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What does it mean to reinvent the wheel within leadership context? It simply means to critically examine your leadership holistically and make it more effective and goal-driven. It also entails examining your ideas as a leader, your trajectory in the past, where they have gotten you so far and how you can improve on what has worked for you before now and also look for alternative means to make certain things that have not worked to work in your leadership. Now, there is a portion of the Bible that I believe is going to help us to understand what it means to reinvent the wheel of your leadership. It is found in Genesis 6:5-8. The Bible says:
Listen to Podcast: How to Reinvent the Wheel of Your Leadership
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth…” We should never forget that man was a creation of God, man was God’s idea from the beginning. In Genesis 5:1-2, the Bible says: “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. 2 He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.” So, from here, we can deduce that God is the creator of man. Man didn’t exist anywhere until God created him. And so, we can rightly conclude that man is a follower of God or God is the leader of man because when you create a thing, you automatically become the leader of your creation. But going forward from Genesis 6 from verse 5-8, the Bible says:
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man [He has created] was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart…” Notice that the Bible says God was grieved in His heart that He had made man on the earth but didn’t say God remained grieved forever and perpetually, not knowing what to do. One of the hallmarks of effective leadership is that a leader must always know what to do per time, whether the situation is palatable or not. This is why you are the leader and the responsibility of leadership was given to you and not someone else.
So, what exactly did God do in this situation? God needed to reinvent the wheel. You see, to reinvent the wheel sometimes could also come in the form of working again on something that has already been worked upon before so that it can be improved upon and become better. Reinventing the wheel does not necessarily mean you have to start to create new things afresh. See what the Bible says God did from verse 7: “So the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.” God destroyed man from the face of the earth and then began afresh again with one of them who found grace in His sight, Noah and his family. In other words, we can say that God reinvented the wheel.
Now, how do you apply this principle to your own leadership? How do you reinvent the wheel of your own leadership? You need to go back to the drawing board and check again the original intent of your leadership. What exactly is your leadership meant to create? What problem is your leadership meant to solve? How is your leadership supposed to help your organization going into the future? A critical and honest answer to these questions would help you to be able to reinvent the wheel of your leadership. When man was not doing the bidding of God on the earth as He had thought, He had to step into the situation and do something. God didn’t allow man to continue in that state of wickedness. He destroyed them and started all over again.
There are times as a leader that you might need to drop your old ideas and ways of thinking and embrace new ones. There are times you might need to drop your old trajectory and embrace a new one. When brand new cars are produced and released into the market, and there are one or two complaints about the car’s functionality by the end-users, what the manufacturers simply do is to recall those cars. They simply take them off the road so that they don’t do anything untoward to the consumers. You cannot continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. If you take your pen and throw it up a million times, it would always come down, except you do something deliberately that would make it hang in the air and not come down.
To reinvent the wheel of your leadership, there is need for you to go back to the drawing table and trace exactly where the problem is coming from. It is only by doing this that you can become the effective leader that God has made you to be. I believe you have learnt something in this episode of Leaderview.
Thank you for the gift of your time, my name remains Abiola Obayomi. Please don’t forget to share this podcast with people within your sphere of leadership so that they can also get to learn a few things from it. Till next time on Leaderview, remain committed to your leadership assignment. God bless you.
[Centre for New Dimension Leadership]
