Rising from the Ashes: Reflections on Resilient Leadership

Grit & Growth

Meet Kwami Williams, co-founder and CEO of MoringaConnect, and Brian Lowery, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, to learn how one Ghanaian entrepreneur overcame fires, floods, theft, and COVID to build a more resilient and successful company.

Kwami’s path to co-founding a social agriculture venture in Ghana based on the native Moringa tree was anything but straightforward. As a Ghanaian-American MIT graduate in aerospace engineering, his first love was flight. But on a trip back to Ghana, after 10 years in the U.S., he decided to focus his life on improving the lives of the people in his home country and continent.

Five years into running the business, they were helping smallholder farmers plant Moringa trees and then adding value to the raw materials with a flagship consumer brand. Everything started to unravel in 2019, starting with a wildfire that burned over 15,000 trees, then a factory fire, floods, and a robbery. 2020 only added fuel to the fire with COVID.

Kwami knew he needed help to tackle these back-to-back crises, and chose honesty over pride.

“If I could give one piece of advice to an early-stage entrepreneur, I would tell them to build an amazing team of people who they could go to war with because the hard days, the bad days, the battles will come.”

“I just acknowledged the fact that I have no idea how to bounce back from this. So I just committed to vulnerability from the get-go. And I committed to communicating as much as possible from the get-go.”

Brian Lowery agrees that vulnerability is vital to both personal and professional growth. As a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he is an expert on the psychology of leadership and training future leaders like Kwami. According to Brian:

“The leader is not the person with the answers. The leader is the person who brings people together to help figure out what the best answers are around a range of issues.”

Kwami and his team found ways to overcome adversity by taking one slow, intentional step at a time and asking themselves:

“Why is this happening? What can we learn from it? Let's also pause and ask ourselves. Okay. What can we start? What can we stop and what should continue? And once those ideas materialize, we just say, what is the smallest version of that we can commit to and be consistent with?”

And, despite facing a 90% reduction in revenue, the team stayed true to their mission of giving back to the community with give-back campaigns supporting COVID health workers and racial justice organizations. Today, the True Moringa brand has taken off and is poised to raise its first equity round in the second half of 2021. And most importantly to Kwami, they’ve planted over 2 million trees and are serving over 5,000 women and family farmers across Ghana.

Listen to Kwami’s inspiring story and Brian’s insights to learn how to build resiliency in yourself and your company so you can handle whatever life throws at you.

Resources:

• Know What You See with Brian Lowery Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Know What You See with Brian Lowery Podcast on Spotify
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

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