What can Obama teach you about leadership?

Former U.S President Barack Obama will be speaking in Singapore about his time in office and his views on leadership.
By: | October 15, 2019

He was the most powerful person on the planet for eight years and the head of the world’s biggest economy, so you could argue Barack Obama knows a thing or two about leadership.

And with only four former U.S Presidents still alive, he’s part of a very exclusive club. Both Barack and his wife will Michelle will be speaking at different events in the Lion City in December.

So what exactly can he teach us about leadership? Obama was always keen to break the image of a leader as someone at the top who simply ordered people about. During his two terms in office, he learned that leadership involved teaching people who thought they didn’t have a voice to speak up about the things impacting their lives.

He also said it was liberating to fail publicly, even if it meant some people would think he was an idiot. Writing for The Guardian in 2017, he wrote: ‘’Once you’ve been president of the United States, then a) you’ve made a mistake every day; b) everybody has seen you fail, and large portions of the country think you’re an idiot – but it’s a liberating feeling when you realise, “OK, I’m still here, I still wake up every day, and I still have the opportunity to do some good.”