Last month I started a series on Leadership and I was able to highlight a few of the lessons I had learnt from my experience in leadership positions. Of course, I did not exhaust the ink that was set aside for my thoughts on this. In the last episode, I highlighted the indispensability of action and teams and the emphasis on defining your realities as a leader and most especially not being deluded by the glamour that comes with the titles of leadership. But rather, being conscious of the fact that the real leadership is action and not position. Before I continue, I would want to drop a caveat, that I am not an embodiment of perfection in leadership, and that I am not an authority that must be looked and learnt from, NO! As I write this, I am also learning and ultimately helping myself get better. I literally sit down and view in retrospect my ordeals as a leader, my failures and successes and flesh out those common and uncommon lessons that we all can learn from.
Relationships
A common or seeming trivial point this may seem. But in truth it is a distinguishing reality of whether a leader can make it to achieving his goals or not. Why do I say so? It is often said that relationships define you, and it could be the right or the wrong ones accordingly. Let me give an instance; while in secondary school you were a notorious bully who was hated by the junior students. Then imagine twenty years after, you are applying for a contract at the Government House – a big one – and the guy who sits on the desk that approves your contract happens to be a guy who you once hit on the head, and may be had sworn never to forgive you. You had better pray he has forgotten your face and also your name. That may sound a bit too far-fetched. And maybe it is just too gloomy to be true. Let’s look at the positive side. How about if while in secondary school, you always helped other students out, gave tutorials, spent extra hours teaching your colleagues the math problem nobody in your class grasped or you were not even the nerdy type, but the sociable and down-to-earth one – free to mingle with and always had something good to say. Do you think that if you ever needed help, advice or worse of, a job, from an old friend or colleague; that it would be held back if available? I scarcely think so. In summary, building good relationships with people help you have an edge in whatever interaction you have with them. Communication becomes easier, team work becomes more fruitful and team spirit becomes more invigorated. The scenarios I painted don’t just limit the power of relationships to secondary school or tertiary institution colleagues, but it revolves around our everyday conversations and interactions with all the people around us. From the security guard, to the shop-keeper, to the supervisor, to the coordinate colleague, to the taxi driver – good relationships create an environment for growth, productivity and camaraderie in team work.
Sacrifice
If you have led a team before to carry out any task, it would not come to you as novel that leadership in itself is sacrifice. I was not surprised when I once read that the founders of some of the world’s biggest businesses like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg earn a salary of ONE DOLLAR a year. Well, you may say other benefits accrue from owning major shares in your business – you are right. But the truth remains, that once you attain the post to lead, nothing becomes more imperative for you than to make sacrifices of all kinds for the success of your goals. That is why it is always the case that the leader (I mean goal oriented and focused ones) are sitting on their sits before everyone arrives the meeting, or have to say “Let everyone get their salaries now, I’ll get mine when they are all settled”. Oh yes! Ask any man or woman who has set up a business or company how much of their cash, time and energy they have had to forfeit to set up their enterprise to the position that it stands. I for one had to, and still have to make day to day sacrifices for my business. When I first started LOL! TV, I called the team and let them know the financial implication starting up would be to us. I think they understood that, but more that they understood was that the financial burden rests more on me than anyone else – fortunately for me; I understood that better than they did. Up till date, save ads and external sponsorships, a chunk 80% plus of the financial burdens of the TV comes from me. Tell me about sacrifices! The truth is, except a leader has the passion and vision for his goal, he would not understand the function of sacrifice in leadership.
This brings me to the duo of vision and passion.
Vision and Passion
I am not too sure of which should come first. But I think vision should come first. What do you think? They may also be intertwined. And well, that is why I decided to have both of them here together. Every leader must have a vision for his team. That is cliché. Vision is creating objects of intent in the mind-sight. Or simply put, vision is what you set for yourself as the big picture of what you want to achieve. It cannot be further from the truth that without vision no team, business or group can exist. Yet still, any leader can have a vision. But then, a passion for one’s vision is what fuels action. I say this from experience. And I will give a briefed real life allegory to buttress. When the famous designer Christian Louboutin was young, he was fascinated by ladies shoes and wanted to delve into the area of women’s shoe fashion. He didn’t just end it there, he let his passion consume him as he would sneak out of school to watch the Paris showgirls perform, and eventually he dropped out of school to devote himself to becoming the world’s most famous footwear designer. That is not to encourage dropouts – Louboutin later went to get training from design schools and also apprenticed for years under a shoe designer. All fuelled by his vision and passion.
What do you think?