Out of 25,000 applicants, only 30 earned a place. That single figure tells you how rare the room was when Yetunde B. Oni, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Union Bank of Nigeria, recently sat down with a cohort of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy.
The Academy, a Lagos State Government initiative established in honour of Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande, the state’s first civilian governor, exists to raise a generation of ethical and capable young leaders. Its fellows are drawn from across professions, sectors and ethnicities, and shaped through a fellowship facilitated by the Africa Leadership Initiative, West Africa (ALI WA), whose work on values and principled leadership has become a quiet engine behind some of the country’s most thoughtful emerging talent.
It was into this gathering that Mrs Oni brought not a corporate address, but a conversation. Honest, personal and at times disarming, she spoke about the philosophies that have carried her through a career spanning more than three decades, the setbacks she has had to surmount, and the values that opened doors she never expected to walk through.
She gave them a framework to hold on to. She called it THRIVE.
The six principles
T — Take ownership of your relationships. Leadership, she argued, begins with the deliberate stewardship of the people around you. Relationships are not incidental to a career. They are infrastructure.
H — Honour God. She spoke openly about faith as a steadying force, an anchor that keeps ambition tethered to something larger than the self.
R — Recharge and refresh. Mental and physical health, she insisted, are not luxuries to be deferred until the work is done. Leaders who neglect their own wellbeing eventually have less to give.
I — Invest in your growth. Continuous and heavy investment in personal development is, in her telling, the price of staying relevant. The learning never ends.
V — Value your work. She pressed the fellows on identity and brand. What do you stand for? Do you create value? Who, in truth, are you? The questions were not rhetorical.
E — Embrace setbacks. Failure, she said, is not the opposite of progress but a part of it. The leaders who endure are the ones who learn to metabolise disappointment rather than be defeated by it.
The people behind the leader
If one theme threaded the entire conversation, it was relationships. Mrs Oni was candid that she did not arrive at the top of Nigerian banking alone. She credited the steady support of family, her parents and her husband, alongside the mentors, friends, coaches and sponsors who shaped her at different stages.
She drew a sharp and useful distinction between a mentor and a coach, two roles often conflated and rarely understood, and she traced much of her progress back to a foundation of Nigerian cultural values: hard work, honesty and integrity, courtesy and respect. These, she told the fellows, are not relics. They are the very qualities that have earned her trust and opened doors throughout her journey.
“You need people,” was the message, delivered without sentiment. Relationships, she explained, must be managed and nurtured with the same seriousness one brings to any other discipline. Time must be managed with equal care.
On believing, and risking
Perhaps the most resonant moment came when Mrs Oni spoke about self-belief. She admitted that becoming the MD/CEO of Standard Chartered Bank, Sierra Leone, did not cross her mind – not because she was unqualified, but because she didn’t think she would get it. Encouraged by her husband, she applied anyway, and she got it!
That appointment would later see her make history as the first woman to lead a Standard Chartered Bank operation in her market.
The Union Bank of Nigeria appointment told a similar story. She had not even known the position existed after the CBN’s intervention. It came to her through relationships; through the quiet networks of people who knew her work and recommended her name while she was unaware in faraway Sierra Leone.
The lesson she left with the fellows was unambiguous. Believe in yourself. Take the risk. Put in for the thing you are not yet certain you deserve, because the opportunity you are waiting for may be one you cannot see, reaching you through someone you have not yet met.
Why this matters
Engagements of this kind are easy to underestimate. They produce no headlines about balance sheets and no immediate line on a financial statement. Yet they speak to something Union Bank has long understood: that institutions endure when they invest in people, and that leadership is built one honest conversation at a time.
Credit is due to the Africa Leadership Initiative, West Africa, whose facilitation of the Lateef Jakande Leadership Academy continues to shape young Nigerians of real promise, and to the Academy itself for the rigour of a process that turned 25,000 hopefuls into 30 fellows ready to lead.
For Yetunde B. Oni, the afternoon was less about what she had achieved than about what she was willing to give: her time, her story and her counsel, offered freely to those coming after her. It is, in the end, what the best leaders do. They light the path for the next generation, and they THRIVE.
