A leadership comfort zone brings stagnancy, deprives one of innovation, stifles growth and frustrates both the leader and the team they lead. Your personal preferences like leadership style, communication style, prejudices, habits and mannerisms must be effectively managed so that they do not work against you. You have to be careful that your strengths do not end up becoming a hindering comfort zone. Seek to lead, driven by a cause.

Teach faith as a non-negotiable - What should your family be aware of? Why should they be aware of these things? How will they become aware? When and at what stages must they become aware?

It’s about teamwork, realizing we are on the same side and complementing each other. The family is at its best when exposed to and engaged in high-quality environments, interactions, and relationships. This is not technological or economic quality – it is leadership and effectiveness quality. Children mature best when the adults in their life work in partnership with one another. There must exist important aligning of mission, beliefs, values and behaviours within the family unit.

A leader must produce other leaders. Why do you want to produce followers, when by being called a leader the assumption is that you already have followers? Influence those who follow to birth their kind and develop others to lead.

Alignment of vision, mission, values and attitudes need to be matched between you and those you choose to surround yourself with. The cost of training or replacing will be very minimal and less painful if recruitment, selection and positioning are done well. This applies even to general employment processes, whether at leadership or staff levels.

It is the challenge for every leader to develop and invest in those he depends on, to ensure his or her vision is realized in the way it has been put upon the leader’s heart. These key people will enhance the success or taint the leadership image and brand of the visionary.

You choose the leaders and place them strategically around the table of your vision and mission. They are already around you because of some degree of loyalty, so if you continue putting 80% effort in enhancing loyalty that already exists, you will end up going into overkill and igniting a toxic level of internal office politics that was not originally existent in your organisation.

If in this generation, you still consider yourself the only one who knows or who has the capacity to make a difference, it’s a shame because you are delaying this leadership excellence train from reaching its destination. Make a decision to change your leadership philosophy and agenda today!

Every leader must be challenged to educate their followers and capacitate them with knowledge, tools and a voice to champion their own causes and become actively involved in setting the agenda for citizen participation in social transformation. Don’t create a dependent constituency; develop and lead other leaders who demonstrate a growing personal responsibility for their own success as well as for those around them.