From Blueprints to Being: A Journey into the Heart of Leadership

Before I got on the plane to Johannesburg, leadership mostly lived in my head. It was neat and tidy there, a set of theories I could recite, a list of models I could sketch out from memory, and a plan that sat nicely inside a proposal. The Laidlaw Scholars programme had given me strong scaffolding, and I was grateful for it. I had SMART goals that ticked all the boxes, a sensible path that would move me from observing to actually doing, and what felt like a decent grasp of South Africa’s political and social context. On paper I looked ready. In truth, I had no idea what was coming.

The next six weeks pulled that tidy plan apart. They were intense, often uncomfortable, and very, very human. What I thought would be a technical exercise in applying leadership tools became something else entirely. It was messy. It was emotional. It was, at times, chaotic. And that is where the real learning happened. Somewhere between the blueprint I had written and the person I had to be in the moment, I found a more honest way to understand leadership. Not just for a project, but for the sort of life I want to live.

My two years with Laidlaw had been busy with conferences, workshops, and those long conversations where your cohort challenges you in the best possible way. That all helped. It gave me a language and a set of frameworks, and it gave me confidence as well. Johannesburg, though, was the crucible. That is where the more abstract stuff, things like adaptability and empathy and empowerment, had to face the friction of the real world. My carefully built plan met the reality of humanitarian work. Reality won. And I am glad it did.

The humility of adaptability: when plans fall apart

My proposal imagined a straight line. I would arrive, get the lay of the land, and then, in a logical sequence, move from watching to helping to leading. It was a nice idea. The first week made short work of it. I was lodged in a little bungalow at Nkosi’s Haven with unreliable heating and water, which, to be completely honest, was a shock after the comfortable facilities I was used to at St Andrews. The organisations I worked with did incredible, brave work, but they were also underfunded and stretched thin, and they carried the usual mix of internal politics and long-standing tensions that can trip up even the best intentions. None of this was on my timetable. It just was.

One of my first jobs was to run a workshop on bullying. I got the task with less than a day to prepare, and barely any materials. That calm, planned glide from observation to leadership that I had written up so carefully stopped being a glide and turned into a shove. There was no chance to wait for ideal conditions. There was only a room of young people who needed something useful in the next hour.

That is where I actually learned what adaptability feels like. We say that word a lot, do we not, and it sounds very polished and reasonable. In practice it meant I had to let go of the plan I loved and walk into a school without a working chalkboard and try to deliver a sensitive session anyway. It meant getting creative with whatever was in the room. It meant staying calm whilst navigating awkward questions about my role, or who I was aligned with, and still keeping the work at the centre. The leadership in front of me was not the kind that gives orders from a distance. It was the kind that responds, adjusts, and improvises. It seeks steadiness inside instability. It looks for the bit of ground you can stand on, however small, and starts from there.

If I step back for a second, I suppose there was a tug of war between the part of me that loves order and the part of the world that refuses to be ordered. My proposal loved order. The field did not. I could try to force my tidy map onto a landscape that would not fit it, or I could learn a different sort of movement. Not imposing control, but dancing with what arrived. That required a little psychological flexibility, and also a dent in the ego. There is a kind of peace that comes when you stop insisting that your map is the world and start finding your compass instead. That is how it felt. I stopped clinging to the script and paid attention to the scene.

Looking back, this was my first proper leadership lesson. Adaptability, the gritty kind, is not a nice-to-have. It is the ground that lets all the other skills stand up. Without it, everything else wobbles.

Redefining impact: from abstract metrics to human connection

In my proposal I wrote about making a tangible, positive impact at scale. It sounded worthy. The organisations I worked with used similar words, often because donors ask for numbers that look clean on a slide. You know the sort of thing, how many children reached, how many workshops delivered, that kind of tally. I understand why it happens. Money follows proof. The trouble is, the proof that fits easily into a spreadsheet is rarely the whole story.

On the ground, a ten minute talk to a hundred children felt smaller and, frankly, thinner than a forty minute conversation with a group of six where something real happened. I started to realise that the pressure to count outcomes was bending the work towards what could be counted. That is not the same as what matters. The moments that stayed with me were not the ones that would impress a funder. They were the small, human ones that do not scale neatly.

