Leadership is being the calmest person in the room

Ask marketers what leadership takes and they'll list vision, strategy, people skills. The trait that came up most often on the podcast was quieter than any of those: composure. And nobody put it better than Yudhvir Ranchod, Brand Director at Peach Payments.

"When stuff is exploding — internally, with exco, with your consultants — you are always the calmest person in the room. Inside you're dying, but on the outside: it's fine, how do we get through this, how do we work through this. Then you debrief afterwards."

He treats it as a professional skill, especially anywhere near PR. It isn't suppression. It's regulation, held in public and processed in private. For any marketer whose job includes crisis comms, it's the whole job.

The zoom-out

Yudhvir's second discipline is the ability to step back, trained in his case by studying politics. "Things move so fast in tech that if you're not looking three steps ahead, you get left behind." The calm and the zoom-out are linked, because you can only stay steady in the storm if part of your attention is already above it, watching where things are heading.

The ego check

Underneath both sits a story he carries from a former GM, who looked out over a floor of two hundred people and reminded himself that better athletes, better fathers, better writers sat right outside his glass office:

"To think that you are better than anyone, and that your ego is boosted by your position, is your fatal flaw."

The point isn't false modesty. It's that a leader relies on a team to make the business, and them, successful. Position is accountability rather than superiority.

Leading yourself first

The thread connecting the whole leadership conversation is that the hardest person to lead is you. Harsha Prag's first-90-days rule is not to spend six months proving yourself, but to spend them building clarity. Her definition of strategy is the cleanest we've heard: what we're saying yes to, and what we're saying no to. Melanie van Rooy's supports it. Get a coach or mentor who'll hold up the mirror ("leadership can be very lonely"), do the inner work on your blind spots before pressure finds them, and start leading through influence, listening and trust before the title arrives.

Because, as Melanie says, the world has enough bosses. A title makes you accountable, and character is what makes people want to follow you.

Try this week: write your yes/no strategy line, as "we're saying yes to ___, which means saying no to ___", and share it with your team. Then identify your mirror-holder: a coach, mentor or peer who'll challenge you rather than just encourage you. If you don't have one, that's this quarter's task.

Calm is easier when you have people to check your read against. On finding them: how to build a real marketing network in South Africa.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.