THE SENSEI LEADER in Kenya - Part 1/7

I've been seeing your articles, you know, here in The Star, uh, Sacco Star, the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce, you're writing for them, uh, Kenya Institute of Management. And they, you know, you've been received very well in terms of on your topic on leadership. But I have a few questions for you because a few people I've interacted with have asked me a little bit, um, about you. There's a lot of interest and curiosity, so I thought this might help us clarify a few things. Um, we have your book in Nairobi, Kenya, I am happy to say. The Sensei Leader.

Oh, I'm honored to see that. That's beautiful.

Yes, it is in the— in Nairobi now, in the market. So the first question is, what is the sensei? You know, your book is The Sensei Leader. So what is the sensei? What is sensei leadership?

Well, traditionally, of course, sensei is a Japanese term, and it's used to talk about a martial arts instructor, basically, a martial arts master. And it's really interesting because the job of a sensei is relatively simple. It's to inspire, empower, and guide people to their very best. Now, in the dojo, of course, that means helping people get to black belt and beyond. But you know what's important is in leadership, you know, I always ask when I'm doing presentations, you know, what does that mean in your life? What does that mean in your role as a leader? And of course, the best leaders, that's exactly what they do. When we bring it down to its most fundamental terms, leaders inspire, empower, and guide others to their very best. Now, fortunately, I get to preach to the choir a lot. You know, I love to work In fact, I think I bring more value to good organizations, right, to good companies. You see a better return, you see more value when you're supporting and developing this type of leader in a good organization. It's very difficult to fix bad without— well, without firing people and starting from scratch, right, which sometimes needs to be done. But that's what it's all about. So basically what I do is I teach leaders how to be the sensei, how to be a good teacher, coach, and mentor, how to inspire, empower, and guide others.

Mm-hmm. Oh, so that is a sensei leadership. And leadership as we know it is hierarchical. We usually look up for leadership.

Oh yeah.

But you come from a different perspective.

You know, one of my masters, Master Yong Zhuangming, who I quote all the time, I think he's one of the world's greatest living philosophers and had the pleasure to study with him, I think about 10 years off and on. And he explained in fact that, the symbolism of a bow, right? When we bow to one another as martial artists, and of course they do that a lot in Asia as well as a greeting, and he talked about that as elevating the other person, right? So I lower my head, I lower myself to you, see, and I'm elevating you. Now that speaks really well to our philosophy of leadership at all levels, right? What is a leader? Now in order to really talk about this sensibly, we have to make sure we agree on the terms, and these terms are very badly used and very badly misinterpreted. You know, what is a leader? What is leadership specifically? Admiral Grace Hopper— it's interesting that we're talking, you know, at the end of International Women's Week, right? Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the— well, she was the first woman to gain the highest title, the highest rank in the United States Navy. And several years ago, she said, management is about things, leadership is about people. And for too long, we went overboard on the management and forgot about leadership. I've never heard anybody say that better, right? That idea of leadership is it's an action that has nothing to do with rank, title, or position of authority. It means— well, first of all, it goes back to those three words we used: inspire, empower, guide. You don't need rank, right? You don't need rank or title or even permission to do that. We can all do that. We can all do that at any level. We can do that for other people, right? And then, uh, you know, the idea of leader, that word itself, that gets, I think, misused too much. In fact, a lot of people challenge me and they say there are too many leaders in the world. I say no, they— we can't have enough, but we have to know that we're talking about the right kind of leader. Again, that person that leads by example, that inspires others, guides others. But also, too many people confuse leader with, well, with the right title or position of authority. But too many confuse leader also just with someone who's charismatic or attractive or popular, right? Or they confuse leader with a high performer, and that gets very dangerous. You know, all over the world we hear, you know, one of the key issues in leadership today is that too many people are promoted solely on performance and don't have the skill sets that we're talking about to really, you know, to really lead people effectively, to inspire them, to empower them, guide them. I hate to keep coming back to those words. I don't want to sound redundant. No, actually, I'm going to change my— I don't hate to come back to those words, but I do apologize for sounding redundant. We have to keep revisiting these things. We have to keep reinforcing these fundamentals, right? Yeah. So that's what it's all about. Once we understand what leader and leadership means, then we can go forward constructively and support and develop this type of leader.

So what you're saying in a nutshell is since leadership is not about title or your position in the office, anybody can be a leader. Or anybody ought to be?

Oh yeah, you know, I strongly believe there are only two types of people in the world today. There are leaders and those who refuse to be. That's it. Again, it has nothing to do with rank, title, or position of authority. Now it would be nice if all managers or all people in position of authority were also effective leaders, but we know that's not true. I mean, you know, you have tremendous leaders right on the front lines of every organization because they are people who inspire others. They lead by example. They share their knowledge, their wisdom, their experience with others, so they guide them and they empower them to do a good job. They encourage one another. You see all these things that we're talking about, and that can happen at any level. And of course, on the flip side of that, right, I think we can all agree that there are plenty people with a lot of power and authority who are just plain lousy leaders.