There was a cha cha class at Nkosi’s Haven that dissolved everyone into laughter, and for a bit, you could feel the room breathe again. There were connections with children who were there one week and gone the next, and still those short relationships meant something honest in the time we had. There was a session on youth pregnancy where I gently dropped the plan and started taking questions, and the things that came out were raw, vulnerable, and absolutely the point. There were families wrestling with a justice system that had let them down for years, and their steadiness took my breath away. There was a therapy session with REPSSI where rhythm and movement did more healing than anything I could have written in a bullet point.

My mum always told me that changing one person’s life at a time is enough, and to be fair, I believed her. In Johannesburg I stopped just believing it. I felt it. And once you feel it, the way you talk about impact shifts. You start seeing human beings, not categories. You stop measuring only by reach, and start measuring by depth.

If I try to put it simply, I moved away from treating people like objects that the work happens to, and moved towards meeting them as full subjects who are in the room with you. It is the difference between talking at someone and being in conversation with them. The first one is measurable. The second one is alive. When leadership sits in that second space, it becomes less about delivering a product and more about building a relationship where something new can actually happen. That is where empowerment shows up, quietly, almost by accident, because people feel seen.

So yes, my proposal’s line about big impact still matters, but I now read it differently. Big impact can come from small rooms, if what happens in those rooms is true.

The wisdom of following: from saviour to student

Before I left, I worried about falling into the White Saviour trap. It is a well-worn story, and I wanted to avoid even the shadow of it. I told myself to listen hard to local expertise. That intention was tested quickly, and it had to grow up a bit.

Some of my best leadership moments arrived when I did not lead at all. Zanele, my colleague, taught me simple classroom rhymes that settled the room in seconds. Brilliant, honestly. I watched Mashudu at The Teddy Bear Foundation take a topic as complicated as consent and turn it into songs that children as young as three could sing with pride. That is a skill set you do not learn from a handbook. You learn it by watching, asking questions, copying, and saying thank you.

The hardest moment was in a youth pregnancy workshop when one boy came out with a violent, misogynistic comment. It knocked the breath out of me. I froze. I could feel the room watching, and I knew I did not have the right cultural or contextual touch to handle it safely. Sonja, a local manager, stepped in. She handled it with a mix of calm authority and cultural fluency I simply did not have. She did not embarrass the boy, she did not let it slide, and she turned the moment into something teachable. I felt relief, and also a bit of shame, if I am honest. Then I felt gratitude.

That experience taught me that part of leadership is knowing where your knowledge stops. It is not failure to let someone else take the lead. In that moment, the best thing I could do for the room was to step back, watch carefully, and learn. The “curiosity” I had listed as a goal in my proposal stopped being a nice trait and became an actual practice. Ask. Listen. Follow. Amplify the wisdom that is already present. Be useful, not central.

This is not just polite behaviour. It is essential if you want to avoid the old pattern of showing up with outside answers. There is a humility in it, and, oddly enough, a strength. People trust you more when you are clear about what you do not know. The work gets better when you build it with the people who have lived the reality, not just read about it. I went to South Africa to learn. That day, I really did.

Finding my voice: the practice of empowerment

For all the unexpected turns, Johannesburg did give me the chance to grow the skills I hoped to develop. In the beginning I felt a bit like the classic useless intern, trying not to get in the way. Over time, I took on more. I delivered workshops on bullying and gender based violence. I made mistakes, corrected them, and improved. During a youth leadership training with REPSSI, I shared Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences. The whole point was to make it clear that everyone in the room was already bright in their own way, not just the ones who happened to be good at exams. You could see the effect. Heads came up. A few smiles. That was a good day.

I also had the chance to sit in on meetings about REPSSI’s strategy for 2026 and, somehow, to contribute. I found my voice there. I kept speaking up for approaches that centred the child, and for bringing young people into the planning process rather than treating them as a target group to be spoken about. It was not about winning an argument. It was about nudging the room towards the people the work is for. Little by little, I felt less like I was borrowing somebody else’s leadership style and more like I was practicing my own.

If I try to say what changed inside me, it is this. I had an ideal version of myself in my head, the leader I wanted to be. Then there was the actual me, tired on a Tuesday afternoon, sometimes out of my depth, learning on the fly. The growth came from letting those two talk to each other. Not giving up on the ideal, but letting it bend towards reality. That is where an authentic voice starts to form. Not from copying a model, but from mixing your values with your real experiences, including the wobbly bits and the failures. People can smell that honesty. It creates trust. And trust, more than any slick framework, is what lets leadership work.

