Walk through any major African city and pay attention to what you see.

• Glass towers that belong in Dubai.
• Churches that look like they were lifted from the American South and dropped onto West African soil.
• Office buildings with no memory of the climate they sit in, no acknowledgment of the sun that beats down on them, no relationship with the land they stand on.
• Malls with names that gesture toward European luxury.
• Hotels designed to make a foreign visitor feel at home while making a local feel like a guest in their own city.

Now ask yourself: whose idea of progress is this?

London has an identity. You feel it before you understand it. In the red brick, the Georgian terraces, the way old and new sit together without apology. The city knows what it is. It has argued with itself across centuries and arrived at something that could only be London.

New York has an identity. Relentless, vertical, unapologetic. You know where you are the moment you arrive. The city does not explain itself. It simply is.

Beijing has an identity. Ancient and modern in deliberate conversation. The Forbidden City and the CCTV headquarters occupy the same skyline, the same story, the same country’s idea of itself across time.

Accra could have an identity. Nairobi could. Lagos could. Abidjan, Kigali, Addis Ababa. Every one of these cities sits on soil with thousands of years of architecture, craft, philosophy, and aesthetics embedded in it.

But somewhere between then and now, we stopped building from that place.

We started building from someone else’s idea of what a serious city looks like. 🙁

The architecture is just the most visible symptom, which is the easiest thing to point at. The deeper problem runs through everything.

Take religion.

I want to be careful here because faith is personal, and this is not an argument against belief. But it is an argument about origin and ownership and what happens when a people adopt a spiritual framework that was, in many cases, delivered to them by the same hands that took everything else.

Christianity as practised across much of Africa did not arrive as an invitation. It arrived with colonisation. It was used, deliberately and strategically, to replace existing spiritual systems, to delegitimise African cosmology, to make people strangers to their own ancestors. And it worked. The borrowed became more sacred than the original. And the original became something to be ashamed of.

The same is true in parts of North and East Africa, where Islam is prevalent, though the history is different and the dynamics more complex.

The point is not that the faith is wrong. The point is what it signals about identity when a continent’s dominant spiritual frameworks both arrived from outside, both required the suppression of what existed before, and both are now so deeply embedded that questioning them feels like heresy rather than history.

Now bring this into the boardroom.

Because this is where it becomes a management problem, a leadership problem, a productivity problem that shows up in quarterly results and brand strategies, and the way African companies price themselves in global markets.

The African executive who was educated in a Western system, worships in an imported tradition, works in a building designed without reference to local context, and leads a company modelled entirely on a Western corporate template, is making decisions from a borrowed identity. And borrowed identities have a particular weakness. They are always slightly uncertain of themselves. Always looking outward for validation, and always measuring success by someone else’s standard.

You see it in how African companies present themselves. The mission statements that sound like they were written in Delaware. The marketing that mimics global campaigns without asking whether the insight underneath them is relevant to the people being spoken to. The pricing that undersells, because somewhere deep in the organisation, there is an unexamined belief that what comes from here is worth less than what comes from there.

This is not a confidence problem in the way motivational speakers describe it. It is an identity problem. You cannot project clarity outward when there is confusion at the centre.

The companies that are breaking through globally from this continent (Africa) are the ones that stopped trying to look like something else.

The identity that Africa buried is not a liability in the global market. It is the advantage that African businesses have not yet learned to use.

The question for every leader reading this is uncomfortable but necessary.

When you make decisions, whose framework are you using? When you build your culture, whose template are you following? When you define what success looks like for your organisation, whose definition are you reaching for?

If the honest answer is that you are not entirely sure, that is worth sitting with. Because an organisation takes the shape of the identity at its centre. A leader who has not done the work of knowing who they actually are, beneath the education and the titles and the frameworks borrowed from other contexts, will build something that does not quite know what it is either.

And organisations that do not know what they are cannot communicate clearly, cannot price themselves correctly, cannot attract the right people, cannot retain them, cannot build cultures worth belonging to.

Identity is not a soft topic. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.

We have been building on someone else’s foundation for long enough. The cracks show up everywhere, in our cities, in our boardrooms, in the quiet uncertainty of talented people who have achieved everything they were told to want and still feel like something is missing.

What is missing has a name. We built everything. Just not in our own image.

The most productive thing an African leader can do right now is not learn another framework. It is unlearn the belief that the framework has to come from somewhere else.

