What Elementary Schools Can Teach Us About Leadership

kundlasarah
Dec 12, 2025
4 min read

What Led to Studying Leadership at a School

After eight years of facilitating leadership programs for others, I decided it was time to be on the other side of the experience.

When I launched Questing Insight this year, I knew I wanted to get more connected with my community. I'd spent nearly a decade at Worthington Steel leading workshops and developing people, but my roots in Westerville were more personal than professional. So when I learned about Westerville Leadership, a nine-month civic leadership program, I applied.

The main questions I was seeking answers to: what would it feel like to go through someone else's leadership curriculum? What would I learn about my own community? And maybe most importantly, what kind of leader did I want to be outside of a corporate setting?

A Different Kind of Classroom

Even just over the past few months, the program has taken our group places I would not have expected to study leadership.

We've toured Westerville's key infrastructural buildings to discover everything that goes into keeping our community running. We sat down with our Police Chief at the local Justice Center and heard about community security efforts. We visited Fire Station 111 and met with Fire Chief Brian Miller to understand emergency response coordination. We discussed parks and recreation with Director J.R. Fourqurean and learned how public spaces shape community wellbeing.

Each session revealed a different layer of what it takes to lead a community. But last week's visit to a nearby Elementary School caught me off guard in a way I wasn't expecting.

Walking Familiar Halls

When it was confirmed that I’d be meeting with leadership at Wilder Elementary School, I felt a small jolt of nostalgia. This was my elementary school. I walked these halls as a 4th and 5th grader, long before I knew anything about leadership development or organizational behavior.

Now, two decades later, I was back. But this time, I was sitting across from Principal Tabbie Swain and some of the 2^nd grade teachers, hearing about the challenges they're facing nowadays.

Throughout the discussion, I learned that the number of students requiring specialized behavioral support keeps rising each year. In schools, these are referred to as “Life Skills” classes, where specialized teachers can provide the additional behavioral support in smaller group settings that some students need. They help bridge students' communication gaps and provide emotional regulation guidance. Most importantly, they're filling a critical need for a growing trend we're seeing more often in schools.

The Connection I Didn't Expect

As someone who specializes in training adult workshops on communication skills and conflict resolution, I see the end results of ineffective behavioral patterns. The workplace communication breakdowns I address in my sessions don't start in conference rooms. They start much earlier. If schools are seeing more students arrive without the foundational skills for expressing needs, managing emotions, and navigating disagreement, it means these patterns aren’t being modeled elsewhere.

We can't expect emotionally intelligent employees to show up if emotional intelligence isn't being modeled at home, in neighborhoods, and in communities. The skills we need at work are the same skills we need everywhere: listening without defensiveness, expressing needs clearly, managing frustration constructively, and understanding that someone else's perspective doesn't invalidate your own.

This isn't about blaming parents or schools. It's about recognizing that leadership and effective communication skills aren’t confined to workplaces. Leadership is what we model when we disagree with a neighbor. It's how we respond when we hear feedback that we don’t like. It's the way we navigate conflict in community where no one is “tracking our performance,” serving as an example for our own family members to follow.

What I'm Taking With Me

Visiting this elementary school last week reminded me why I signed up for this civic leadership program in the first place.

I wanted to get more connected to my community. I wanted to understand the systems and people who make Westerville work. But more than that, I wanted to practice the kind of civic leadership I encourage others to develop.

The skills I teach in workshops, the frameworks I share in training sessions, the insights I write about in this blog are all things I need to model in my own community first, because if I'm asking organizations to invest in developing their people, I need to be equally invested in developing myself and my connection to the place I call home.

Your Turn to Engage

If you've been thinking about getting more involved in your community, I'd encourage you to take that step. Look for local leadership programs, volunteer opportunities, or civic organizations in your area. Attend a city council meeting. Show up to a neighborhood event. Have a conversation with someone doing work you admire.

Strengthening our workplaces starts with strengthening our communities. And strengthening our communities starts with each of us deciding to get involved.