Unlike the conventional prep-talk everyone gets from pod-casts, mentors, graduation speeches and all the well composed “same-truths”, if there is one thing I have learned thus far, about leadership, it is that you do not have to be the smartest, most virtuous or even the most organized mess in the flock. You honestly just have to be bizarre enough to leap beyond the realm of reality in hopes of a future bigger than the dreams you once had.
My envisioning of what leadership ought to be was based on the good old virtues that accentuate society’s prospects of what “refined guidance” should be: the necessary humility, the cannot-do-without teamwork and how could one forget the prerequisite vision. But what happens when you lack these hallmarks? Do you become society’s model of a kakistocrat? 
The truth is that no one knows what to do actually, but “the end certainly ‘justifies the means’”- Niccolo Machiavelli. Think of leadership as a flower. Expected to bloom into an array of petals but is never looked at from the dirt its roots had to wiggle through to spring into a full bloom. The wiggling represents our “struggles”.
From my perspective, your biggest struggle as a leader should not be the people you lead; it should be the you that leads them. When I first became the Head Girl of Jesuit Memorial College, I thought I had it all figured out. Like many other competitive settings, prefectship brought out the “Nola” I chose to forget about. I had to find out I am “bossy”, “overbearing”, “too blunt”, “rude”, “too virtuous”, “too loud,” and on and on the list goes. Was I all of the things? Yes. Did I care about what people thought? No. Did I eventually realize that by not caring, I was doing myself great harm? Yes. And did I work on fixing it? Did I fix it? Still on it.
People’s opinions about you as a leader do matter. You cannot expect people to listen to you when you do not listen, but it is even harder when you have to learn to listen to yourself. Getting to know all the “uglies” people found in my deportment made me hurt for a long, long time. And as much as I wanted to pretend that they were just hostilities, I had to become better for myself, to be better for everyone else. Surpassing my peacock, my pride.
Oh! Being a leader is enjoyable. Lots and lots of respect, responsibilities and recognition but very few real friends. As a teenager of this age and era, fake friends are the most bountiful gift of our social time. It’s a situational irony of attending a masquerade ball and you are the only one undraped, without a mask.
As a leader in any form or dynamic you know your true friends by those who are not afraid to let you in on your errs (even when your stubbornness neglects them), by those who stand by your side to ensure that you reach your goals (even when gaining that one goal means losing it all including them), and most importantly those who see past your portfolio and check in to see how “Nola” is fairing outside the other world. Never forget the “Real Ones”.
Leadership is service. One cannot serve and expect to be served. Take Jesuit Memorial College as a case study. Every year, a new set of aspiring SS1 students festinate to pick up prefectship application forms and after a vigorous electoral process we get thirty of the lucky ones. This makes me chuckle.
Many times, before I submitted my prefectship application form, I asked myself, “Am I in for the benefit or am I in to benefit?” A major problem many leaders have is that they only look to enjoy the copious harvest at the end of the farming season, without tackling the soiled earth. When this happens and things go south, people begin to wonder, “What happened?”, It was always “all for one” and “not one for all” – My Hero Academia (M.H.A).
“From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto edifying of itself in love. – Ephesians 4:16
In service, one cannot serve without the service of others. In the Bible verse above, Apostle Paul writes a letter to the Christians of Ephesus. The section of the letter within which we find in Chapter 4 borders on the issue of disunity in the church. Apostle Paul then goes on to urge the Christians to cooperate with one another; he likens the body of Christ, the church, to the human body by creating a mental image of how each organ in our anatomic makeup as humans is linked together, such that the productive functioning of one organ in a particular body system aids the functioning of other. Same is the very nature of a body of leaders brought together to serve.
As a leader no joy is greater than seeing those you lead and those leading with you, eventually thrive on their own. The journey of self-discovery is an unending one, but finding your standing is the first step in this path. And many times, taking that step would require the guidance from others, who may eventually go astray never finding their way back to their own path. To conclude, the real struggle of leadership is the tendency of a leader to lose themselves to find others.
Oluwabukunola Natasha ALABAJA
Class of 2026