Professor Randall S Peterson is Academic Director of the London Business School Leadership Institute and Chair of the Research Ethics Committee. One area of his research looks at how the personality of the chief executive shapes the way that leadership teams interact and perform. In 2021 he was looking to write a case study on leadership that didn’t “follow the traditional rules.” He’d previously written a case on Egypt’s Commercial International Bank, and a friend and colleague there knew of an “amazing person” that Randall should investigate as the subject of a new study. He was looking for a leader with an unusual leadership style. When he met Fatima Akilu, the first thing she told him was that leaders “don’t have to tick every box” to be effective.
“I was blown away by Fatima’s story,” he says. “She cited the animated movie Ratatouille which is about a rat with a tremendous gift for cooking but who has to hide himself inside a human chef’s hat! The point is that leadership talent can come in unusual packages and from all kinds of places. And we can be blind to this.
“Fatima’s story exemplifies the way that talent and tremendous influence can emerge where you might least expect it. There’s her work with villages that have been ransacked by Boko Haram. Even as these extremists were going about dismantling families and structures, they failed to take into account the role of local groundnut sellers: these omnipresent salesmen and women who love to connect and talk with others—which is why they are great at selling—and who continued to operate right under Boko Haram’s nose as connectors for medicine and other resources that villagers desperately needed. Here were unlikely community leaders at work, getting things done even in extreme circumstances.
“And Fatima’s personal story demonstrates the same principle. This is a quiet, Black women of Muslim origin who has been able to achieve extraordinary things in the UK and the US. She has founded a really important charity and a consultancy which works with a raft of organisations. Someone who doesn’t tick all the boxes herself is a game-changer, an entrepreneur and a majorly successful human being in a world that isn’t set up for her to succeed.
“When I teach the case of Fatima Akilu to Master in Management and MBA students one of the key questions I ask them is this: what does it take to be a leader? What is actually core in leadership? And we explore the idea that leadership can manifest in different ways; that it’s not always about making the big speech or holding the highest office. We look at the ways that effective leaders are able to motivate, connect and mobilise people around things that matter in different ways.
“To me, a key takeaway when you hear about Fatima Akilu’s work, is that different leaders lead differently. And that’s OK. We all of us want to simultaneously fit in and stand out. And that can be a challenge. I think that Fatima’s example shows the virtue in determination, patience and playing the long game—which are the things that work for her given her personality and style.
“This is a story of leadership that demonstrates the power of finding your own voice, and determining what works for you given who you are. It speaks to the importance of self-awareness and how to use that in order to make a difference. And after all, isn’t that what we’ve been talking about in leadership for the last 40 years?”
Fatima Akilu is the founder and Executive Director of the Neem Foundation, which works to de-radicalise and rehabilitate victims of extremism in Nigeria. Her leadership style, as discussed by Randall Peterson, Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Academic Director of the Leadership Institute at LBS in a teaching case study, has won her international admiration and plaudits, and is the subject of a documentary and a forthcoming book. Here she shares her leadership journey, in conversation with Professor Peterson – and offers three insights into things that she does differently as a “quiet leader.”
Fatima Akilu has spent a lifetime facilitating the voices of the unseen, the unheard, the marginalised and the overlooked. Her work has touched and positively transformed people’s lives across three continents.
As a graduate student of psychology in the UK, Akilu spent much of her time working with homeless youngsters and founded a centre for mothers and babies in the city of Reading. After moving to the US in the early 2000s, she worked at various psychiatric hospitals and care institutions, including the Broome Developmental Center in upstate New York, where she led efforts to transform long-held practices— “tiny, tiny, incremental changes” to align staff and alleviate stress and burnout, and which required the “patience of an elephant,” she says.
On the back of this experience and her work with violent sex offenders in US state facilities, Fatima was offered a job with the National Security Advisor’s Office in her native Nigeria. Here she found herself designing and rolling out an ambitious government programme: to tackle both the causes and effects of the Boko Haram insurgency that was gathering momentum in the northeastern state of Borno.
It was Fatima’s remit to help counter rising violent extremism, while managing the trauma of its victims – work that subsequently led to her founding the Neem Institute, a consultancy, and the Neem Foundation in 2016. The NGO that provides free treatment to victims of Boko Haram and leads efforts to improve mental health in Nigeria. Today Neem employs over 150 people and transforms the lives of thousands of people every year.
Full case study available at London Business School Case Collection
Image credit: Kagho Crowther Idhebor, Thomson Reuters Foundation
Transformative accomplishments
Under Fatima’s stewardship, Neem has delivered psychosocial support to more than 30,000 people and driven socioeconomic reintegration services to over 5,000 children to date. The Foundation has also established a school for girls victimised by the Boko Haram insurgency, and a radio advocacy programme that brings in experts to counter violent extremism and drive peacebuilding efforts in Nigeria. The programme reaches more than 30 million listeners across the country. Meanwhile, Fatima and her team have trained over 600 professionals – many in partnership with UNICEF – to serve in government bodies, NGOs and other organisations.
