Allocate Self, Outpace People, Bank Growth

On August 26, 2026, I joined Pastor Sandie Thomas at the London Black Business Foundation’s Black Business Symposium. She spoke on leading self, leading people and leading growth. My job was to show how that leadership becomes a business result. Here are the three ideas I shared.

1. Allocate self

Most of us treat growth as an effort problem: work harder, take more courses, attend more events. At a senior level, that is not what changes outcomes. Treat your development the way an investor treats capital. You have a limited number of growth hours, so ask where the next hour produces an outsized return. Growth spread across ten generic skills makes you competent. Growth concentrated on the one thing nobody else in your room has makes you irreplaceable.

Your task: name the one skill or relationship that, if you doubled down on it for 90 days, would make you the obvious person to call.

2. Outpace people

Promotions and bigger contracts rarely go to the person who asked for the seat. They go to the person already operating from it. Start making the decisions above your title, in writing, before anyone asks. Sometimes you will be wrong. You will also be building a record of judgment that people learn to trust.

Your task: write down one decision above your current role that you already have enough information to make, and what you would decide.

3. Bank growth

Growth is not stored in certificates. It is stored in reputational capital: promises made and kept, compounding quietly until someone has to decide whether to trust you with something big. At FilAfrik, we have seen it with our sponsors. They do not renew because of a polished deck. They renew because every deliverable we promised showed up exactly where and when we said it would. That is not marketing. That is a ledger.

Your task: write down one promise you made in the last month and one word next to it: kept, or pending. If it is pending, that is your homework.