Leadership is defined as a process of providing direction, energizing others and getting their voluntary commitment towards the vision of the leader. Goals and visions are set by a leader, who influences others for sharing that vision and working together to achieve the goal. Therefore, leaders are concerned about getting a change and motivating others to support that change.

You will find leaders at all the levels of a sports organization, but all of them might not immediately stand out from the crowd. There are different moments, characteristics, cultures and situations that demand different skills in a leader. Someone might be superb is exercising leadership of his/her volleyball team, but might be bad at exercising leadership in some other environment. This happens most of the times. There are terrific young sports leaders, who exercise no leadership in their school or any club, and thus don't know anything about it. The kid may be unfamiliar with the other settings that have different set of norms, authority structures and a totally different set of adaptive changes.

When we talk about power, it is the ability to influence the behavior of others. Effective leaders exercise power and know how to use it wisely, despite of the age factor. It is the type of power used by a young leader, which describes why other children are following him. John French and Bertram Raven identified five types of power:
  • Legitimate
  • Reward
  • Coercive
  • Referent
  • Expert power
If we leave the power part aside, there are different characteristics describing how an effective young leader can influence others. Traits, behavioral, contingency and transformational are the four categories of characteristics. Nobody can tell which leadership will work the best. The trait model was popular for fifty years, which was replaced first by behavioral model and then by contingency model. At present, many supporters follow the transformational model that is reflected in the efforts of leaders to transform the outdated forms of organization to competitive ones.

In today's world, the style of leadership applied in the previous century, or event twenty years ago is outdated. The situation is changing, which indicates that leadership must evolve from autocratic towards democratic style.