When asked about Gaddafi and Castro, he suggested that Americans tend to see things in black and white. Every problem has many causes. While he was indisputably and clearly against apartheid, the causes of apartheid were complex. They were historical, sociological and psychological. Quitting is leading too In , Mandela asked if I knew of any countries where the minimum voting age was under And he had to face the reality that it would not win the day. He accepted it with great humility.
That was also a lesson in leadership. Knowing how to abandon a failed idea, task or relationship is often the most difficult kind of decision a leader has to make. When he was elected in , Mandela probably could have pressed to be President for life — and there were many who felt that in return for his years in prison, that was the least South Africa could do.
In the history of Africa, there have been only a handful of democratically elected leaders who willingly stood down from office. Mandela was determined to set a precedent for all who followed him — not only in South Africa but across the rest of the continent. He would be the anti-Mugabe, the man who gave birth to his country and refused to hold it hostage.
Ultimately, the key to understanding Mandela is those 27 years in prison. The man who walked onto Robben Island in was emotional, headstrong, easily stung.
The man who emerged was balanced and disciplined. He is not and never has been introspective. How is the man who emerged from prison differed from the willful young man who had entered it. He hated this question. What impresses me most about Mandela is how he always put the greater good over his ego.
Mandela had many opportunities to take revenge when he became the president of South Africa. To the surprise of the black population, he did not make use of these opportunities and instead lead the country to peace. Mandela had an incredible discipline. His daily morning routine in prison started with running in place for 45 minutes, followed by sit-ups and finger-tips push-ups. Obviously Mandela knew what he wanted and remembered it. Nelson Mandela inspired people because he valued them.
He would learn as much as he could about a person before meeting them. It is said that he learned all the names and talents of the Springboks team when he brought the rugby world cup to South Africa in Although Mandela was very focused when at work, he would interrupt whatever he was doing for impromptu meetings or greetings, and he always saw the good in others like another great African Prince Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi.
Just the way he walked, the way he carried himself. It lifted up the other prisoners. It lifted me up. Just to see him walk confidently. Leadership is about people, and every single person matters.
Train yourself to treat everyone you come across with utmost respect and honour. Attend to each person as if they are the only ones that exist and matter at that moment. Allow yourself to be inspired by the giftedness of other people:.
For you to be able to inspire other people, you must have sources of inspiration for yourself. Leaders who do not have clear sources of inspiration often fail to inspire others, their organisations and communities.
Practice to recognise and acknowledge the giftedness of other people. Learn to appreciate the beauty of nature and human genius in others. Great Leaders have courage. Courage does not mean absence of fear. Learn to recognise your fears. This means facing the harsh or brutal realities of your situation and, nevertheless, choosing to follow what you think is the morally right course of action. Great leaders have always led by example. People get inspired by and trust those who lead by example.
Those who speak very well sometimes impress people. However, those who live by what they believe in always inspire others. Do not ask of others what you are not ready to do yourself. At the end of each day, ask yourself how you are working to bridge the gap between your words and your actions. Aim to make the gap narrower each brand new day.
As a leader, your name must symbolise and be associated with a set of values. This is what will make you most effective. All great leaders, while being inspired by others, did it their own way. On a daily basis, make an evaluation of how your values are aligned to your words and actions. Consistently try to gauge the kind of impact you have on other people. If it is positive, do what you can to grow and consolidate that. If negative, find ways to adapt or discard it. There is a leadership style and practice that can only be performed best by you.
Do it your own way. Great leaders practice humility. Humility will attract people to you. Arrogance will not. When you make a mistake, do not shy away from admitting that you are wrong. Do not see the world through the lenses of your title in society.
Simply see yourself as a human being. Life is a mixture of hope and hopelessness, joy and pain, success and failure, vision and disillusionment. You as a leader have the task of helping others to live successfully with these apparent contradictions. Learn to live the moment. Learn to live each day as if it was your last opportunity. Learn to live with the paradox of confronting each situation without losing focus on the great opportunity that lies ahead.
As a leader, train yourself to be a dealer in hope. There will always be people who disagree with your leadership style and what you do. Recognising and believing in the good side of everyone around you will win you friends. When you recognise the giftedness of those who consider themselves your enemies, quite often you disarm them.
You win them to your side, provided this is done with honesty and goodwill. Do it for others. You must make effort to identify and acknowledge, privately and publicly, what is praiseworthy in those who oppose you.
Celebrating the achievements of the individuals and groups you are leading generates inspiration and invites people to achieve even more.
Achievements are not usually an end in themselves. They are often a sign that we are moving closer to the kind of life we ought to live. Achievements symbolise our hope in the attainment of a better and happier future. Celebrate every positive step that an individual or a group of individuals you are leading makes.
