Leadership Workshop — A Founders Edition
You are not doing justice by keeping people in a room they can’t bring the best of themselves. — Brian Paul, Founder: Studio 19
It was a rainy Thursday on the 28th of April when different founders from different industries gathered together to learn about the dynamics of leadership and building a business.
The workshop was held at Adanian Labs Tanzania.
The event kickstarted with an engaging networking event that allowed everyone to talk with everyone.
The Eagle Lead Team shared the need of having such workshops. Africa, as the data shows has the largest workforce with over 60% of its population being youth. More research shows that over 22% of youth start businesses in Africa, and it is enticing to see that youth are taking matters into their own hands. However, the failure rate is quite high; 9 out of 10 startups fail in just one year. According to the CB insight report 2019 which assessed why startups fail, showed that 35% of the reasons for startups to fail are related to people and culture. The grounds were: company culture, organizational structure, and people management.
After the brief presentation from the Eagle Lead Founder, the Founders were divided into teams and began a thrilling scavenger hunt. The intent was to allow the founders to enjoy and really work together to demystify the common challenges they experience as founders in leadership. They sang, took selfies, debated, and connected.
Later in the day, it was refreshing and healing to hear from founders who have built businesses and led teams before.
The panel discussion was moderated by Haika Gilliard, a curator, a pharmacist, and a founder herself. The discussants were: Adam Mbyallu, who is the chief strategist of Sahara Ventures and also one of the founding members. He immensely shared that leadership is mostly about well-being. The well-being of yourself as a leader and the well-being of the people that you are leading. Mr. Adam further emphasized the need to be able to clearly communicate your vision and to be able to have everyone in the team aligned to that vision. He further explained that Sahara ensures proper due diligence before they have someone join their team. When you are a startup, a single team player works for 5 people. If you get the wrong person it is a huge liability for the entire team. You need to take enough time to learn and know the person’s character and competence before having him/her join your team.
Mr. Biran Paul, the Founder of Studio 19 was also very composed as he shared that Leadership is about being humble and not choosing to have the last say, it is not about believing that you know everything. He gave the perfect metaphor of a football team, who in the football team is the most important person?; as much as there is a captain, a goalkeeper, a team coach, or even the manager- you cannot really say for sure who is more important. Everyone is equally important and that is how founders should view their teammates. The studio 19 founder further shared that the recruitment process and building a team are two different things. His experience with his co-founder was; that they made enough time to really discuss each one’s expectations, what success means to them, what they really want to do, and what things are they never willing to compromise. Answering these questions early on allowed them to get through and overcome every hurdle they come across as co-founders in the long run.
Appreciation:
- Adanian Labs for making this workshop a success. It was quite an honor to partner with you.
- Adam Mbyallu and Brian Paul for being honest and very open during the pannel discussion
- To all the founders who made the time to drop by despite the rain and the distance! You made it all possible!
Stay tuned for more!
