Lead Last: Olaolu Ogunyemi on Servant Leadership, Fatherhood, Resilience, and Raising the Next Generation

Hello everyone and welcome back to Telling My Story, the podcast where we explore real stories, personal journeys, challenges, lessons, and the experiences that shape who we become. Today, we are talking about a subject that affects every part of our lives, leadership. But we are looking at leadership from a different perspective. Not leadership based on position, authority, or status, but leadership based on service, sacrifice, connection, and purpose. My guest today is Olaolu Ogunyemi, a U.S. Marine officer, award-winning author, leadership mentor, and the author of Lead Last. He is also the founder of Parents Child Connect, where he helps parents, educators, and mentors build stronger relationships with the next generation. Olaolu's story brings together military leadership, fatherhood, personal adversity, faith, and a deep commitment to helping people become better leaders at work and at home. Olaolu, welcome to Telling My Story. It's a pleasure to have you here with us today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to have this conversation and I'm honored that you reached out to me and that we can really connect and have this wonderful conversation on leadership. So I'm looking forward to it. All right, Olaolu,

let's start from the beginning. What experiences shaped the man and leader you are today?

Yes, so I would say really it started off with my family's foundation. As we were talking about in the pre-show, my father immigrated from Nigeria to the United States. And here he started a family and it's six of us, six children. And we all grew up in a very close knit family. We all knew that our goal was to look out for each other and try to help each other grow and develop and become the best versions of ourselves. And we challenged each other. We were very competitive. We wanted to make sure that we got the best out of each other. And that wasn't the most healthy way that we did growing up, of course, because it's four boys and we definitely clashed. But we tried our best to really look out for each other. And to this day, we still have very close relationships. And I believe that's important because what I realized is that, you know, what my foundation and my family that gave me, you know, from the values that they gave me all the way through just understanding what it means to look out for another human being that helped me in my leadership, both as a parent and as a Marine. And so the foundation was set a long time ago when I was a child and really in the community we grew up in, whether it be through sports or at church or otherwise, we really had a strong community of leaders that surrounded us and set the foundation for my entire life.

Wow. That's really very inciting. I believe family is everything and it's only family that cuts your back no matter what.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you have built much of your philosophy around the idea of lead last. What does that phrase really mean?

Yeah. So for lead last, there's three things I always talk about. I always talk about sequence. I talk about preparation and I talk about durability. So let's break that apart. So sequence, what that means is a lot of times when we come into leadership