The law of the lid dictates that a group can only rise to as far as the leaders goes…
“In the first law–the law of the lid, John Maxwell intended to tell us that there is a lid on a person’s leadership ability and this lid determines his level of effectiveness. The lower a person’s ability is to lead, the lower the lid on his leadership ability, and the lower his effectiveness. On the contrary, the higher the leadership ability, the greater the effectiveness. Your leadership ability always determines your effectiveness.”
This intrigued me and made me try to find why this would be so…
So I decided to look at it from this angle; if you are to lift a weight you can only do so for weight that is so much your body size. So how do you get to carry this weight? There are two possibilities, you can either get some muscle or cut the weight that you have to carry. Now cutting of the weight seems like an easy alternative but in leadership it’s not always the case.
Now gaining some muscles is a little bit complicated because it is more or less a natural phenomenon, it involves putting in extra time in exercising, it basically just involves work which most of the time we are lazy to put in.
So we back to shedding off weight…this is either involuntary or voluntary. Voluntary would be where you work on your package and kick some weight off it; involuntary would be where as you lift or as you go on your normal business some weight just falls off your package. Now for as leader that’s just challenge right there…selecting what weight goes and what remains.
But have you for a moment thought what if that weight had a destination and it had to get somewhere intact? What if the weight was a whole unit you get it all delivered or you mess up the whole project? What if the weight was a nation in dire need of change and direction?
I put it to you in order for the package to be delivered we simply need to develop muscles as leaders, we just have to get off the bad diet get rid of our favorite food of corruption, nepotism, tribalism, any other …ism that would mess up the goods on transit.
But then again what if the weight knew its destination and could therefore determine when and how to get there? What if we as a people decide not to be so dependent on the leaders and chart our own route leaving them as mere guides and not ultimate truths?
What if at the grass route level we decided what we want and drove the agenda to the leadership rather than let them decide what’s on the agenda? If we delivered the agenda what that means is that we give them the road map to our destination, to our future, to our plan for Kenya.
My Dream for Kenya
By Norman Ondego, for Kenya
