Cultivating Tomorrow’s Leaders

Ask Jennifer Tackett about her research into the fledgling field of youth leadership development, and Tackett’s enthusiasm shines.

She speaks fast and with an energized tone.

She uses words like “passion” and “sincere” to describe her work, which applies scientific findings and principles to the study of youth leadership, emergence, and development.

And she touts her ongoing efforts to identify untapped leadership potential in the younger generation, particularly among those who don’t fit the conventional look of a leader.

“Building our next generation of leaders has to be one of the most important things we could do for our world, for society, and that’s not flip from my perspective, that’s really very genuine,” says Tackett, professor of psychology at Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Personality Across Development (PAD) Lab.

 A research shift

Ironically given her contemporary zeal for youth leadership, Tackett’s early research had nothing to do with the topic. Her first scholarly work, in fact, revolved around disinhibition and problematic adolescent behaviors like aggression and delinquency. Along that path, however, Tackett found the psychological profiles she was creating resembled those of successful leaders.

“When I started thinking about that, it made a lot of sense,” Tackett says. “The kids who find themselves in trouble have a lot of these traditional leadership characteristics. They’re often good at taking risks and influencing their peers to achieve some shared goal.”

The discovery spurred a dramatic research pivot. Tackett ceased examining adolescent obstacles like alcohol use and gambling and began investigating how leaders emerge in youth.

She conducted focus groups with high school and college students to understand leadership aspirations, motivations, and values. She distributed surveys asking youth about the life activities propelling their leadership development and conducted personality studies to identify leadership traits. She also tasked high school interns in her Northwestern-based lab to pursue projects examining leadership, such as how leadership emerges in social media.

“I really want the youth to tell me what a leader looks like, not the other way around,” Tackett says.

 Developing youth leaders

In 2022, Tackett co-authored a paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science promoting adolescence as the optimal time for developing leadership potential. She championed a multidisciplinary developmental perspective to study early leadership – how it emerges, develops, and follows into adulthood.

“Leadership itself is very consequential and critical on a societal level. It's so important to have good leaders and people willing to take those roles,” says Tackett, whose research momentum has only accelerated in the years since that key publication.

At present, Tackett sees youth leadership development lacking and littered with bias. When teachers in a classroom setting select a class leader, for instance, they often turn to those who “look like leaders” – the A student, the star athlete, the school musical lead. In chasing the prototype, however, teachers overlook promising candidates who don’t fit the traditional mold and thrust potentially poor leaders into elevated roles.

“We’re probably missing out on people who could really move the needle on important problems,” Tackett says.

Alongside others in the still-nascent field, Tackett is looking to develop approaches allowing, if not empowering, capable youth, especially those of different identities and backgrounds, to step forward.

“Adolescence is such an important age for starting to see your sense of self in these different adult roles that it's really the most important time to be studying leadership and then trying to intervene,” she says.

 Advancing the study of youth leadership

Tackett’s work accelerated in summer 2025 when she spearheaded the inaugural Northwestern Youth Leadership Conference. Supported by funding from Northwestern’s Office of the Vice President for International Relations and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Tackett invited researchers focused on different domains of adolescence – identity development, achievement motivation, and social-emotional skills among them – to Northwestern’s Evanston campus to expand the study of youth leadership and foster collaboration. Alongside other conference attendees, Tackett is now crafting a paper to construct a developmental science framework for youth leadership roles and outcomes.

At the same time, Tackett continues applying her research to heighten leadership capacity among Northwestern’s student body. For several years, she has directed a personality-based leadership intervention with students at The Garage, Northwestern’s student startup hub. The six-week effort helps individuals assess their own personality and understand how to leverage that self-awareness to achieve leadership goals. She is currently adapting the intervention for student leaders in Northwestern’s student affairs space.

As Tackett’s research profile grows in the still-novel field of youth leadership development, she regularly receives notes from parents, teachers, counselors, and school administrators eager to know more. Recently, she began helping staff at a Tennessee school develop a youth leadership curriculum for students in grades 3-12.

“It’s clear people really care about this and are hungry for the science to catch up to the real-life need,” Tackett says.