On leaders and leadership

It is so often passed over in my business. You can’t easily ‘qualify’ someone as a leader with any sort of calculation or numeric metric. There is no performance management plan. You can’t get a degree in it. Yet we know it when they see it. That prolific champion of the people - the Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama, Mary Robinson, Maya Angelou, Barack Obama, Abraham Lincoln.

So in the taxi ride to the airport for this trip to Kenya, my taxi driver and I talked about Museveni’s re-election and what that meant for Uganda. He was happy that Museveni was re-elected, he said, and that there had been very little violence associated with the elections. Five more years. He wondered, however, why Museveni wasn’t grooming any future leaders. What happens next? I had no good answer. So the theme of this trip was set. When I arrived in Nairobi, I started to provide training for a team managing a leadership and capacity building program for local leaders, members of government, business leaders and civil society members from the East African region. I like the model: bring people together to focus on making change in their organizations, with hopes that they will use this training and networking to decrease hunger and improve food security. Share information, strategies, best practices and then go back to your organization and see what you can deliver. The cynic in me says sure, we’ll see if they are really doing anything with these lessons in 6 months, but the idealist in me says yes! Outside the walls of the training, Kenya is also struggling with the push and pull of politics on leaders in the coalition government. People I talked to in Nairobi ask, so what about us? These politicians talked about delivering services when they wanted us to vote for the new constitution and here we are 7+ months later without much change to speak of.

To our North, Tunisia Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen. All countries experiencing their own struggles between the people and their leaders. The pundits can call it whatever they want but ultimately it seems to me that people in so many corners of the world are looking for a leader that is that role model, someone they are proud of that can help get them what they need. Someone that follows up on his or her promises and drives the country (or organization, or community) forward with a vision for what can be better in the future. I guess the search is on.