I have never once applied for a leadership role. Somehow, they keep finding me.
I have thought about this a lot over the years, and I still do not have a clear answer. Maybe it is my personality. Maybe it is that I have always had a way of putting things and people together, of seeing how the pieces fit before anyone asks me to arrange them. Whatever it is, the pattern has repeated itself often enough that I have stopped calling it a coincidence.
At Africa Prudential, I was a Product Owner. When the person leading the product resigned, I did not compete for the role or negotiate for it. I simply woke up one day and found myself as the Product Manager. There was no announcement, no transition plan, and no handover document that made everything make sense. There was a product, there were people depending on it, and there was me. I carried it until I moved on.
Then I joined Heirs Technologies, and before I could learn where the printers were, I was moved to lead marketing temporarily.
I had zero marketing experience. None. I had never built a campaign, never briefed a designer, and never argued with anyone about brand guidelines. Yet there I was, the unofficial marketing lead, learning the function and leading the function at the same time.
Think of everything that could go wrong in that setting. Now put the list aside, because none of it is what nearly broke me.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
The work, I could learn. I read, I asked questions, I watched people who knew more than me, and slowly, the marketing part stopped being frightening.
The people part is what humbled me.
Before that role, I genuinely believed I was a great people person: warm, approachable, and easy to work with. That role tested my patience, my empathy, my humility, and my self-awareness in ways I did not know they could be tested.
My honest struggle was this: I could not understand why my teammates did not think the way I did. Fast. Get it done. Move.
In my head, that was not a preference; it was simply how work worked. So, when things moved slowly, differently, or not at all, I pushed, and they pushed back. We quarrelled again and again until it reached the point where HR and our Group Heads had to step in.
Let me be clear about something, because it would be easy to write this story with me as the reasonable one. I was not always the reasonable one. I was efficient, and I was impatient, and I had not yet learned that those two things are not the same virtue.
In the middle of it all, someone said something to me that I have never forgotten. They told me to stop focusing on the challenge and start asking what God was using the situation to teach me.
That shift in perspective cost me nothing and changed everything.
Maybe it was patience, because I clearly lacked it at the time. Maybe it was tolerance. Maybe it was the simple, uncomfortable truth that we are not all the same and, therefore, cannot function at the same capacity, in the same way, or at the same speed.
Maybe it was all three.
What I know for certain is that I learned them. Not gracefully, and not quickly, but I learned them.
What I Carried Out of It
Leadership is not a bed of roses. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either very new to it or was never really carrying the weight.
Understanding the different people who work with you is a job on its own. Managing each of them according to their personality, pace, and pressure points, while still holding the standard, delivering results, and avoiding becoming the toxic person everyone quietly dreads, is an enormous amount of work.
It is invisible work.
It does not appear on any deliverables tracker.
Hats off to every leader doing it well, and hats off to those still learning, because I was once one of them.
I also learned that being handed responsibility you did not ask for is not a punishment. It is usually somebody telling you they have seen something in you before you have seen it in yourself. The discomfort is the tuition.
That season did not just teach me how to lead a team. It taught me how to be led, how to be corrected, and how to recognise good leadership when I finally saw it up close.
Which is exactly where the next part of this story begins.
