Invictus is one of the most profound movies on leadership. I’d watched it before purely for entertainment, but watching it this time with leadership lenses on is a completely different and transformative. There a few reflective key lessons I draw out of this great picture.<\/p>\n
The movie Invictus takes us to a time when the tension in the nation of South Africa from a recent transition from centuries of foreign rule and decades of the Apartheid. A new government of the preciously oppressed signaled to the native South Africans a time for change. Their new leader however carried a deep sense of humanity. He understood that for their nation to progress, they had to painfully bury the past. This seemed ironic given that he suffered more at the hand of the apartheid injustice. When he became president however, he led the nation not with a vengeful hand but with compassion, empathy and deep consideration.<\/p>\n
Conviction. It is an uphill climb believing in triumph when faced with a daunting challenge to realize a particular goal when faced with indomitable challenges. It take a deeply rooted conviction by the leader that it can be done. Followers always feed off of the leader\u2019s conviction. That is what the story of Nelson Mandela in the movie portrays. In the face of clear facts on the ground, he believed that the SpringBoks would win the world cup and he rubbed this strong belief onto not only Francois Pienaar<\/strong> but the entire team and eventually nation and it tilted the tide of victory towards south Africa.<\/p>\n As an effective leader, Nelson Mandela carried such a distinctive assortment of Character, competencies and commitment. He espoused each of these by the virtues and values he carried, his understanding of people and intelligently knowing how to lead a cynical and patronizing white minority, and a disenfranchised and vengeance driven black majority. His leadership of both was driven by a personal commitment of a deep \u00a0aspiration to see a free and just South Africa. This drove him to lead with integrity and sound judgement of various matter.<\/p>\n I\u2019m intrigued by another leadership lesson Invictus teaches me and that is courage. The SpringBoks were under immense pressure to perform, many were afraid of the impending loss against the New Zealand All Blacks. The odds were stacked against them because all stats seemed to spell failure for them. However the courage their leader and captain Francois Pienaar<\/strong> embodied, which courage he picked off of president Mandela just permeated every player and shot them to victory in the 1995 rugby world cup. Francois\u2019s <\/strong>courage was further entrenched by the courageous Invictus poem that the president gave him. Francios picked up Courage from different experiences the president organized for him to go through. The training in townships, the national anthem in native Zulu language, the visit to Robben Island where Mandela had been incarcerated for close to 3 decades and the immense trust 43 million South Africans had placed in the\u00a0SpringBoks, all infused courage in them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"