Fatima’s accomplishments are as wide-ranging as they are transformative to the lives of countless thousands of people who have been brutalised and marginalised. Over the course of her 20-year career in mental health, she has seen the very worst and the very best of humanity. And at times, she too has been victim of a kind of persecution and malfeasance that is all too human.
In 2015, just as the programme she was leading at Nigeria’s Security Advisor’s Office (NSA) was gathering speed, a national election saw her boss ousted and a replacement leadership team brought in; a new leader who promptly sacked the organisation’s entire management – including Fatima. Amid the chaos, accusations began to fly around the NSA, she says.
“When they sacked me, they were really awful; very, very contentious. They investigated me over and over again about an article that was written in The Daily Telegraph in the UK that said things that probably were not too complimentary about the Office. They thought that I had collaborated with the writers, when in fact the first thing I knew of the article was when another newspaper in Nigeria called me asking me for comments to rerun it in a Nigerian newspaper.”
Fatima was charged with fraud by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). And even when their investigations failed to find a shred of evidence to convict her, the harassment continued – at the behest of the new leaders of the NSA. Fatima’s sister had her bank account frozen as a function of government “harassment;” a campaign that went on for months, even leaving members of the EFCC itself confused about the motivation and validity of the ongoing investigation.
“They told me themselves: look, we don’t know what it is that’s going on with that Office, but we have not found anything. We don’t know why they keep trying to harass you.”
The origins of the foundation
Starting over, trying to decide which direction to pursue in the fallout of the EFCC investigation, Fatima came up against funding issues. As she and her sister began to sketch out the lines of a project that would become Neem Foundation, they found themselves blackballed by investors.
“At one point, a big backer called and said, ‘We can’t work with you anymore because we’ve been told that you’re politically compromised.’ That was a big blow for me personally. But I kept my head down – I was determined that I was going to make Neem work, regardless of the obstacles that they put in my way. And whenever I went to the northeast, I saw people in need and I just focused on them and what we could achieve. But, on the whole, that first year was very, very stressful because my reputation was on the line.”
It wasn’t until the then Head of UNICEF called Fatima personally to say that she didn’t care about the accusations and was going to fund her anyway that Neem truly got off the ground. “Because UNICEF was not afraid to fund us, other funders also came on board. That’s how we started in the very early days. But it was very tough for me.”
Leading from the middle
There is a quiet determination that runs across Fatima’s career trajectory and that undergirds her success as a leader. The quality that has steeled her for encounters and prolonged work with violent sex offenders and extremists has also empowered her to overcome the kinds of personal and professional obstacles that could very easily derail a career. Behind this determination, fuelling it continuously, is an imperative to serve other people, she says – a sense that her purpose on this planet is to make other people’s lives easier, not her own. Throughout times of despair, it is this feeling of service to others that has pulled her through.
“Service anchors me. Whether it’s in homeless shelters, battered women’s homes, juvenile halls or psychiatric hospitals. Because when you give yourself to the service of others, you have a grounding that circumstances can’t sway.”
Fatima describes her own leadership style as “leading from the middle.” Growing up as the middle child of seven in a large extended family with two siblings below her and four above, Fatima found herself “looking up and looking down,” as an observer, she says; a “shy and introverted” child with stillness and a quietness to “see a lot”.
“Mine is not a traditional leadership style, from the top. I think the changes we’ve made in Nigeria around the way we deal with former terrorists are as a result of the work we’ve done at the bottom. I’m down in the villages, talking to people, talking to women, bringing women and men together. I’m not up on a big platform, like the UN, doing this on a massive policy scale. I’m actually doing it from the ground.”
That being said, Fatima believes that there are many different styles of leadership. While all leaders can lead from the middle – and might benefit from doing so – getting things done depends on individual style and personality.
She did not set out to be a “leader” in the cliched sense. “I just see myself doing work that I like and trying to change lives if I can. I thought about the leader I look up to: Amina Mohammed, the number two at the UN. She’s super-strong, super-assertive. But I didn’t want to be like her. I’m not an assertive person. I’m not going to force myself to be assertive. I don’t have that abundance of confidence. I don’t have the charisma. I don’t have a lot of the things that a lot of great leaders have.
“And you know, when I thought about it, what is a leader? It’s somebody who tries to effect change. Do I need to have all those things to effect change? I don’t think I do.”
Fatima may not see herself as a typical leader but others are fascinated by her style and her approach, and the lessons she has to share. She has even been asked to write a book on leadership by King’s College London, which is due to be published in 2023.
