I’ve always been a planner. My junior strategist recently pointed out that I plan my hairstyles for months, knowing which seasons call for a protective style and which seasons let my hair breathe.
Tafadzwa Penny, strategy director at Machine_, looks at the leadership story you will one day get to tell (Image supplied)
I’ve always been a dreamer too. Fun fact: growing up, I wanted to be a music producer and Timbaland’s protégé. I’m still trying to strategise that one.
And I’ve always been a problem solver. My parents never understood how the TV, decoder and amplifier connected, or how to fix a DStv error message. Hint: sometimes the solution really is switching the plug on and off.
Not the perfect map
Looking back, those three instincts — planning, dreaming and problem-solving — have shaped how I have moved through my career.
But they have not protected me from uncertainty. If anything, they have taught me that leadership is not about having the perfect map. It is about learning to keep walking when the map changes.
None of this means I always knew how to move through my career, let alone how to lead.
Because I learn by observing people, I watched how others navigated their paths.
Some taught me to be detailed. Some taught me patience. One taught me confidence and audacity. A few taught me self-awareness.
But what I had to learn for myself was how to do hard things.
What it takes to build, learn and lead
It is easy to dream of being a great leader and imagine the life that comes with it. It is much harder to face the journey that teaches you what it really takes to build, learn and lead.
From interning twice to now directing strategy at our agency, my career has been a series of hard things: simplifying complex information, collaborating with people who did not look or think like me, choosing confidence over comparison, facing my insecurities at every level, reminding myself that I belong, and speaking up instead of shrinking back.
Conquering hard things is not about copying someone else’s version of success.
It is about walking your own journey with self-awareness and a willingness to keep learning through your growth areas, at your pace. No one truly arrives.
There is always something to learn — in the workplace and within yourself.
You arrive as you are, and take it from there.
A becoming
Over time, those lessons have shaped my leadership style.
I try to lead with clarity, curiosity and care: clarity because people deserve to know what good looks like, curiosity because strategy is stronger when more than one perspective is in the room, and care because people do their best work when they feel seen and stretched, not simply managed.
I am still learning this every day, but I have come to believe that leadership is less about being the loudest voice in the room and more about creating the conditions for others to find theirs.
The milestones that matter most to me are not only titles or promotions, but the moments when I became more myself at work: the first time I realised my perspective had value, the first time I held my own in a difficult room, and the first time I helped someone else see their own potential more clearly.
Those moments remind me that a career is not just a ladder. It is a becoming.
An empowering realisation
So my advice is this:
Dr Maya Shankar writes in The Other Side of Change, “It is common to crave certainty when it comes to our future. But research shows we are bad affective forecasters; we don’t make good predictions about how we will feel about specific events that haven’t happened yet.
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In part, this is due to a bias known as the end-of-history illusion, which says that we greatly underestimate how much we’ll change in the future, even though we fully acknowledge that we’ve changed considerably in the past.”
That is an empowering realisation. It means we can take comfort in knowing that who we become through future experiences will be different from who we are right now.
Growth comes with time, and with each moment of our own journey. We can give ourselves the grace to get there, and the grace to go through it.
What we can do about it, as Maya says and I agree, is stay curious and hopeful.
Stay connected to other people and their stories.
I would add this: remain self-aware, because self-awareness is one of the strongest strategies for growth.
And lastly, keep trying. Keep facing the hard things. You do get better at doing hard things — and that is the leadership story you will one day get to tell too.