There is a man who walks my street most mornings. He carries his goods on his head. No shop, no signage, no logo. Just him, the sun, and whatever he has decided to sell that week. Some mornings, it is phone chargers. Some mornings, it is cooking oil in small sachets. Once it was umbrellas, the week before the rains came, which is either good timing or good instinct. Probably both.

What he does not do is tell you what he is selling.

He tells you what your life would look like if you bought it.

Not “I have phone chargers.” It is “your phone will not die on you today.” Not “cooking oil, fresh stock.” It is “your soup will be ready before your husband gets home.” The product is almost beside the point. What he is selling, always, is the version of your day that goes better because you stopped and paid attention to him.

I have sat in marketing meetings that lasted three hours, but did not communicate half as much.

There is a concept that gets taught in business schools called the “jobs to be done” framework. The idea is simple: people do not buy products. They hire them to do a job in their lives. A person does not buy a drill because they want a drill. They buy it because they want a hole in the wall. They buy it because they want the painting hung. They buy it because they want the house to feel like home.

The framework has a name, a body of research, professors who have written books about it, and courses you can pay a lot of money to take.

The man walking my street never heard of it.

He has just been practising it every single morning because his livelihood depends on getting it right.

That is the thing about informal sellers that formal businesses keep missing.

They cannot afford to be vague. There is no awareness campaign, no brand recall study, no “we are playing the long game.” There is just this moment, this person walking past, this window of maybe four seconds before they are gone. Every word has to earn its place. Everything that does not move you toward yes gets cut, not in a brand review meeting six weeks later, but in real time, on the street, because it did not work yesterday.

That pressure produces clarity. The kind of clarity that most marketing teams spend entire quarters trying to manufacture.

The outcome-first pitch is not a technique the informal seller learned. It is what survived. Everything else got left behind because it did not convert.

There is something else they do that I find even harder to teach in a boardroom.

The local medicine sellers. The ones who set up at the roadside or appear at markets with their remedies, their roots, their preparations. They do not just tell you what the product does; they show you how it is made. Right there. The leaves, the bark, the proportions, the process. They walk you through all of it out loud, in public, to anyone who will stop and watch. Check TikTok lately. There are so many of them there.

And then at the end, they say: If you cannot find these ingredients yourself, I have them. If you do not have time to prepare it, I have it ready.

Think about what that move is doing.

It is the opposite of what most formal brands are taught to do. Protect the formula. Guard the process. Never show too much. The thinking is that if you give people everything, they will not need you.

But the medicine seller knows something more true than that. Showing you everything is not a risk. It is the proof. It says: I am so certain of what this does, I will teach you to make it yourself. The demonstration is the pitch. The transparency is the trust. And the trust is what closes the sale.

Because here is what they understand that the boardroom keeps forgetting: people are not really going to make it themselves. Life does not work that way. They are busy. The ingredients are scattered. The preparation is unfamiliar. What the demonstration does is not give the product away. It removes every remaining doubt.

By the time they say “contact me if you cannot find the ingredients,” you already believe in the product completely. Because you just watched someone who clearly believes in it more than anyone paid to sell it ever could.

That is a level of marketing confidence that most formal brands cannot get to. Not because they lack the product. But because they do not trust it enough, or their customer enough, to show everything and still believe the sale will come.

I think about this when I sit with campaign briefs.

We spend a lot of time describing the product. Its features, its qualities, what makes it different from the last version of itself. We talk about what it is before we ever get to what it does for you. And even then, what it does is often written in the language of the brand rather than the language of the person standing in the heat deciding whether to stop walking or keep going.

We build personas. We run focus groups. We brief agencies. We review copy, revise it, align it with the brand voice, get it signed off, and send it out into the world, hoping it lands.

The man on my street does all of that in four seconds. In his head. While balancing things on it.

I am not saying throw out the strategy. I am not saying informal is always better than structured. There are things that scaling requires that a street seller does not need to worry about.

But I am saying that somewhere between the brief and the final approved copy, something often gets lost. The human being on the other end. The specific moment in their day that your product is supposed to improve. The outcome they are actually trying to get to.

They remember that. We keep forgetting it.

We optimise for impressions. They optimise for the sale.

One of those is a business metric. The other is a conversation with a real person about their real life.

The best marketing has always been the second one. We just built enough infrastructure around it that we sometimes forget which one actually matters.

My friend called me Incognito Rastaman. He said it laughing. The kind of laugh that is also a little bit of an accusation. We had been on a Snapchat streak, the two of us, the way old friends do when they are not close enough anymore to call but not distant enough to lose completely.

ut we were close once. Closer than that word usually means.

