Esi and Nana Kwabena sat next to each other in the same lecture hall at the University of Ghana, Legon. They studied the same textbooks, passed the same exams, and graduated in the same year. They even joined the same bank in Accra on the same Monday morning, both of them nervous in their new corporate clothes.
Ask anyone who worked with them in those early years who was the better banker, and you would get an honest shrug. They were equals. Same sharp mind, same long hours, same pride in getting things right.
Fifteen years later, Esi sits on the board of a respected financial institution. She gets invited to speak at industry events, and her opinions are quoted in business pages that Nana Kwabena reads over his morning tea. He is still a capable, well-liked senior officer in the same department where he started. He has never been demoted, never been disgraced. He has simply stayed where he was while the world moved past him.
Every one of us knows a pair like this. Some of us are one half of the pair. And the question that quietly eats at us is always the same: if the talent was equal, what was the difference?
The Explanation We Reach for First
When we watch two equally gifted people diverge, we usually grab one of three explanations.
Luck. She was in the right place at the right time.
Connections. He knew nobody, and she knew the right people.
Politics. She played the game better.
Each of these has a grain of truth, and each is a little too comfortable. Luck and politics are things that happen to us. If they explain everything, there is nothing we can do about it, and we get to keep our sense of fairness intact.
But the real reason is usually less dramatic and far more useful. It is about where two people, with the same hours in the same day, chose to put their effort.
The Hours Nobody Sees
Here is what Nana Kwabena’s days looked like. He arrived early, worked hard, delivered excellent results, and went home. Weekends were for family, church, and funerals, which in Ghana are not small commitments. His evenings were spent resting after a demanding day. By any reasonable standard, he was a diligent and responsible man.
Esi did all of that too. But somewhere in her second year, she began giving a small slice of her time, perhaps three or four hours a month, to something that paid nothing and had no obvious payoff. She joined a technical working group at her professional body. She attended the meetings. She did the reading. She helped draft a position paper that, in the end, only a few hundred people ever read.
Those few hours a month looked like a sacrifice. They were actually an investment, and like any investment, the return was invisible at first.
What Those Hours Quietly Built
Over the years, that small commitment produced three things that Nana Kwabena’s excellent work, on its own, never could.
People who knew her work. The working group included professionals from other banks, regulators, and consulting firms. They watched her think under real conditions. They saw how she handled disagreement and whether she delivered when she said she would.
A trail of visible contribution. Her name appeared on guidance documents, conference programmes, and eventually panel discussions. Strangers began to form an impression of her before ever meeting her.
A reputation that travelled ahead of her. When a board seat needed filling, nobody had to ask what she was like. Three different people already had an answer, and each of them had formed it independently.
None of this was luck. It was the slow compounding of a small, consistent choice.
Why Talent Alone Hits a Ceiling
There is a hard truth in this story, and it is worth saying plainly: talent is necessary, but talent is invisible to anyone who has not seen it in action.
Your manager knows you are good. Your immediate team knows. But the people who decide on promotions two levels above you, who choose board members, who recommend consultants, who nominate speakers, usually do not sit anywhere near your desk. They rely on what they have heard, read, and seen from a distance.
If nothing about you travels beyond your own office, your talent stays locked inside it. This is not a flaw in the system so much as a feature of how humans make decisions about people they do not know well. We trust what we have encountered, and we encounter people through the rooms they show up in.
This is the pattern behind most career divergence between equals. One person kept their talent inside their department. The other found ways to let it be seen.
Where the CILG Fits Into This
This is exactly the gap that a professional body like the Chartered Institute of Leadership and Governance is positioned to fill, if members use it the way it is meant to be used.
Many people join CILG, as they would any institute, for the credential. That is a perfectly good reason. But the credential is only the doorway. Inside the building are committees, working groups, mentoring programmes, leadership development pathways, and events where professionals from entirely different organisations meet and work together.
A member who pays dues and stays quiet is, in effect, holding a key and never opening the door. A member who volunteers for a working group, helps shape a governance framework, or mentors someone newly qualified is doing what Esi did: converting private talent into public trust.
You do not have to be senior to begin. You do not have to be brilliant. You have to be willing to show up, repeatedly, in a room where other professionals can see you work.
A Conversation Worth Having With Yourself
I will tell you something that may sting a little. Many of us do not avoid these opportunities because we are too busy. We avoid them because they feel awkward.
Putting your hand up for a committee when you are not sure you are qualified. Walking into a room where you know nobody. Writing something that colleagues might read and judge. Those moments are uncomfortable, and our schedules give us a perfectly respectable excuse: I am just too busy right now.
Sometimes that is true. Often it is a polite cover for a simpler fear. If you recognise yourself here, you are in very good company, and there is nothing shameful about it. But it helps to name it honestly, because the discomfort is rarely as large as it feels from the outside, and the cost of avoiding it compounds every year.
What Esi Would Tell You
Years later, a younger colleague asked Esi how she had got so far so quickly. She laughed and said she had not been faster than anyone. She had simply never turned down the small, unpaid invitations that nobody else seemed to want.
“People think a career is decided by big moments,” she said. “Mine was decided by a hundred small Tuesday evenings.”
Nana Kwabena, hearing this story secondhand, went quiet for a while. Then he asked a question that has been the start of many turnarounds: Is it too late?
It is not. The compounding works for anyone who starts, at any age. It simply works better the earlier the first deposit is made.
Your Move
If you are looking at a colleague who seems to be pulling ahead despite being no more talented than you, resist the urge to explain it away. Look instead at where they spend their discretionary hours. You will almost always find the answer there.
And then turn the same honest gaze on yourself. Not to criticise, but to choose.
Here is a simple question to take into your week: what is one small, unglamorous invitation you have been quietly turning down, and what might it be worth if you said yes?