Initially, Dr. Niyi Adesanya got what he believed to be a divine calling to be a pastor, a fisher of men for Christ. He plunged himself headling into spiritual ministration. But, with time, it turned out that was not what God wanted for him. The real divine design, as advised by his mentor, Sam Adeyemi, was for him to be a teacher that would groom managers and leaders – to do for Nigeria what John Maxwell is doing in America – by branding himself for the corporate world.
“I bless God that I listened to him because that advice smoothened my transition”, Adesanya said.
Since then, there has been no looking back. Today, Adesanya is a consultant, strategist, founder of The Speaker Business Academy, Marketplace Academy and Chief Executive Officer, FifthGear Plus Consulting. He easily stands out as one of Nigeria’s leading pragmatic and inspirational speakers, a leading voice on leadership transformation and youth empowerment.
For more than fifteen years, he devoted himself to researching and studying leadership and how to apply it in the entrepreneurial space. He launched his flagship programme – the Niyi Adesanya Leadership Bootcamp in 2018 – an annual workshop that provides managers, supervisors, team leaders, C-suite executives, directors and entrepreneurs with hands on tools to enable them best manage systems, processes and people effectively, inspire qqteams, guide change initiatives, navigate the complexities and politics in managing internal and external stakeholders.
Adesanya shares widely his knowledge of improving corporate and individual performances. “I have a formula that has helped to improve performance as an individual: it is very simple and applicable. I call it the individual competitiveness formula and it is thus, what you know + how you express it multiplied by who you know and who knows you”, he said.
His yardstick for measuring the success of a leader is how many of his followers he is able to turn to leaders. Turning followers to leaders, he believes, is what leadership development is all about. He identifies culture as one big barrier to personal and organizational – even national – performance improvements.
For him, the task of leadership development is to get the individual or the organization to change the culture – the way they think and how they do things.
Over the years, he has provided training, consulting and business re-engineering services to top ranking organizations across Nigeria. His clients include at least one of top three organizations in major sectors of the economy. He is a major contributor to effective corporate governance in Nigeria in many companies where he serves on the board. Adesanya is a faculty member of various institutions in Nigeria, including Daystar Leadership Academy and the C.I.T.C. Leadership Centre.
He developed and executed a competitiveness upgrade concept that helped a telecoms company strengthen its connection to its target customers leading to a massive sustainable boost in their income within a 5-year period.
Adesanya’s professional experience has seen the transformation of individuals and multinational organizations with results of increased effectiveness and productivity to show for it. “Having trained over 35,000 people on leadership, my concepts have widely been adopted and endorsed as relevant, practical and result-oriented”, he said.
With an average of over 100 presentations annually to local and international audiences, Adesanya has been recognized as one of Nigeria’s foremost inspirational speakers and a leading voice on leadership transformation in the country. He has an enviable record of speaking in over 80 tertiary institutions and delivering keynote speeches to top officials of corporate institutions across sectors and industries. Over top 50 companies in Nigeria recognize Niyi Adesanya as one of the leading speakers in the country.
Part of his engagements is the training of senior lawyers across the country on public speaking and presentation. He has been a Brand Ambassador with Etisalat (9mobile) during which he toured over 80 higher institutions across 30 states of Nigeria, speaking to an average of 2,000 youths per occasion.
He is the convener of the acclaimed interactive platform “Meeting Point”, which linked up luminaries in various industries and visionaries aspiring to make their marks in chosen fields. The platform helped to place the youth on the right trajectory in career and development.
A number of top leaders of Corporate Nigeria who participated in Adesanya’s programmes have testified to their effectiveness. Prof. Pat Utomi, founder, Centre for Value in Leadership, for instance, had this to say about one of them. “Niyi Adesanya shows again with this effort that case studies abound in our context from which philosophies of leadership and necessary wisdom for guiding our world to greater progress can be synthesized. This labour of love has earned its influence on us.
Chinwe Iwe, System Architect, CISCO, said: “His mentorship and magnanimous extension of some of his speaking platforms afforded me the opportunity to stretch and hone my communication and public speaking skills”
It is in recognition of his leading role in redefining leadership training in Nigeria that Niyi Adesanya is hereby honoured with the award of Leadership Coach of the Year by the Top10 magazine.