Empowerment, too, began to look different. It was less about me inspiring people with a big speech, and more about creating a space where other people could see their own strengths. Sometimes that meant designing an activity that allowed quieter students to contribute. Sometimes it meant keeping quiet for an extra beat so someone else could find their words. Sometimes it was advocating for a process that asked young people for their ideas before we wrote the plan. Small acts, repeated, change a culture. I know it sounds a bit soft, but it felt solid.

What the numbers miss, what the body knows

I want to say a word about bodies here, because one of the surprises of the trip was how physical the learning was. The therapy session with REPSSI that used rhythm and dance showed me, in my bones, that healing is not only cognitive. It is also in breath and movement and timing. You cannot write that neatly in a KPI. But when you watch a child’s shoulders loosen, or you hear a group find a shared beat, you understand that something measurable is happening even if your spreadsheet cannot catch it.

There is a wider point. In underfunded settings, people become very good at surviving. They get creative because they have to. That creativity is not a sign of lack. It is a resource. It is what makes it possible to run a workshop with almost nothing, to turn a handful of materials into a lesson, to turn a room with no chalkboard into a space where learning still takes place. I had read about resilience. In Johannesburg I saw it everywhere, and I learned to rely on it, carefully, respectfully, without romanticising it. Resilience is not an excuse for lack of support. It is a strength that deserves better conditions.

Working with the grain of the place

There is a phrase I kept repeating to myself, work with the grain of the place. It helped to calm me down when I was tempted to push too hard or speed up in ways that did not suit the context. Working with the grain meant noticing how a school day actually runs, who does what in a charity office, which informal leaders the children pay attention to, what has already been tried, and where the gaps are. It meant accepting that some processes in the organisation are slow for a reason, that external reporting takes time no matter how urgent your session feels, and that, yes, internal politics are part of the terrain. You can rail against that, or you can learn to navigate it with patience and a bit of grace.

I do not want to paint it as saintly patience. I got frustrated, quite a lot actually. But the more I noticed the grain, the more I could find small places to push where it actually made a difference, rather than barging into a wall and calling it progress. This is not glamorous. It is what real work often looks like.

Courage, kindness, and the long view

Another thread that ran through the six weeks was courage. Not the cinematic kind. The daily sort. Families showing up to appointments after years of being let down. Colleagues coming back to work after a tough home situation because the kids needed them. Young people asking serious questions in a room full of peers. The courage to change your mind in public. The courage to apologise. I had to find small bits of it too, like admitting when a session had not landed and asking for help to fix it. Leadership sounds big, but it is made of these little acts.

Kindness helped. It sounds obvious, but under pressure it is easy to go sharp. There were times when a gentle word did more than a well argued point. And there were times when someone else’s kindness saved my day. A cup of tea placed quietly by my elbow, a ride offered when transport fell through, a quick check in after a difficult conversation. Those are small, but they kept the whole thing human.

Taking the long view helped as well. Not every workshop will change a life. Not every meeting will move the strategy forward. But if you show up, keep listening, stay honest, and put your shoulder to the right lever when it appears, then, over time, the work bends in a better direction. I had come into the trip hoping for big moments. I left appreciating the slow ones.

Conclusion

I flew out with a blueprint. I came back with a compass. The plan and the goals I started with were not wrong. They were the start I needed. Reality then knocked the edges off them and turned them into something more durable. My Leadership in Action project taught me that leadership is not a position you hold, and not even a tidy bundle of skills you can memorise. It is a relationship, a process, a habit of attention. It is being willing to listen more than you talk, to adapt when the ground moves, and to measure success not only by reach but by those real moments of connection that you may never put in a report.

All of this sits on top of the wider Laidlaw programme, which, to be fair, taught me how to think in the first place. The trip to South Africa has sharpened my ambition to work in humanitarian psychology. I have lost any rose tint I might have had, and what remains is a clear picture of how complicated, frustrating, and deeply rewarding this work can be. The best leadership here is not about arriving with answers from outside. It is about helping a community to make more of its own answers, on its own terms. It is about noticing where power sits and using yours to open a door rather than to take the seat.

I do not think my leadership development is finished. Far from it. Johannesburg felt like the beginning of a longer practice. I will keep the compass, keep the humility, and keep the hope that even small, honest work, done with care, can add up. If I am lucky, I will keep listening too.