Every week, we’ll be sharing brilliant insights from our conference and podcast guests. From CEOs and senior leaders, to upcoming new talent and inspirational trailblazers, we’ll be unlocking their wisdom on our blog.
This week, we’re sharing thoughts from Ayomide Akin, Beryl Ncube, Melissa Owusu and Abidemi Ogunbowale-Thomas from Accenture who discuss the idea of leadership and what it means to them.
In the Accenture panel at the BYP Leadership conference, the topic of leadership was discussed in detail and various aspects of the idea were broken down. The result was several interesting takeaways that we all can digest and embody in our own lives.
Through each of the Accenture speakers personal accounts of how they dealt with the challenges that they faced from how they coped in the first few years of their time in Accenture, to where they found their mentors, to what they’ve seen to be good examples of leaders, to how they made advocates of people who where in much more senior positions in the company and more, below are some questions that we should all think of for our own lives and careers.
It’s important for each of us to really reflect on these questions and how we are internalising them, because these could be the difference between where we are now and how far we can go in the next 1 year, 2 years, 5 years. No matter how far we think we can go, we should always aim even higher than that, always.
Here are 10 important questions that you need to consider as a leader.
1. Do you have a picture / vision for the people around you?
2. When things happen in your team with the people you oversee, do you point fingers and throw them under the bus or do you protect them?
3. Do you put into action what you tell people about or are you someone that is all talk?
4. Are you prepared to break conventional thinking and use your initiative to make decisions that you believe are best from your own pool of wisdom and knowledge?
5. Can you honestly say you are grounded with who you are to the point that you know how you respond when you are challenged or under pressure?
6. Are you accepting of the fact that others have been through different experiences to yourself and do you make an conscious effort to understand where others have come from and how you can best invest in them / support them to get the best results possible?
7. Are you prepared to serve others?
8. Are you looking for different types of mentorship, including people that don’t look like you?
9. Are you regularly making efforts to build your self awareness so you’re understanding how you impact people and how you can you best develop people who aren’t like yourself?
10. Are you prepared for the eventual setbacks that you will end up receiving in your career and are you best equipped to be tenacious and bounce back from these setbacks in the best way possible?
You can watch the full panel with Accenture here