We shared a room. The same four walls, the same ceiling, the same nights that stretched long because we were young and had nowhere urgent to be. He was finding his voice as a DJ. Reggae shows, events, and radio. I used to play guitar for him. Ragga rhythms, slow and heavy, while he practiced over them. I knew every Damian Marley, Vybz Kartel, Pressure Buss Pipe lyric: every riddim worth knowing. Music was not something we consumed in that room. It was something we made. Something we lived inside.

Then I went into the corporate world. And somewhere along the way, I packed the rastaman into a bag and left him at the door.

He noticed.

Here is what nobody tells you about ambition. It does not just ask for your time. It asks for your taste. Your references. The things you talk about when the conversation gets comfortable. It asks you to read the room so well that eventually you stop being someone who reads the room and become someone afraid to be read.

Corporate culture has a sound. A dress code for personality. Some things signal seriousness, and things that signal that you are not quite serious enough. And reggae, somewhere in the unwritten rules of the rooms I was trying to enter, did not make the list.

So I made a quiet decision. Not a dramatic one. I did not sit down and choose to hide anything. It happened the way most small surrenders happen. Gradually. Reasonably. One adjusted reference at a time. One unplayed playlist at a time. One moment of deciding that this particular part of me was better kept offstage.

I told myself it was just professionalism. Context-switching. Knowing your audience.

It was also a little bit of shame dressed up in sensible language.

I have met many versions of this person.

1. The woman who grew up speaking her mother tongue at home but trained herself out of the accent because she decided it made people take her less seriously.
2. The man who loves Afrobeats but curates a different persona for LinkedIn.
3. The person who code-switches so fluently that they sometimes forget which code is the original.

We do it because it works. That is the truth that the inspirational version of this story skips over. Fitting in has real returns. The adjusted accent gets the callback. The curated persona gets the engagement. The incognito version of you moves through certain spaces with less friction.

But friction is not always the enemy. Sometimes, friction is just the feeling of being fully present. Of taking up the space your whole self requires instead of the smaller, tidier space your edited self fits into.

The cost of the edit is subtle. It is not that you fail. It is that you succeed as someone slightly less than who you are. And over time, that gap between the self that shows up and the self that stays home becomes its own kind of exhaustion.

There is a version of professionalism that is genuinely about the work. Showing up prepared. Communicating clearly. Being someone people can rely on. That kind of professionalism has nothing to do with your taste in music or where you came from or what you sounded like before the world started measuring you.

And then there is a version of professionalism that is really just conformity with better branding. That version asks you to shrink. To sand off the edges. To become a more palatable, more legible, more inoffensive version of the person you actually are.

That second version does not make you more professional. It just makes you easier to overlook.

The most interesting people I have met in boardrooms are the ones who brought something in with them. A perspective that did not come from the same three business schools and the same five frameworks that everyone else was citing. A way of seeing that was shaped by something outside the usual coordinates of corporate life.

Those people do not succeed despite the thing that makes them different. They succeed because of it. The difference is not the obstacle. The difference is the advantage. It just takes longer to see that when you are standing at the door deciding what to leave outside.

My friend (Jahtaman) called me Incognito Rastaman, and I laughed.

Because he was not just describing a music preference I had quietly archived. He was describing the version of me that used to sit in our shared room at night, guitar in hand, playing ragga rhythms while he practiced his sets. The version of me that knew every lyric, felt every bassline, and never once thought that any of it was something to be managed or hidden or apologised for.

That person did not disappear when I put on the suit. He just stopped being invited.

I do not think the answer is to walk into every boardroom playing Damian Marley. Context still matters. Reading a room is still a skill worth having.

The suit is real. The guitar is also real. The lyrics, the room, the friend, the music we made before either of us knew what we were becoming. All of it is real. All of it is mine.

You have been code-switching so long that you forgot it was a choice. It still is.

There is a question nobody asks you when you get promoted.

Not “are you ready?” That one gets asked. Not “do you have what it takes?” That one gets implied. The question nobody asks is this: are you willing to become a different person?

Because that is what each step up actually requires. Not just more skill. A different way of seeing the work. A different relationship with the people around you. A different idea of what your job even is.

I learned this the hard way. Three times. Yes o. Three solid times.

The first version of me was all hands.

And I was good at it. That is the truth. I could execute. I could take a brief and turn it into something real. I was so fast, I was reliable, and I took pride in the quality of what I produced. My value was visible. You could point at it.

