After Two Decades of Leading, What Was Left to Learn About Myself?

Dr. Ayman El-Tantawy

In the development sector, we measure everything. Programme impact. Beneficiary satisfaction. Team performance. Service quality. We build indicators, review reports, and keep asking the hard question: did we make a difference? Yet there is one measurement most of us quietly postpone, year after year: when did we last assess ourselves as leaders, with the same rigour we demand of our programmes?

A few weeks ago after more than twenty years of founding organizations, leading networks, and working from the villages of Upper Egypt to international platforms I sat down with the results of a professional leadership impact assessment. I will admit I approached it with some scepticism. What could an assessment tell me that two decades of experience had not?

The answer surprised me. It told me almost nothing entirely new. It did something more valuable: it gave me precise language for what I had been living without naming.

Long experience gives a leader strong instincts. You know you light up at a new idea and lose steam in front of detailed tracking sheets. You know you would rather gather partners around a table than reconcile budget lines. But instinct remains a collection of scattered impressions not a map you can work with.

What the assessment offered was a clear picture: very high energy for seeing what is possible and initiating transformational change; strong energy for placing ideas in a strategic frame; genuine energy for building consensus and mobilising others and low energy, yes, low, for routine execution and detailed day to day follow up.

I stopped at that last line for a long time. It was less a discovery than a written confession of something I had always known and worked around. How many operational tasks have piled up on my desk that should have been handed over weeks earlier? How many initiatives have I launched with a founder's enthusiasm, only to feel their weight once they became daily management?

A seasoned leader can do two dangerous things with a result like this: reject it to protect his self image, or use it to punish himself. Both are a waste.

The third path the one this experience taught me  is to treat your leadership profile the way you treat any field reality: with honesty and planning. My low energy for routine execution is not an invitation to "improve" at it. It is an invitation to build a structure that compensates for it: a strong operational deputy in every organization I lead; a named owner and a weekly rhythm for every initiative I launch; a clear answer, before any announcement, to the question who carries this after the applause?

Looking back, my best work happened when I followed this equation without fully realising it. The Wosool access project did not succeed because I managed its details. It succeeded because it was built on a network of organizations that carried implementation, while my role was vision, alignment, and opening doors. And as I reflect today on my responsibilities toward the CBR/CBID World Congress Cairo 2026, I see the same equation with sharper clarity: my natural place is the narrative, the vision, and the alignment between global and African networks and the event's strength will come from capable operational leadership standing on solid ground beside me.

Because our sector lives a quiet paradox. We require our programmes to measure, review, and learn and we exempt ourselves, as leaders, from the same discipline. We speak endlessly about building our teams' capacities, and forget that a leader's capacity to understand himself is the infrastructure beneath everything else.

And let me say this plainly to colleagues who have spent long years on this road: do not assume self-awareness tools were designed for young professionals at the start of their journey. The opposite is true. The longer your experience, the more valuable the mirror becomes because you carry enough decisions, crises, and turning points for every line of the assessment to find an echo in your memory. A young leader reads his results and imagines. A leader of twenty years reads them and remembers.

In our field we constantly invoke the principle "Nothing About Us Without Us" that those at the heart of an issue must be at the heart of its decisions. I have come to believe self awareness is that same principle applied inward: being genuinely present in understanding ourselves, rather than leading from an outdated self portrait we have not revisited in years.

Three decisions came out of this experience, and I share them in case they serve you.

First, I redrew the boundaries of my roles: what must stay in my hands because it needs my real energy vision, relationships, strategic positioning and what must move immediately to those whose energy is execution.

Second, I now give people more time to absorb big ideas. What looks to me as clear as daylight may need weeks to become conviction for my team and that is not a shortcoming in them; it is the nature of change itself.

Third, before launching anything new, I ask one decisive question: has the previous initiative been closed or handed to someone who will complete it? The enthusiasm of beginnings must never become an archive of open projects.

After all these years, I have learned that self knowledge is not a destination we reach, but a practice we keep exactly like measuring the impact of our programmes. A leader who knows where his energy flows gives his team a clear map, and gives his organization a sustainability that does not depend on his person.

So here is the question I leave with you, especially those who have carried leadership for many years: when did you last stand before a structured mirror that measures your leadership not your achievements? Perhaps the time has come.