Leading with authenticity

Adeolu Adewumi-Zer at ZER Consulting Africa explains why being unapologetically You is the key to thriving in leadership

 

Stepping into leadership as a woman—especially in corporate spaces—often comes with an unspoken challenge: imposter syndrome. That nagging voice that whispers, ‘Do I really belong here?’ or ‘Have I truly earned this?’ can be persistent, even for the most accomplished professionals.

 

But what if the key to overcoming imposter syndrome isn’t about proving ourselves to others—but embracing who we already are?

 

When I decided to make the move from consulting to corporate, it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that I ended up in the global HR department of one of my clients – my largest one in fact, the one I, myself, had landed – given that these were people who had worked with me already.

 

Perhaps a year after I joined this rather international group, led by a Swiss man, we got a new head of compensation and benefits, an American. Given my connection with the USA, I tend to get along quite easily with Americans, and it was no different in this case. One day as we were chatting, he shook his head in disbelief at something I’d just said and exclaimed, “Adeolu, you’re such a dichotomy. You’ve managed to get a mix of everything. . . an American accent, a German mind, and a Nigerian heart.” That summed it up so well that I never forgot that phrase.

 

While I’ve leaned into and maintained who I am as a person, through my status as a “third-culture kid” and the various moves I’ve made over my still-short life, I’ve also been very open to absorbing the best of each culture while remaining very much me. A colleague looked at my company website one day and asked if I had built it myself. Given this colleague’s light, but constant, teasing over my lack of creativity when it came to graphics, I braced for his response but proudly said yes. He went on to say that he did love the website and was quite impressed, but that he could tell as he was going through it that it had my voice – and this was someone who had known me less than three months!

 

And that is how I embrace my own awesomeness. I know who I am, what I represent, how I present myself, the way I speak...these are all building blocks for my personal brand as “Adeolu the Afro-optimist.” Much of this was not intentional; it just stemmed from my own purpose for my life, my lifelong pride as a global Nigerian, and my confidence, cemented now in my late forties, of who I am as a person. As I told an interviewer during my very first podcast appearance back in 2020, “Take me as I am.”

 

That’s what we all need to do: remember that there’s only one of each of us. So what’s your unique life story, and how can you leverage that as a child or friend of Africa?

 

Many times, I’ve regretted that my dad didn’t send me back to Nigeria for high school as he had planned, or that I can’t speak my own mother tongue as fluently as a native, or even that we didn’t move to France, rather than an anglophone country, so that I could at least speak French (rather than German, Spanish, etc.). But then I shrug my shoulders and remember that it’s my own life experiences that have made me who I am today. I certainly can’t change them; I can only use them.

 

The wonderful thing is, when you know who you are, and, more critically, are comfortable with it, you find your own unique brand of inspiration and leadership that will draw the right people – your people – to you.

 

My Afro-optimism can be seen not just in my pride in my dark skin and kinky hair, but in the way that I dress myself. This has shifted as I’ve moved from country to country. What presented itself in bright and vibrant colours when I lived in the West quickly transformed into my own brand of “Afro-corporate” dress when we moved to Nairobi. Whether it’s my Ankara jacket top, my Kente pencil dress, my crafted Kenyan jewellery, or my Maasai slippers on more casual days, I almost always have something African on me.

 

Given that we were on the continent, I didn’t realize that people actually took note of my style choices during my travels until I became CEO in my home country for one of the companies that I had helped acquire, and colleagues routinely mentioned how they’d always admired my boldness when they encountered me during my acquisition trips, with one Afro-print style or another.

 

I’m quite sure there are enough folks to whom my Afro-pride doesn’t appeal. Not professional. Too in-your-face. Trying too hard. Not conservative enough. Too simple. Too informal. I can imagine some or all this running through some people’s heads. But once I understood that I didn’t need to be liked by everyone, I also realized that I just didn’t care. Take me as I am.

 

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Adeolu Adewumi-Zer is the founder of ZER Consulting Africa, and internationally best-selling author of Afro-Optimism Unleashed

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and studio-fi