When you are an executor, your hands are everything. What you make is who you are. And there is a deep satisfaction in that. Something ships. Something works. You did it.

The problem is that hands are addictive. When you are good at doing things, doing more things feels like the natural answer to every problem. Something is not working? Do more. The team is slow? Pick up the slack. A project is falling behind? Stay later.

I stayed later a lot.

And I got rewarded for it. Which is how I ended up getting promoted into management without anyone telling me that the thing I was being rewarded for was exactly the thing I now needed to use less.

The second version of me had to learn to use my head.

Not because I had not been thinking before. But management thinking is a different kind of thinking. It is not about how to do the work well. It is about which work should be done at all. It is about why, not just how.

This transition was uncomfortable. My instinct was still to jump in, to fix, to produce. But a manager who does everything themselves is not a manager. They are just a very stressed individual contributor with a team watching them.

I had to learn to sit with the discomfort of not doing. To ask harder questions instead of providing faster answers. To look at a plan and say “this is moving but is it going anywhere?” To have the conversation that slows things down now so they do not fall apart later.

I had to learn to think out loud with people instead of presenting finished conclusions. To say “I don’t know yet” and mean it as a position, not a failure.

The head is a strange muscle for someone used to leading with their hands. It asks you to be slower. More deliberate. More comfortable with uncertainty. Less interested in being the one who did it and more interested in whether it was the right thing to do.

It took me longer than I want to admit to make that shift fully. But when I did, the work changed. The team changed. Things that used to depend on me started running on their own.

The third version of me had to open up something I had kept pretty closed.

I was in a one-on-one with someone on my team. We were supposed to be talking about a project update. Timelines, next steps, the usual.

But she sat down and something was different. Not upset exactly. Just quietly absent. Like part of her had already left the room before she walked in.

I had noticed it for a few weeks. The slightly shorter answers. The ideas she used to volunteer that she had stopped offering. The energy that used to fill her side of every conversation, gone a little flat. I had noticed all of it and done what busy managers do. I filed it away. Told myself she was probably tired. Probably just having a week.

I almost opened my laptop and started the agenda. Then I paused and asked how she was doing. Not as a formality. I put the laptop down and asked her properly.

She looked at me for a second like she was deciding whether I meant it.

Then she told me.

It was not a breakdown. There was no single thing that had gone wrong. It was quieter than that and somehow worse. She said she felt invisible. That her ideas had been going nowhere for so long she had stopped having them. That she did not know if she was growing inside this job or just getting older in it. That she had been trying to show me this, in small ways, for months. A comment here. A question there. And I had been too deep in the work to look up long enough to see her.

She was not angry. That is the part that stayed with me. She was just tired of being unseen.

I sat with that for a moment. Then I realised something that changed how I have led ever since.

I had been managing her work. I had never once stopped to lead her.

That is the difference the heart makes. Hands produce things. Head directs things. Heart sees people. And people who feel seen work differently. They take more risks. They tell you the truth earlier. They stay longer and try harder, not because they have to but because they want to.

Heart is not softness. It is not popularity. It is not avoiding hard conversations. In fact, once I started leading with more heart, the hard conversations became easier. Because people trusted that I was having them for the right reasons.

Leadership at that level is not about having all the answers. It is about making people feel like they are worth investing in. Like their growth matters to you beyond what it produces for the business.

That shift changes you. Not just as a manager. As a person.

So here is the staircase as I understand it now.

You start with your hands. You build something real. You earn your place. That matters, and it should not be skipped.

Then you are asked to move up. And if you are lucky, someone tells you that the move is not just about doing more. It is about doing differently. About pulling your hands back enough to let your head lead. About thinking instead of just executing. About building something that works without you at the centre of it.

And then, if you keep growing, you are asked to make the hardest shift of all. To care. Genuinely. About the people, not just the performance. To understand that your job is now to make other people better. To see that the most powerful thing you can do some days is put the agenda down and just listen.

Most people get stuck somewhere on that staircase.

The executor who got promoted but never stopped executing. The manager who thinks brilliantly but leaves a trail of burned-out people behind them. The leader who is loved but cannot hold the team to anything because they never learned to make hard calls.

None of these are bad people. They are just people who made one transition and thought they were done.

The work is never done. Each level asks you to add something new while keeping what you already built. Hands, then head, then heart. On top of each other.

That is the staircase. And nobody draws it for you.

You just have to keep climbing until you figure out what the next step is asking of you.

If you are somewhere in the middle of one of these transitions right now, that discomfort you feel is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you are growing. Keep going.