In the final year of my undergraduate degree, I published a weekly post on a personal blog as an annual media studies assignment. In one such post, I had to present an argument about whether leaders are born or raised. At the time, I believed that leaders get raised. With enough training and practice, anyone can be a leader.
Corporate taught me that leadership has nothing to do with title or hierarchy. That influential and impactful leaders often exist in the bottom of organisations. Workers without glorified titles. They have the intangible power to make or break the most successful companies through the sheer power of numbers.
We know this to be true. Change happens when ordinary people rally to make a dream or belief a reality. It is true about who we are as a South African people.
I now know that leadership is a choice. It is a choice that we choose. We choose to reflect on the impact of our decisions. We choose integrity. We choose professionalism or take the less messy complicated and conflictual view. We choose to work together. To find happiness and joy in difficult moments.
It is messy to bring your problems into the workplace. It is easy to do development work on the team you lead when you have not done the work on yourself. It is disempowering to those we lead not to decide on the vision that we wish them to invest their time in.
We get paid to lead and not to assume that those that we lead are not leaders or respected. Leadership is a choice.