As a leader, you must create and participate in the practices and ceremonies that honour the life of the people you are privileged to serve. Great leaders know how to move themselves from centre stage. They know when it is time to go so that their legacy lives on. Prepare for the time when you will leave office. Allow other people to emerge as your potential successors.
Learn to be happy when those you are leading show signs that they will be better leaders than yourself. They are part of the fruits of your labour.
But that is besides the point. The knowledge that in your day you did your duty… is in itself a rewarding experience and magnificent achievement. Mandela helped to unite South Africa as it dismantled apartheid, the cruel system of white minority rule.
He symbolized for all of Africa a commitment to democracy and freedom. Unlike Gandhi, who said that nonviolence and truth were inseparable, and King, who famously declared that violence was immoral, Mandela embraced armed struggle as a young man to end the racist system of apartheid.
As a young politician, his rhetoric was angry, uncompromising and inspiring. His aim was to incite revolt. Ultimately, the world remembers Mandela not for his call to arms, but for his gentler call for reconciliation in a country deeply divided by race to this day. He was a man of quiet dignity to match his towering achievements; a man with an ever radiant smile and immense and humble sense of humor. This is a useful trait of a great leader as they can possibly with stand bad times and foresee a better future.
Mandela was able to see the bigger picture throughout his 27 years of imprisonment. Tenacity Being determined and is a extremely useful aspect of being a leader. Possessing resiliency and flexibility in the face of change can grow leaders which may increase organisational profitability. Mandela was able to be steadfast in his beliefs and never gave up on his ideals. It has been stated that through their vision and personality, leaders are able to transform organisations into successful businesses.
By being motivational, inspiring and stimulating to those they are leading leaders are able to foster an atmosphere of loyalty and respect. Inspirational motivation This includes behaviours such as expressing appealing visions, focussing efforts and behaving in ways to energise followers.
Nelson Mandela was able to do this by inspiring first the ANC to follow his lead and campaigning for equal rights. Additionally, whilst in prison Mandela was still able to have a voice through others to communicate his vision of ending Apartheid. Lastly Mandela was able to be a inspirational motivator after he was released in Mandela was able to broker a peace deal, despite an initial amount of unrest leading, but eventually led to a fairer system.
Individualised consideration Supportive behaviour towards followers, showing concern for their needs, encouraging and assisting development. Idealised influenced This involves your charisma as a leader, if people perceive you are confident, competent and committed to higher ideals and ethics they are more likely to follow you and involves how you action are related to your values beliefs and missions.
Intellectual stimulation Helping followers by inspiring creativity of thoughts. Changing outlook on life. Based on this there are more likely to be positive results, higher levels of performance and achievement within the team or organisation. A research study which investigated research investigations based on transformational leadership found that it was associated with higher levels of follower performance Wang, et al, This shows that the leadership traits associated with transformational leadership positively affect how individuals behave in organisations.
Based on this one can say that Nelson Mandela possessed all the characteristics of a transformational leader, persuading, inspiring and leading South Africa to become a fairer and freer society. Therefore in short, Nelson Mandela can show us many things about being better leaders. In Nelson Mandela handed power to Thabo Mbeki, who served as South Africa's second democratically elected president. The presidency of the ANC is held in high esteem for the simple reason that it confers on the incumbent the stewardship of the National Executive Committee, a council that could, if need be, bring about a resignation of the state president.
Ndebele observes that a leader,. For Mandela, leadership was mainly about advancing the cause of others, because he understood how they — especially strangers in neighbouring countries who suffered untold misery in sanctions and cross-border raids launched by the South African military — had paid a huge price. These are men and women, known and unknown, who have declared total war against all forms of gross violation of human rights wherever in the world such excesses occur.
Therefore, when he was in various circumstances required to comment on the leadership in, say, the Southern African Development Community, he stressed the importance of serious planning for regional growth and development. These were not mere words or the rehearsed platitudes that characterise speeches in summits; coming from a generation of hard idealists who had grown up in the principle of a united Africa, Mandela believed that the current crop of leadership could turn the tide against poverty and inequality in the region.
None of us can achieve sustainable growth and development, or peace and stability, in isolation. Today, as South Africa and the world gear up to celebrate the centenary of his birth, the inevitable question comes up: What would our country be like if Mandela had not stepped into the breach to assume leadership at a most perilous period of our history? Aligned to this question is the subtext in current debates about the economy, where queries are being raised — oftentimes with a real purpose to elicit knowledge and sometimes with an aim of breaking down what is held to be the mystique around Mandela — about whether the negotiations in the early s were skewed against the black majority.
