Ngozi Adebiyi: Leadership is Hard, Not Impossible

You probably already have heard that Leadership is serious business. Let’s face it: Leadership is a lot work…pure and unadulterated hard work, and it’s getting harder. Taking responsibility for your own life is enough work let alone trying to direct the action of others.

To excel and be a great leader, you must have the courage and staying power to commit to the hard work necessary for leadership. Delivering on your financial targets, facilitating a high team performance, multi-tasking, maintaining traction on daily tasks, getting things done and most of all providing the much needed energy and leadership to your team is not easy. Some of these tasks are not what you can delegate and must be done by you and you alone. To ignore them would be setting yourself and organisation up for failure.

As a leader, you have to be ready to get your hands dirty. That is the price you pay to lead. Your reluctance to get busy and work at pulling all the different forces that will seek to move your team or organisation in different directions to the centre can cost you big time. Trust me, the easy way isn’t that easy especially at the end and quick fixes never really fix the complex issues and challenges you would have to deal with every day as a leader. Committing to make the lives of others better than when you met them is no child’s play. We need to stop underestimating what it takes to be the kind of leader others would be glad to follow.

Different people come to share and make a single organisation their abode, spending more hours with each other than their friends or family members. Then, one individual – you – is saddled with the responsibility of harnessing their uniqueness, talents, skills and strengths for the good of the organisation. Wow! That’s hard work. To pull through, you must embrace the tenets of resilience, determination, and a personal resolve to be effective. This is what being determined to succeed as a leader is really about.

You must never back down and rescind from facing the challenge that comes with leadership, for there lies the opportunity to grow, make great things happen and leave a mark wherever your path crosses.
“If you avoid the hard work of leadership, you will become a weak leader. If you tackle the hard work of leadership, you’ll become a strong leader” – Vice Monilinaro

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