To be or not to be that is the ques­tion. —Ham­let

Sta­tus quo bias. The egre­gious er­ror per­pe­trat­ed by the es­tab­lished pow­er dy­nam­ics and sta­tus quo of so­ci­ety is the myth that vi­sion­ary lead­er­ship must fit a cer­tain back­ground, pro­file and stereo­type. Trans­for­ma­tion is eas­i­ly talked about but not quite so easy to ac­cept. Main­tain­ing the sta­tus quo is an im­por­tant pri­or­i­ty.

Last Tues­day, I had the won­der­ful op­por­tu­ni­ty to be the guest speak­er at the Ro­tary Club of Port-of-Spain lun­cheon meet­ing. It was an in­vi­ta­tion I didn’t take for grant­ed. Ro­tary val­ues di­ver­si­ty and cel­e­brates the con­tri­bu­tions of peo­ple of all back­grounds, re­gard­less of their age, eth­nic­i­ty, race, colour, abil­i­ties, re­li­gion, so­cioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus, cul­ture, sex, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, and gen­der iden­ti­ty.

The top­ic I agreed to speak on was the Com­mon­wealth Youth Games 2023 - “From Vi­sion to Re­al­i­ty - Life Lessons”. With an al­lot­ted speak­ing time of 15 min­utes. I had to con­dense a mul­ti-year jour­ney of long days and nights, un­wa­ver­ing brav­ery and de­ter­mi­na­tion that be­gan with a vi­sion in 2018 that some be­lieved was—too bold and un­re­al­is­tic. The sto­ry couldn’t be cap­tured in a 15-minute ad­dress.

Life lessons be­came the per­spec­tive in par­tic­u­lar the lead­er­ship habits of brav­ery, ex­cel­lence, in­spi­ra­tion, part­ner­ship and team build­ing.

To­day, I high­light (1)—the habit of brav­ery that em­braces risk, change and fail­ure.

Un­der­stand­ing the pow­er of a vi­sion to mo­ti­vate peo­ple to dream of ways they can cre­ate a bet­ter to­mor­row. A fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence be­tween a man­ag­er and a leader is to re­al­ly lead, you must leave your com­fort zone—the will­ing­ness to sac­ri­fice per­son­al se­cu­ri­ty for the greater good.

Do you have the guts to be will­ing to be laughed at? To look fool­ish? Do you have the guts to ask what is it go­ing to take? Do you dare go against suc­cess or fail­ure?

(2)—the habit of part­ner­ship and team build­ing. Mov­ing from vi­sion to re­al­i­ty is a process that re­quires oth­er peo­ple to share, buy-in and sup­port. In the ear­ly pre-bid and bid days, ex­tra­or­di­nary sup­port and buy-in came from the Min­is­ter of Sport, Ho­n­ourable Sham­fa Cud­joe, TTOC (T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee) sec­re­tary gen­er­al An­nette Knott, and the three women who un­der­stood the vi­sion, used their tal­ent, pas­sion, hard work and ded­i­ca­tion to con­vert the vi­sion and big pic­ture in­to the re­al­i­ty of a com­pelling and trans­for­ma­tion­al bid pro­pos­al and pre­sen­ta­tion - Rheeza Grant, Chanelle Young and Kwanieze John.

It re­quired team ef­fort and com­mit­ment. If there is no clar­i­ty around what you are try­ing to ac­com­plish to­geth­er, part­ner­ship and team-build­ing can seem and feel trans­ac­tion­al. It’s im­por­tant not to as­sume your goal is every­one’s goal. In my years of lead­er­ship, I have seen too many projects fall apart when team mem­bers aren’t clear about who is do­ing what and by whom. This ap­plies in every sphere of life - busi­ness, sport, home, school - you name it, if there is no clar­i­ty all will fall down.

There is a quote by Moth­er Tere­sa that I ref­er­ence ha­bit­u­al­ly- “You can do what I can­not do. I can do what you can­not do, to­geth­er we can do great things.”

As the fo­cus shifts from hav­ing won the bid to de­liv­er­ing the Games it’s an ex­pand­ed group now led by the lo­cal or­gan­is­ing com­mit­tee. Team­work, part­ner­ship and col­lab­o­ra­tion across mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers are cen­tre stage. All of T&T have a stake.

Spe­cial thanks to the Ro­tary Club of Port-of-Spain, who ac­knowl­edged that the lead­er­ship and the life lessons learned from T&T win­ning the bid to host the sev­enth Com­mon­wealth Youth Games, can be ap­plied to busi­ness and oth­er as­pects of life.