Was the Mandela project a massive sell-out? Behind these unasked questions — one is helplessly forced to conclude — are justifications for the fancied sell-out: the old people were deferential to white counterparts on the negotiation table. They were scared of the white man. Commentators tend to approach the debacle — the human tragedy — that characterised South Africa from its inception as a colonial construct to the present moment, where it struggles to integrate its discrete pieces into a coherent whole, much the same way sports fans do a post-match analysis.
Armed with the advantage of hindsight and instant replay technology, the analyst can reimagine, but never quite empathise with, what took place in the arena.
The act of recreating the past is always subverted by the gaps lying between what has been experienced by the flesh-and-blood actors — the gruelling trial that informs their decisions — and our collective grasp of their actions long after the noise of battle has died down.
It is always tempting, when dealing with a venerated figure like Mandela, for commentators who wish to ascribe to him an unassailable saintliness to urge detractors to remember what it was like back then, meaning that, given the overwhelming odds stacked against him, it would be understandable if Mandela capitulated and quailed before his captors. But all evidence points to a man who was single-mindedly steadfast in his quest to create a democratic and non-racial country of the future.
The hardship was a temporary inconvenience, a time when he had to do the groundwork for a radical change, especially in the heady s when repression in the country increased, a sign that the regime was losing its grip. Or, put differently, if there was some residual inferiority to the white man roiling in the mind of leaders like Mandela.
Mandela gave an emphatic no, because, he said,. We cannot today realistically know what Mandela et al felt when faced with incarceration. We have his word and the testimony of his compatriots. We do know, however, that it was a grim period, which none of us, certainly not the children of the dispossessed, would wish to revisit.
What we can take from what we know about Mandela is that he strove to enshroud himself and those around him with dignity that makes it hard for the enemy to unravel. From their arrival in prison, he insisted on being addressed as Mr Mandela.
It is here, also, that his counter-intuitive stance towards leadership proved equal to the task: he defanged the right wing and brought it to be part of the negotiations towards a democratic future. Through the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which allowed for a long cathartic moment, violators of human rights stepped forth and owned up, thus ensuring some form of closure for their victims.
To use a crass metaphor, a father builds a house but cannot be blamed for the incapacity of his children to improve on the dwelling. He had many transgressions, some of which would convert into virtues, in the scheme of things.
Without verbalising it, he embodied what is credited to one-time president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, that leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness and that, acting alone, the leader must accept everything alone.
Mandela knew fully well that the ANC was viscerally opposed to the idea of talking to the regime. Aware of the hostility to those talks, which were dismissed as enemy manoeuvres, OR Tambo had to steer a cautious course. But the practicalities of the times — the ouster of the ANC from Mozambique, cross-border raids in neighbouring countries and the clamour of Umkhonto weSizwe fighters that they wanted to go home — coalesced into an acceptance of the reality of a negotiated settlement.
It would, of course, be accompanied by an intensification of armed actions inside the country. Isolated from his support network, watching the carnage against defenceless people being played out on the daily news bulletins, Mandela started tentative steps towards brokering a negotiated settlement.
He had consulted Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and Govan Mbeki about this intention — and was told in no uncertain terms that this was a very bad idea. Much later, alone, Mandela went into action. Mac Maharaj has said that Mandela was a man who took responsibility for his action.
Having decided that the time had come for talks to start — an impulse no different from the moment he decided on armed action — Mandela knew he would have to go against the advice of the prison collective.
In time, the collective — which also involved Oliver Tambo in Lusaka — accepted the strategy of talking to the enemy.
He accepted that, in the event of the plan blowing up in his face, he would carry the can. Each generation has come up and defined its mission; land and economic transformation, twin imponderables that have been left unaddressed for centuries, stand out and cry for resolution. A new cadre of leaders asks questions and challenges the answers given as being not enough. Sometimes the questions go to the very legitimacy of the Constitution, an enduring irony given the provenance of the Constitution.
What is significant is that the country has come to growth. Mandela has left. The youth, dreaming dreams and hoping hopes, strives to carve out a reality that will ensure their own survival. They too will in time grow old and drag their increasingly disgruntled children into meetings and councils, to plan on how to change their lots. And Chloe, my grandniece, will not remember her hour of helplessness and hunger. The world will move on, secure in its moorings. There is no doubt that Mandela, a modern titan, was as much the creator of history as he was its product.
He could have chosen other routes to usher in the democracy that we now enjoy; he, however, chose alchemy of head and heart, logic and compassion, to coax out of a complex and volatile society, something of value. Wednesday 18 July
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