NGO Soul + Strategy 065. How you should transition into a new role as a leader: Adama Coulibaly @ Oxfam
Summary
What are the vital steps a senior leader have to take as they step into a new leadership role? What to do and what to expect when you are transitioning into that new role?
And, separately, to what extent are African leadership models and frameworks different from global North ones? Most importantly, what could global North imprinted leadership models learn from African ones?
In this NGO Soul+Strategy podcast episode, I interview Adama Coulibaly, Global Programs Director at Oxfam, on both these topics. He is a very experienced NGO leader, a coach, and an eloquent thinker and author on all things leadership. And he just transitioned into his new role at Oxfam, so he is here to speak from experience!
Adama’s Bio:
- A seasoned leader with nearly 30 years of experience in international development and humanitarian aid
- Global Programs Director, Oxfam International; earlier in his career he was also a Regional Director at Oxfam
- Leadership positions as Country Director at the International Rescue Committee, Regional Director at Plan International, and Principal Adviser at UNICEF
- Certified Transformational coach, and somebody who labels himself a 'positive thinker'
We discuss:
- His advice to leaders who are transitioning into an organization, based on his own experience
- What differentiates African takes on leadership models and frameworks, as distinct from global North imprinted models?
- Adama Coulibaly (nickname ‘Coul’) considers himself a born positive thinker; he learned this behavior in his youth while facing very difficult circumstances in his home country Mali
- As an adult, he learned about the field of positive thinking; and that positive thinking is good for your physical and mental health
- Coul’s advice, in a nut shell, on how to transition into a new senior leadership position:
Give yourself at least 2, if not 4 weeks between two jobs
Use your break time to learn as much about your new organization as you can
Communicate healthy boundaries immediately, otherwise, you will pay a stiff price
Build on what works; don’t feel the need to change everything or most things
Prioritize external engagement, insist on it, and commit to external engagements so that your calendar time for this is protected
- On African models of leadership: they tend to focus on the collective nature of people: the person in the context of their community (see for instance the Ubuntu model)
Quotes:
- “Positive thinking is not about utopia: I call myself a realistic positive thinker. There are a lot of negative things in the world. It is about how we balance negative and positive things”
- “If you have a weak transitioning period, you set yourself up for failure”
- “As soon as you enter the door, you have to problem solve, there is no honeymoon for senior leaders”
Resources:
Positive minds, a pro bono consulting, coaching, and mentoring group (see also Coul’s blog on this site)
Coul’s blog post about leadership transition
YouTube video of this podcast&a