two ways to identify GATE students -- through academic achievement and using a checklist system to find students who are gifted and talented in other ways, such as creativity and leadership," according to the article. "The academic pathway gives students a numerical score based on their performance in reading and math and, for fourth-graders, language. Officials then identify the top 5 percent districtwide within each racial and ethnic subgroup in each of the academic areas, reviewing the results for proportional gender representation. The other pathway to the program is through a nomination process to identify students with unique learning styles, creative ability, leadership skills or artistic ability. These students must be nominated by two adults, at least one of whom must be employed at the student's school."

In other words, the school district is setting out to make sure the proportions look right, and (shockingly) has achieved that.

The whole thing is a bit farcical. I have no doubt that someone can be a gifted leader -- but this is the problem with making gifted programs a reward, or a pull-out with special classes, or field trips, or what have you.'

Good article. I remember reading it a while back.

Remarkable indeed.

I have never had the slightest idea what it means to "know who you are."

I have absolutely no idea who I am.

What does this even mean?

While you personally may not view leadership as something one is gifted in, many other respected sources do such as the Belin-Blank center do. Certainly it's not a greatly discussed topic, which is why I brought it up. You're welcome to bow out if you don't wish to discuss it or if it doesn't meet your personal criteria.

As I said earlier, my purpose in using the quote from the commercial website was my belief in the statement I quoted from it. I'm sorry if you're offended by me giving credit to where it came from, it's a common practice and I believe a fair and honorable one.

In either case, whether one believes that leadership is a form of giftedness or not, the gifted often have traits of leadership that have great potential for development. I think we can at least all agree on that. So let's focus the discussion there.