Leadership starts young. Everything else can wait.

Every summer, I clear my calendar for a few weeks and run leadership workshops for middle and high school students. People who know my schedule — the engineering day job, the business ventures, the family commitments — ask me why. Of all the things I could spend time on, why this?

The answer is simple: because nobody else is doing it well enough. And because the window to build this skill is closing faster than most parents realize.

You can learn to code at 30. You can pick up finance at 40. You can start a business at 50. Thousands of people do, every year, and they do it well. But leadership — the real thing, not the word on a college application — is built through years of practice, failure, group dynamics, and community-based problem-solving. And the foundation for all of that is laid between the ages of 11 and 16.

Every other skill has a second chance. Leadership has a window. And for most students, that window is right now.

I have watched too many talented young people reach college and then the workforce with brilliant technical skills and zero capacity to lead a room, resolve a conflict, build a coalition, or stand up for something when it was not popular. That gap does not start in college. It starts in middle school, when the curriculum is focused on everything except the skills that will matter most in their lives.

The gap that schools are not closing

Let me be clear: I am not blaming teachers. Most teachers are doing extraordinary work with limited resources and rigid curricula. The gap I am talking about is structural. It is baked into how the education system is designed.

Schools teach subjects. They do not teach students how to lead. They teach students how to perform individually. They do not teach them how to build and navigate a team. They test knowledge. They do not test judgment, empathy, decision-making under ambiguity, or the ability to stand in front of a group and move them toward a shared goal.

This is not an indictment of the education system. It is a description of reality. Schools were designed to produce knowledgeable individuals. The world needs capable leaders. Those are two different outcomes, and the gap between them is where programs like ours live.

Why leadership, specifically, cannot wait

I hear this from well-meaning parents all the time: “We will focus on leadership later. Right now, grades and test scores matter.”

I understand the logic. I disagree with it completely.

Here is what the research and my own experience running these programs tells me: leadership is not a module you bolt on later. It is a foundation you build early. And the building materials — group dynamics, community projects, real-world problem-solving, standing up in front of peers — are only available in abundance during the middle and high school years.

The reason is developmental. Between 11 and 16, young people are forming their identity — their sense of agency, their relationship with authority, their understanding of how groups work. If you introduce leadership concepts during this window, they become part of who the person is. If you wait until college or the workplace, they become something the person has to perform. There is a world of difference.

A 13-year-old who learns to facilitate a group discussion will become a 23-year-old who naturally takes charge of a team. A 13-year-old who never gets that practice becomes a 23-year-old who reads a book about leadership and tries to apply frameworks that feel unnatural.

What we are building this summer

This summer, we are running three programs. Each one is designed to address a different dimension of the leadership gap, and each one is built around the same core principle: students learn by doing, not by listening.

Notice what these three programs have in common: none of them are lectures. None of them are individual assignments. Every single one requires students to work in groups, navigate disagreements, divide responsibilities, present to an audience, and take ownership of an outcome they cannot fully control.

That is leadership. Not the word. The practice.

What happens in the room

I want to tell you what I see every summer, because it is the reason I keep coming back.

On day one, most students walk in quiet. Some are nervous. A few are overconfident. Most have never been asked to lead anything beyond a school project where one person does all the work and everyone else gets the grade.

By day three, something shifts. The quiet ones start speaking up — not because we force them to, but because the group dynamic creates space for it. The overconfident ones learn to listen, because the team will not move forward until they do. Students who have never disagreed with a peer in a productive way learn to say, “I see it differently, and here is why.”

By the final presentation, I see students standing in front of an audience — sometimes their parents, sometimes community members, sometimes local officials — presenting ideas they built as a team. Their voices are steady. Their posture is different. They make eye contact. They handle questions.

And here is the part that gets me: they did not know they could do this. Nobody told them they were leaders. Nobody gave them a title. They discovered it through practice, in a room where it was safe to fail and necessary to try.

The most rewarding moment in every workshop is not the final presentation. It is the look on a student's face when they realize they just led a room — and it worked.

A message to parents

I say this as a parent myself: we are over-indexing on academics and under-investing in the skills that will actually determine our children's trajectory.

Grades get them into college. Leadership gets them through life.

I am not asking you to deprioritize academics. I am asking you to recognize that the leadership gap is real, it is widening, and the summer months — when the academic pressure eases — are the perfect window to address it.

And if your child resists? Good. That is the point. The discomfort of being asked to lead before you feel ready is exactly how leadership capacity is built. Every adult leader you admire went through a version of this. The question is whether your child gets that experience at 13 or at 33.

Where city councils and communities can help

Programs like ours should not be rare. They should be everywhere. And local government has a significant role to play in making that happen.

A broader call

This is not just about my programs. This is about a systemic need.

Every community has people who could run a youth leadership workshop — former teachers, retired executives, active professionals, college students, parents with relevant experience. What most communities lack is the infrastructure that makes it easy for those people to step up.

We need more summer programs. We need more after-school programs. We need more community organizations that say: “Your child's grades are someone else's job. Our job is to make sure your child can lead.”

We need parents who look at the summer and see not a gap to fill with entertainment, but an opportunity to build the one skill that will compound for the rest of their child's life.

And we need city councils and local governments that recognize youth leadership development as infrastructure — not as a nice-to-have community event, but as a foundational investment in the kind of citizens who will run this community in 15 years.

I keep coming back to this every summer because I have seen what happens when you give a young person the experience of leading. Not a lecture about leadership. Not a chapter in a book. The actual experience of standing in a room, making a decision, navigating disagreement, and presenting something they built with others.

It changes them. Not dramatically. Not overnight. But permanently.

And once you have seen that change happen in a 13-year-old's eyes — the moment they realize they are capable of more than anyone, including themselves, ever told them — you do not stop. You clear your calendar next summer, and the summer after that.

Because that is the investment that matters most.