Femi LazarusCEO at Femi Lazarus Consulting

Get out of the Crowd!

30 Jun 2026 · 2 min

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1:49

In this monologue, the speaker argues that a pervasive "culture of respect" in Africa sustains a crowd mentality that stifles genuine leadership. He explains that respect is conflated with honor, leading people to defer to insecure leaders who demand deference and cause followers to diminish themselves—a phenomenon he calls the "baby boy syndrome." The speaker illustrates how this dynamic forces individuals to manage leaders' insecurities rather than develop their own capabilities, and how respect is often reserved for those who start early or are unseen, while those who begin later are undervalued. He references the biblical example of Saul and David to highlight the danger of preventing young talent from emerging. The overall message urges breaking this paradigm to foster authentic leaders rather than producing "dummies" who merely support insecure authority.

Chapters

If you pay attention to the pattern of the things I've been trying to do, I've been trying to get you out of the crowd, that crowd mentality. How can you have luck and also lack sense? What is trending is trending for you and because of you. Structures are built based on the examination of you. In Africa, there's a culture that is used to maintain people here in the crowd. It's this— it's the culture of respect. Respect and honor are not the same thing. I remember one time it happened in a ministry, and I was, I was surprised and pained. I asked someone to preach, and he said, um, you know, I I don't know much, I don't know much, you know, Apostle is here, I don't know much. It's the lingua we build around insecure leaders who can keep having space. It's the baby boy syndrome that, you know, I really don't know much, I, um, so I want to thank you, I want to, I want to all that. What that does is that it doesn't produce leaders, it produces dummies. Because something tells you almost immediately that you have the responsibility to manage the insecurity of your leader, and in managing the insecurity of the leader, you have to diminish yourself. The Is it the culture of respect that we instill in our people that make them start late, to enter into consciousness late because they have to respect those who are on the line? We go outside and honor those who start early and respect them above those that we teach respect to start late. It's because we don't have respect for the people we are seeing. We have respect for those we can't see. Saul respected the fact that Goliath has been fighting since his youth, but he said David should not start from his youth. If you don't break out of that paradigm, you will not produce leaders. In fact, you will not become one.