By Oluwole Dada
In the last two weeks, we have been reviewing the leadership principles of Jesus. The purpose is to unravel what makes one of the greatest leaders that ever lived a force to reckon with even years after he has departed the surface of the earth. We have reviewed five principles vis-à-vis: Having a purpose and not just a plan, investing in people, staying the course even when it costs everything, leading by serving and not being afraid of having difficult conversations. The conversation continues this week.
Jesus Understood the Power of Storytelling
Jesus never gave a PowerPoint presentation. What He gave the world instead were stories. He shared parables so precise in their construction, so layered in their meaning, so rooted in the everyday life of His audience, that they have been repeated, debated, and applied for over two thousand years. The list of parables includes but not limited to: The Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, etc. Each story is a leadership lecture in disguise. The stories were about restoration, about inclusion, about inner readiness and sustained capacity.
The greatest leaders I have observed in boardrooms, in government, in religious homes are almost always exceptional storytellers. This is not because stories are decoration, but because stories are how human beings process, retain, and are moved to act on information. Data informs but story transforms. Data will tell your people what is happening. Stories will tell them who they are in the middle of it. The brain was designed by God to capture and retain stories. Research from Uri Hasson at Princeton indicates that storytelling is the only human activity capable of synchronizing the minds of the speaker and the listener. Every other form of communication creates distance.
This is why you remember the parable your grandmother told you thirty years ago and cannot recall a single slide from the last strategy presentation you sat through. A leader must learn to tell stories. It keeps the mind of your team members glued to the vision. You cannot achieve that with a variance report. When Indra Nooyi was Chief Executive of PepsiCo, she was famous for her ability to translate complex strategic shifts into narratives that her people could carry with them. Her “Performance with Purpose” framework was not a set of metrics. It was a story about who PepsiCo was and who it intended to become. It unified a global organization across languages, cultures, and time zones because it gave people something to belong to. Find your story. Tell it with conviction. Tell it consistently. A team that knows its story knows where it is going.
Jesus Prepared His People to Function Without Him
This may be perhaps the most overlooked leadership principle in the entire ministry of Jesus. He was always preparing to leave. From early in His ministry, He was developing His team to carry the work forward without His physical presence. He delegated. He sent them out in pairs with authority, with instruction, and with the understanding that they would encounter resistance and would need to navigate it themselves. He did not do the work for them. He equipped them to do it. When He finally departed, He left them not just with the assignment, but with the tools, the community, and the promise of the Helper who would sustain them.
The ultimate measure of a leader is what does your team look like when you are no longer with them. Too many managers are secretly addicted to being needed. They deliberately avoid handing over information because information is power. They make themselves the bottleneck because the bottleneck cannot be made redundant. They build teams that are dependent rather than teams that are capable. When they eventually leave either by choice, retirement, or circumstance, the whole structure collapses, because they never built it to stand on its own. Jack Welch, for all his complexity as a leader, understood this principle profoundly.
He spent his final years at GE obsessing over succession: identifying, developing, and preparing the next generation of leadership with the same intensity he had brought to P&L management. He said his most important job was not running the company. It was building the people who would run it after him. Your greatest contribution as a leader is not what you build. It is what you build into the people who will carry it forward. At every level in the organization, the question is the same: Am I building people who are becoming more capable, more autonomous, and more ready to carry this assignment forward even when I am not there?
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
