Random musings about life, purpose, leadership

Hello Everyone, Welcome to the Lion's den once again. It's been a while since I shared. Today I am sharing an article from the wisdom workout plan from the Bible plan. The plan was created by Rajiv Chelladurai. Hope this helps you on your leadership journey Regards , Alex aka Teranga Lion WISDOM IN LEADERSHIP I believe that leadership is the ability to influence. It is often mistaken as a designation or a title. If you are in a position of influence, you have the potential to practice leadership. While some individuals have the opportunities to lead teams, there are those who don't have that responsibility but are meant to support, encourage and assist the said leaders. In no way are they inferior to those who have the task of leadership. I also believe that if you cannot consistently work at leading yourself, you are not in a position to lead others. We all consciously or unconsciously want to manage others but management begins with managing oneself. If you are

Hello Everyone, Welcome to the Lion's den once again. It's good to be back after a couple of weeks offline. I apolozie to all who I have  disappointed by not sharing in the last couple of weeks.I hope I can make it up in the next couple of weeks. This week I am sharing on how to manage a difficult boss relationship .The number of people coming to seek for ideas to resolve a difficult boss issues keeps increasing and prompted me to share a few principles I think can be useful. A lot of companies have done a good job selling their organisation culture and values, thus creating the idea of a perfect organization. This has led to an expectation of an ideal situation by new hires of a company where managers are leaders and coaches building a healthy work environment and helping their teams achieve great results and rise to their potential.Also experience of having good bosses over time makes us expect that everytime.  Sadly, the reality is not true for a large number of comp

Hello Everyone, Welcome to the Lion's den once again. Hope you all had a great weekend. In the past couple of weeks, I have written about the importance of  communication in everyday life and how this skill is the engine oil of life in general and the corporate world in particular. This week, I am making this more personal by focusing on how we show up by the way we communicate. In the business world, there are lots of meetings to sell ideas, make decisions, secure alignment to plans. During these meetings, one of the commons forms of business communication, presentations are used. Whilst the focus is on achieving the purpose of the meeting, a lot of us do not think about how we show up. What is not always so obvious is also the fact that the presenter is being assessed especially when you have senior leaders are in the room. You can either show up as assertive, competent, leadership potential or show up as weak, incompetent or good technically with limited leadership potentia

Hello Everyone , Welcome to the Lion's den. Hope you have had a great week. Two weeks ago I started a series on communication being the engine oil of business and I promised a sequel. I am sorry this is a week late. As I reflected on it again, it became clear the title was a misnomer, it's not just the engine oil of business but of life. I shared two key principles I have learnt which have helped me  to communicate better. There were one, to always seek first to understand before trying to get others to understand me, and two  to always try to keep any communication as simple as possible ensure most people will read the same meaning from them. It takes a lot of consciousness to be able to apply these consistently. It's important to understand that communication is not just by  what we say or write but also what we do.There are a couple of things that affect our ability to communicate effectively. A key thing that affects our communication is our atti

Hello Everyone, Barka da Sallah and I hope you are enjoying the extended weekend due to the muslim holidays. I have been asked what skills are critical to growing up the corporate ladder. There are a couple in my view which are critical, leadership communication, thinking and problem solving, wisdom/sense of judgement ability to work effectively with others and agility.  I will over the course of the next few weeks write about each one of them but this week I want to start with communication skills. Communication Skills  is sometimes described as a "soft skill." makes it feel like it's a nice to have. Communication is important because it is at the heart of leadership, critical to problem solving and ability to work with different people.  My analogy is to describe it as the engine oil of business. Try to run your engine without oil and you will appreciate how important the "soft engine oil is. Anyone aspiring to a senior leadership position has to bui

Hello Everyone, Welcome to the Lion's den once again. Hope you all had a great week. Last week I wrote about hanging in there to succeed. A common question that I got was "what do I look for to know I am making progress while hanging on as the results haven't started to show?" There seems to be so much focus on the end results and the frustration felt if they were not coming fast enough. In my reponses, I looked at this from either the expectation or the clarity of the road map to the end goal. There is an old saying that which goes "expectation is the mother of dissapointment". I have found in a lot of cases where the expecations were very unrealist or not grounded on solid clear actions to deliver them. It was as if all you needed was a vision or a big idea and no tangible steps put in place to measure and track progress. Also given our religious disposition, setbacks were not anticipated and seen as strange. I hate to disappoint you but there ar