'Leadership is not going to be about you, it’s going to be about the people you’re going to lead.' This is a soundbite coming from an interview I have given to journalist Kiah Berkeley from Canada for the online magazine Day One Leadership. Read the entire interview on their website and thanks to Kiah for the nice conversation!
"One of the biggest misunderstandings in leadership, and especially African leadership, is the fact that people think leadership is about the leader. But it’s actually not about the leader. So if you come in the first day, the first months, listen to the people you’re going to lead. Listen to what they’re dealing with, who they are, what it is that they want, what they are looking for. Don’t only talk to them once but a couple of times in different settings. Leadership is not going to be about you, it’s going to be about the people you’re going to lead. You’re only the vehicle. You’re only the person who is going to guide them. And we have a certain popular term for that that has been used in discourse about leadership and that’s “servant leadership”.
I've been to a conference that was about servant leadership and it was really amazing. They were able to illustrate servant leadership in one single picture. You could see a man standing at a ladder and then on the ladder were the followers. And the leader was holding the ladder and the people that were following him were the ones who were taking the ladder up. That contains everything I believe in about leadership. It’s called servant leadership but I think this should be a general notion about leadership: that it’s not about you, it’s about the people you serve.
What often goes wrong in leadership is that it’s more about the leader and then a disconnection starts because you’re only making decisions based on your own assumptions. It becomes about your glory or your will and that could be a good reason why leadership sometimes doesn’t work."
(Abstract from 'Listen to the people you will lead' September 30, 2016)
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