Name: Saheed Olayinka Shittu

Title: Manager Security and Safety Intelligence

Organisation: ThriveAgric Limited

Architect, writer, agricultural technology risk management, security and safety intelligence manager.

Information and communication technology trends enthusiast with love for Chess and Scrabble.

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Saheed's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

Transitioning and dealing with the human factors

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

I became a leader in a number of ways majorly by

1. Social interaction and projections where I got noticed and appointed or accepted as a leader.

2. By growing through the ranks at the work place or groups.

3. By superior knowledge of issues and topics or getting noticed for my talents and accomplishments.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

My typical work day may start far earlier than the normal but usually includes long breaks.

1. Take early hours, from 12:00am to 3:00am to do tasks that I can do all alone like responding to mails, updating live-sheets, filling forms, spreadsheets, tables etc. Fixing errors.

2. Studying briefly especially online.

3. Taking my bath around 4:00am

4. Saying my prayers.

5. Going back to bed for a few more hours

6. 8:00am commuting to work on days where I must or resuming to my work desk on days I am working remotely.

7. 9:00am resuming work and interacting with colleagues, taking up or assigning tasks for the day.

8. 12:00pm attending meetings

9. 3:00pm to 5:00pm. Rounding up tasks, taking reports and closing out the day.

10. 5:00pm Commuting to my residence.

11. 6:00pm - 9:00pm Attending to family and domestic issues.

12. 9:00pm. Going to bed

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

The impostor syndrome and the need to recognize it hence to know what I am capable of doing can be limitless.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

Rich dad, poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki.

It is easily my choice because I read it early as a young person and read it more times than other books.

I choose it because it taught me about self discipline, training, development and thinking which when properly applied will list my self and my followers.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Read wide, observe, keep learning and be humble then be an opportunity hawk

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

On an occasion, as a senior Supervisor, I led my team to give a huge loan to a promising client looking forward to some great profit, unfortunately the client had intent to default and diverted the funds for some other purposes, some of my almost 50 staff also compromised in their dealings with the client over a period of six months.

I took the blame for the failure and luckily got sanctions from the company, another department was charged with the recovery, I used my experience to pursue the cause of my failure and similar failures across the operations and triggered processes that uncovered spreading corruption leading to the sanitation of the operations, staff and company. I remain proud of the courage to quietly work to save the company as well as the livelihood of staff and other stakeholders.