The Standard
August begins.
Last month we explored — Heritage, Identity, Entrepreneurship. Each one asked the same question: what are you carrying that you have not yet counted?
This month, the question changes and focuses on — Leadership.
Not leadership as a title. Not leadership as the top of an organizational chart.
Leadership as a standard — the specific quality of presence that a person carries into a room, into a decision, into a crisis, that makes the people around them rise rather than retreat.
In 2008, I was appointed Supervisory Councilor for Primary Health Care at Odogbolu Local Government. I was the only woman on the Executive Council. I did not arrive with a manual for that.
I arrived with what I had been given: the instinct that service is not something you perform for recognition — it is something you practice, because the alternative is to leave something that matters in worse condition than you found it.
I did not know then that this was the Soludero standard working through me.
The title our great-great-grandfather Oba Odubefun Odusame chose for his reign — Soludero — does not describe a leadership style.
It describes a leadership outcome: the one who makes the town peaceful, without hardship. Not the one who commands the town into compliance.
The one whose presence creates the conditions for peace to become possible.
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There is a profound difference between a leader who is feared and a leader who is sought out.
The feared leader creates compliance. The sought-out leader creates trust. Compliance lasts as long as the authority holds.
Trust outlasts the person who built it.
Ogun State recognized what I did in Odogbolu with the Best Supervisory Councilor in Primary Healthcare award.
What they could not measure — what no award measures — is the standard I was holding myself to that had nothing to do with the award.
The standard that said: the women in those clinics, the children in those primary health centres, the communities in those wards — they are the metric.
Not the recognition.
That is the standard Soludero encodes. Not excellence for its own sake.
Excellence in service of the people the leader was uniquely positioned to serve.
This week’s question, Family:
Who in our Family — living or passed — held a standard so quietly and so consistently that the people around them never had to be told what it was — They simply knew it from watching?
I would love to hear who comes to mind.
Sincerely,
Oluneye
