I Was the Youngest Person in Every Room for Years

I was 24 when I was made team lead at the consulting firm in Nairobi, overseeing people who were between five and fifteen years older than me. The promotion came because I had been producing genuinely strong work and because my manager saw something in me that she wanted to back.

I was grateful and I was also, from the first week, quietly terrified in a way I would not let myself show. The terror was specific: I was afraid that any question I asked, any uncertainty I showed, any moment of not-knowing would be read by the team as confirmation of the thing some of them had almost certainly thought when the promotion was announced - that I was too young, that it was too soon, that they deserved it more.

So I compensated by performing a certainty I did not always have. I made decisions faster than I should have in order to project decisiveness. I avoided bringing problems to my own manager because doing so felt like admitting the role was too big for me.

I managed the team with a slight remove that I mistook for professionalism and that some of them experienced as inaccessibility. The performance was exhausting and it was also producing real errors - decisions made too quickly, issues identified too late because I had not created an environment where the team felt comfortable raising them, a loneliness in the role that made the whole thing harder than it needed to be.

The change came from an unexpected direction. One of my older team members, a woman named Grace who had been with the firm for eleven years, asked to speak with me privately after a meeting and told me, with the directness of someone who had decided honesty was worth the risk, that the team would follow me more willingly if I asked for their input more visibly.

Not because they doubted me but because they had experience I was not using and they needed to feel that their seniority counted for something even if the hierarchy had shifted. I took her advice more seriously than I took most feedback that year. I changed how I ran meetings.

I started asking questions out loud rather than only in private. I went to my manager with problems instead of only solutions. The role became substantially easier and better almost immediately.

At 30 I understand that the confidence required for leadership is not the absence of uncertainty - it is the willingness to be uncertain in front of people and keep going anyway.