Leading Starts with Little Things
by Samuel Ephraim-Osunde, ALU ‘18
One question a lot of us ask ourselves is how exactly can we be leaders. What exactly do we need to do to be qualified to bear the title of leader? Whenever we hear the words ‘lead’ or ‘leader’, our minds instantly picture figures such as Barack Obama or Nelson Mandela performing some remarkable act of virtue or valiance, but the reality is that leadership isn’t just in the grand gestures and big exploits; it’s in the little ones too.
From my experience as an emerging leader, I’ve always thought about how I can make an impact in my community. When I was younger, I held the notion that a leader is strictly a person who has accomplished one meritorious feat or the other. I’d often cook up some big scheme in my mind about how I’d change things but end up doing nothing because it turned out to be too much for me to handle.
All the while, the annoying question kept bugging me: “What can I do to be able to call myself a leader?” Was it going to be after I had done something newspaper-worthy? When? You can imagine my irritation when the prompt for a university application essay I had to write was, “Describe one moment in your life where you were a leader”. I still don’t remember how exactly I managed to write that essay without knowing my answer, but I did. It was after I got into the African Leadership University that I realized that leadership isn’t as complex as it seems.
At its core, I believe leadership is all about being a good person with good intentions. This doesn’t mean that all good people are leaders. Rather, it means that being a good person is a foundational requirement for becoming a leader. Leaders are people who appreciate their followers and a good way to practice this is through appreciating people in your community. You can do that by caring about the small things like asking other people how they’re doing, paying someone a compliment or helping someone who needs it.
Taking time to be friendly and greet people in your community goes a long way. It not only helps in increasing the breadth of your network, but it also improves your networking skills themselves. You don’t have to be a “people person” to do this. Just make eye contact, smile and ask a simple question. That’s all it takes.
When you take time to connect with people and their stories, they value you more.
You may not believe it, but people are always watching. They notice when you do the things most people aren’t be bothered to even consider. That question you asked, that help you offered may have positively changed someone’s day. You don’t have to solve world hunger or eradicate poverty to get noticed as a leader. Just keep doing those seemingly insignificant things and bit by bit, you’ll make yourself a more reliable, caring and empathetic person. And those qualities, with or without the great accomplishments, still make a great leader.
