Australian leadership: People who dare to dream. People who are prepared to take risks.
Les Twentyman OAM is one of Australia’s best-known youth outreach workers and social campaigners and the founder of the Les Twentyman Foundation. He talked to australianleadership.com about what Australians want from leadership.
We are in complex times. People as a whole want to know that we are being taken to the right place, and not that we are imploding on ourselves. I think this is what we see at the moment particularly with all the issues concerning youth gangs, rioting and drug issues.
The leaders implode on themselves when they go back and take actions that only lead to repeat offences and do not solve the critical issues at hand.
All this ‘get tough on youth’ stuff has been tried and tested around the world. It just doesn’t work without an element of empathy and rehabilitation.
The leadership approach needs to be more creative, and it needs to enable young people to feel included. They should not be excluded and as a consequence being limited to survival mode.
When leaders are creative about the solutions to our youth issues, our youth step up.
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