Mimi Kalinda’s passion to empower Africans into seeing the big picture and taking up more leadership roles, whether in enterprise or politics is mind blowing. She is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the Africommunications Group (ACG), a pan-African public relations and communications agency based in Johannesburg, South Africa. and also the Director of Communications for the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a network of centers of excellence incubating STEM education for Africa’s brightest students.
During Mimi’s LLA interview, she shared a number of tips that could help the working woman and charge her up to be bold enough to take on leadership roles with courage.
Here are 7 tips for the woman #RunningInHeels.
- Excellence is not innate, it is cultivated with effort and supported by passion. Even the best craftsman is working to better himself.
- Africa’s transformation can only start with Africans revisiting the stories they tell themselves about who they are.
- Every leader should strive to be more self aware.
- Africa is at a tipping point and the difference between the continent taking forward strides or regressing into being what the Economist once called “the hopeless continent” is the quality of thinking of its people
- We have to dream bigger dreams for ourselves and believe that we have the potential to make them come true. That is the starting point.
- History has a lot to teach us and role models abound if only we take the time to look back at who came before us.
- Leadership is not only required in the boardroom. We lead families, small communities, associations, etc. Leadership is required of us in different circumstances.
- Every Leader should have a vision and make peace with the fact that the realization of that vision may outlive him/her. Be self-aware: you cannot lead unless you know yourself, strengths and weaknesses included. Think of “us” instead of “me”. Leadership is not worthy of the name when it is egocentric.
