The Sadness of Leadership

A conversation with a young man, prone to high achievement, that I still remember 13 years on.

I taught for many years. Many of the students who passed through my classrooms still pop up on various social media from time to time, especially those I taught in residential summer camps.

One of the young men I shall always remember was a very smart Genoese teenager called Francesco, who’d turned 17 not long before the summer. Students of that particular age always had the worst of things in a summer camp, they were adults in all but name and had to obey the rules which were generally aimed at the safety of a concussed 13 year old. I often tried to dissuade 16 and 17 year olds from the camp experience as the rules were simply too arbitrary, childish and inflexible for people who were smart, mature and sure to be successful in their late teens.

Francesco was frequently in trouble over quite minor issues, but had the intellect and social skills to evade punishment, placate an angry centre manager and generally be treated for what he was (almost an adult) rather than what the rules said (a child ward of a very grabby company). He had come to study for a particular exam, essentially a B2 CEFR English exam called the FCE which he said would give him an advantage in university applications and a later career.

B2 on that European framework would mean that someone’s conversational, but makes errors and doesn’t pick up on all the finer points of language and meaning. It’s the level a university might ask for as a minimum for a technical or scientific course. Francesco was far beyond the ability required for this exam, and it turned out he’d mostly come to England to pass it as a reward for succeeding in some other academic competitions.

These summer camps came with mandatory “fun” activities held during the evenings, based on the idea that people were paying good money to be there so needed things organised, and that it was safer to organise a mediocre activity than to leave a bunch of high school students to their own devices for hours at a time.

The memory that strikes me hardest with Francesco was when we’d organised some kind of ludicrous team sports or competitions event. As a staff member I never enjoyed these, projecting your voice across a football field and over a hundred students quickly becomes tiring. The events are also rather silly and designed around random chance where even the most uncoordinated boy can miraculously win the day for his team.

Francesco’s problem was that his team had elected him captain, much against his will. He’d been selected as a captain by the centre manager the previous week, tended to have his classmates and Genoese friends coalesce around him and was by this point feeling some strain of never being left alone as an “ordinary” member.

He asked me “Mister Sam, why do they follow me?”

I told him it was because he was the leader.

“I don’t want to be a leader, I only want to be me”

I replied that it didn’t really matter, he was tall, smart, social and good at things. Other people were always going to follow him. He was the natural leader even if we picked out someone else they’d all still look to him.

“You think this is true? I do not want this.”

I felt I had to tell the truth, that the world had picked him out as a leader even if he didn’t really want to be one.

“So, If I am a leader, then why am I sad about it?”