Meanwhile, her story has become the focus of a series of leadership case studies authored by Professor Peterson. He and Akilu Fatima sat down together in 2022 to document her career, the challenges that she has overcome in creating the Neem Foundation, the extraordinary stories of survival and hope that characterise the work she spearheads, and the transformative impact that her organisation continues to have on human lives every day. Along the way, they have identified and articulated some of the approaches that Fatima systematically deploys in her leadership practice, that bring about extraordinary and sustainable change.
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Three leadership approaches to embrace as a quiet leader
Fatima’s is a leadership style that deviates from the traditional control and command, top-down approach. Among the many things that she does differently, and which are comprehensively documented in the case study, there is a conscious rejection of ego, a respect for expertise and knowledge – wherever that knowledge comes from – and a tenacity (she also calls this stubbornness) that sets the pace for real change.
Human beings are slow to change, says Fatima. And effecting the kind of positive transformation that she sets out to achieve takes extreme patiences, moving parts from behind the scenes and letting the results speak for themselves.
Here are three insights – three approaches to leadership – from a quiet leader who has profoundly and resolutely changed human lives around the world for the better.
1. Sit in the middle and be a bridge between all levels
“For most of my career, I haven’t been at the top. I also haven’t been at the bottom. And I’ve realised the strength and value of being in that position. I’ve worked with people who are at the top and can’t see the very bottom because they’re too far removed, and vice versa.
It’s vital that there is a connector. Sometimes people think that you need to be at the board level, because that’s where the big decisions are made. But do they have all the right information to make those big decisions? When I sit on boards now, I still try to connect. I still see myself in the middle, because I’m still trying to connect with the bottom, with the people who our decisions are going to impact.
As you get higher in your career, you become more siloed. It happens steadily. And so sometimes you make decisions, and people are not happy. And you can’t understand why they’re not happy. It’s because you haven’t asked them what they want and what actually works for them. Sometimes, what you think people need is not what they need.
A leader I heard about went to an African village to bring the community a way to access water. At that time, the children were walking miles and miles to fetch water. So, they built them these wells with pumps very near, so people didn’t have to leave the village to go to the stream to fetch water any more. When they came back two years later, nobody was using the wells. When [the leader] asked the community why, they started to laugh and they said, ‘Well, we live in one room huts as families. The only time when husbands and wives have privacy is in the morning when the kids go to the stream to fetch water!’”
2. Be willing to learn from anybody
“No leader will ever have a monopoly of knowledge. It’s impossible. You don’t know what the doorman in your building knows: he might have seen more than you. You come into the building in a rush and go up the elevator. He sees everybody, he understands everything and probably has more wisdom than you.
Yes, I have a PhD in psychology. But I go to the field. And the people that are doing amazing counselling that I’m learning from haven’t been to school, but they know how to talk to people from their heart. I don’t know how many thousands of pounds I spent learning to be a psychologist, but just by being out there and talking to people, you learn so much.
I grew up in a house where the beggar at the end of the road came to sit in our living room. And the next day, the prime minister would come in and sit in the same living room. When I started working in the NSA office, there were a lot of young people in their twenties. I knew that many joining Boko Haram and ISIS were young people and I knew that they could bring a lot to the table. And they did. They gave me a perspective and understanding that I couldn’t have gained on my own.
It helped me to design a rehabilitation and reintegration pathway. What do most young people want? Where do they feel they have a place in this world? What would they like in an ideal world? How can we mirror some of that? That insight is invaluable.”
3. Be patient and go at your own pace
“We live in a world where we want things to happen quickly and overnight. And we want everything now. I’ve found that if you are patient enough, things can happen in ways that you least expect. And you will have learned so much and become so much wiser along that journey, because it hasn’t happened so quickly. You’ll have been able to appreciate what the issues and the problems are, where the weaknesses are, where the strengths are.
Most of the things I’ve done have been incremental, in terms of the changes I’ve made. When we started Neem, I had all the experience and knowledge from the NSA office, but I started again, with a very small piece of research in the northeast. This is an area that I had been working on for a while through the NSA office, but because I was no longer in government, I didn’t have the resources to back me. I needed to understand it from a different point of view. I took the time to do that.
I don’t know if it’s tenacity that I was born with, but if I think I’m on the right path, I don’t allow anybody to distract me. I won’t go faster. I’ll go at my own pace.
I was trying to understand a multi-year conflict. If you don’t understand a conflict properly and you try to change things too fast, you’re just going to make a mess. I think that applies to any conflict: you really need to understand the dynamics. If I went in and designed this big programme and they spent millions on it and it was the wrong programme, we’re talking about human lives, not just money.
As I understood, as I studied it and went through it, I made mistakes along the way. But these are small mistakes that you make. Start small, learn from the mistakes and then scale up. I can only speak for myself. I’ve been in positions where I’ve been able to do that. Other leaders that you talk to will probably say that they didn’t have that opportunity to start small. Everybody has their own journey.”
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