- FAAPA ENG - http://www.faapa.info/en -

Leadership is about influencing others to achieve goals – Awuah-Darko

Accra, Feb. 28, GNA – Mr Kwame Awuah-Darko, former Managing Director of the Bulk Oil Storage Transportation Company Limited, has urged people in leadership to use their position to influence others to achieve desired goals.

He said: “If you want to understand the portrait of leadership, I urged you to read the book of Habakkuk Chapter 2, Verse Number 2 in the bible.

He cited: “Write the vision on tablet and make it plain so that he who reads it will run with it.”

Mr Awuah-Darko made the remark when he made a presentation on “Leadership and His Experiences in Life” at a three-day symposium organized by the Students Representative Council of the Ghana Law School at GIMPA in Accra.

The symposium was to orientate upcoming lawyers for leadership roles.

He said: “In life, none of us can take leadership for granted.

“In fact, leadership is everything. If anyone of us is going to succeed, it is going to depend first on your own personal leadership over your life and the choices you make.

“Secondly your ability to influence to impose your will on others to enable that view you have on yourself come through and then thirdly and finally to convince others that that vision you have is good not only for you, but also good for them.”

Mr Awuah-Darko said Habakkuk was talking about vision, communication, and the running was the execution.

He explained: “Because if you communicate it, and you don’t have people to execute it, it will not happen; so, every leader must have the ability to get people to rally around him, whether for an individual requirement or a group or for a community requirement.

“If you think you can lead by dictating your will, I disagree with you.

“You have to convince people. You have to bring people along. The net effect is that you have actually imposed your will, but the process and the mechanism by which you do it is usually not by force.”

The former Managing Director said one of the things every leader must do is to leave the position inherited better than it was before.

“I went to UST, University of Science and Technology. The degree being awarded at the time was BA Social Sciences; whether you did history, sociology, economics, law, you were just given a degree BA Social Sciences.

“So, when you got out of the university the job market was tough as it is today; it was very difficult; so myself and a team who were leading the students’ body at the time managed to impose our will on the university authorities where they changed the degree being awarded to specifically the subject you did.

“So, the steps we took all the way back in 1991 and 1992, has brought a Law Faculty to stand alone in the UST, coming out from the Social Science Faculty at the time.

“That is what good leadership does. It wasn’t just for me, but others have come to benefit.”

Mr Awuah-Darko stated that everybody is a leader and urged Ghanaians to avoid the concept that “It is somebody’s job, or it is somebody’s responsibility, to define who they are, what they want to be, and what they can be.”