Five key leadership lessons learnt as Board Member of Regional Advisory Board (RAB) for Mandela Washington Fellowship 2018.
After taking part in the life changing and prestigious Mandela Washington Fellowship (https://yali.state.gov/mwf) last year in US, at the end of the fellowship I decided to run for the RAB election. It was wonderful because we campaigned to be elected by our 700 dear MWF fellows 2018 for just 10 positions.
To be honest it was very competitive and being a fellow from a country that had just four fellows I was scared to fail. To make it short I was elected and I have served as Linkage Chair on the board from November 2018 until now. If I must detail all my RAB experiences, it will be a book that I will write because I learnt a lot and I am still learning but I decided to summarize in this article five key leadership lessons that I have learned. Let’s go!
Lesson 1: Leadership is always about OTHERS
I will start with a confession, I ran for the RAB with a selfish ambition because for me being on the RAB will provide some advantages and that is not false, but once elected I realized after our first in person meeting that I was completely wrong. The first lesson I have learned is that “Leadership is always about OTHERS” not about us because the main purpose of RAB is to serve fellows by making them benefit from follow up activities after the fellowship. I gained a lot by serving others and at the end I realized it is not my selfish expectations at the beginning.
Lesson 2: Team spirit based on results
The second key leadership lesson I learnt through my RAB experience is that the team spirit produces results. What do I mean concretely? We are 10 Members on the RAB for West Africa Region, We decided at the beginning that team sprit must must drive everything. We are working together more than seven months now and we are all focused on the principle focus. We are not perfect all the time but we got positive results by serving our fellows.
Lesson 3: Communication is the key
The third lesson is essentially focused on communication as the key to resolve any kind of situation even the complex ones. On the RAB, we have faced different kind of situations by working only online, but as we set some communication principles at beginning we have overcome them very well by using formal and informal ways. I also learnt that good and effective communication is based on sharing good information with audience targets (internal or external) at good time and being reactive to avoid any issue.
Lesson 4: Diversity-Humility –Maturity
As I mentioned above, on the RAB we are from 10 different countries in West Africa with different backgrounds. This is huge diverse team and working online is not easy. I learnt how to accept other differences and also to apologize when I am wrong. I grew in maturity because I learnt to listen and to understand others and accept group decision even it is contrary to my view or opinion. Humility is a virtue which helps to become a true servant leader.
Lesson 5: Don’t take things too serious, lead by having fun
The fifth key leadership lesson that I learnt during my RAB experience is that as we are working hard under a lot of pressure, trust me we also have a lot of fun. Sometimes we passed through difficult times both individually and collectively but we always try to overcome by referring to some funny histories or jokes, one of my dear RAB colleague is an expert in making us laugh when we are very serious discussing complex issues. At the end I realized that we don’t need to take thing serous at all times, having fun is also very important to enjoy leadership journey.
Finally, to summarize my RAB experience, I want to mention that taking part in MWF was a great privilege to me because I gained more than my expectations. It was a life changing experience. However, after the fellowship another great experience even if it was not sweet as in the US, it was a great opportunity to apply what I learned during my fellowship in the US. Working on the RAB is not paid job; we have been serving as volunteers since November 2018 until now. We have faced a lot of challenges but united by team spirit we are very excited to continue to serve beyond our legally mandatory tenure which is almost at the end. Finally, if I must use one word to describe my board experience it will be “AMAZING".