Leadership Lessons From A Teenager

For twenty-five years, while I was building a career as a pharmaceutical executive and management consultant, I was also teaching Sunday school to teenagers.

Most people in my professional world didn't know this.

It wasn't on my resume. It wasn't a credential that opened boardroom doors. And for a long time, I kept the two worlds relatively separate. Not because I was ashamed of either, but because I hadn't yet understood how much they were teaching each other.

Then I realized something: The room where fifteen-year-olds are deciding whether to trust you may be one of the most demanding leadership environments there is.

You have no positional authority. No budget. No institutional leverage. If they don't want to engage, they simply won't.

The only thing that works is genuine relational investment. Teenagers taught me that leadership earned is always more durable than leadership assumed. And the difference between the two is relational.

In executive environments, leaders can mistake compliance for followership. People do what they're told because the structure requires it—not necessarily because they have chosen to follow. That distinction matters. Because when things get difficult, people don't follow org charts. They follow people they trust.

I also learned something about preparation. Teaching teenagers requires more rigor than most professional presentations because teenagers will quickly expose the gap between what you know and what you're pretending to know. They taught me to prepare differently.

To listen differently. And to recognize that credibility isn't declared. It's earned, one interaction at a time.

Twenty-five years of Sunday school turned out to be some of the best leadership training of my career. I was just too busy learning from it to notice.

Sometimes the places that shape our leadership most aren't the places that appear on our resumes.