"This week’s All-School was one of the most inspirational I've had at Brewster in my three years here,” offered Teagan ’08. “Mr.Weber really showed me that a person doesn't need to have the word leader in their name, they just have to think and act like one."

Michael Weber of The Leadership Institute began an October All-School Assembly by acknowledging that each member of the audience had a vision, or definition, of leadership. He then spent the next 60 minutes, often to the amusement of students, redefining the definition of leaders and leadership. He encouraged students to think beyond titles and organizational positions when thinking about who the leaders are among them.

Proctors, prefects, club leaders, and student government members are not the only leaders on campus, although that’s who most of you probably think of when you think of who the community leaders are, he said.

Adults define leadership positionally but leadership is not about position, Weber explained. Think of leadership as the choices you are willing to make and the actions you are willing to take, he said. To illustrate his point, Weber asked for a volunteer who could juggle. A few hands shot up. Weber invited Chanelle ’08 to join him on the stage. He then explained how Chanelle likely weighed the risks and benefits of joining him on stage before volunteering. “Leadership is defined by choices. [Can I do it]? What’s the risk? [Can I juggle?] What’s the benefit? [I get to show my juggling ability in front of the community].” Roy made a choice to put herself out there based on choices she considered, he explained.

Leadership also is about influencing people within an organization, not just about the tasks assigned. Leadership is not about completing tasks; managing is about getting tasks completed, he explained. Influencing people requires building relationships and growing relationships is about taking the time to get to know others. He explained that psychologists attest that two individuals can find commonalities between them by asking each other no more than six questions. To illustrate this point and show how easy it is to begin building relationships, he asked students to spend one minute asking questions about likes and dislikes with a nearby student and to track the number of questions it took to discover similar likes and dislikes.

“I think it took us five questions, and we learned that we had both gone out of the country this summer,” said Kendra ’09.

“When asked to find someone that we didn't really know well and survey them to find similarities and engage in conversation, I ended up finding some similarities immediately, said Alex ’08. “My partner and I went through about five similarities before finally just talking about life in general. Of course there were a few things that made us different, but that is a fact of life; everyone is different. He [Weber] successfully showed us, however, that it is stunningly easy to relate to people you don't know, at least on some level.”

“If you choose to lead, you have to build relationships,” Weber said. And relating to people by taking the time to build relationships, a natural step to becoming a leader, grows an individual’s circle of influence.

Through his actions on stage, Weber demonstrated his influence on the audience by asking them to follow his lead in moving in specific directions (from their seats). The audience followed his words and actions, but by the last directives his actions were different from his words yet most of the audience continued following his actions not his words; Weber’s actions influenced his followers more than his words.

Building relationships and becoming more influential is at the core of becoming a leader – leadership is not about the individual, Weber said, explaining that leadership is about the success of an organization not the glory of an individual. “If you choose to lead, you need to recognize that it’s about the team, the club, the orchestra,” Weber said.

Good leaders think beyond themselves for the greater good and with that he requested another volunteer to help illustrate a point. Erin '08 joined Weber on stage to illustrate the importance of challenging the norm. Weber handed Erin a card and asked her to put it as high as she could on the stage wall. After she posted it on the wall, he challenged Erin to put it two feet higher. Erin looked around for something to stand on to accomplish her challenge while students shouted solutions from the audience. Finally Teagan, seated nearby, grabbed a chair from the floor and brought it to Erin on stage to help her meet the challenge. Weber noted that Erin had put the card as high as she could based on the way she was thinking. To challenge the norm, an individual has to be in a certain mindset, be motivated, and be prepared to use all the available resources. “Leaders are the ones that challenge the norm and dare to think big,” he said. In this case, two students, motivated to succeed, worked together to attain success.

With all his expert guidance on helping students define leadership, Weber kept the students engaged with his comic delivery and his flair for mimicking adolescent relationships and situations, helping students relate back to how their own actions can influence others, for better or worse. Through his own actions and interactions with the students, Weber helped define another of his definitions of leadership – leadership is a learned skill and not an innate ability.

Looking to the year ahead, he challenged students to work on building relationships to influence others, to make good choices, to work together for a common goal, and to “take the time to do the best you can with the gifts you’ve been given.”

In 1993 Weber founded the Great American Opportunities Leadership Institute with a focus on building student leaders through workshops and conferences. During the past 12 years, Weber has worked with more than 500,000 young people from Maine to California, helping them to develop their talents and abilities as leaders through interactive motivational presentations like the one he presented to Brewster students. For more information on The Leadership Institute, visit www.youcanlead.com