Genre: (Non-Fiction, Leadership/Personal Development)
Bad leadership rarely announces itself.
It hides behind titles, authority, and tradition until trust erodes, morale declines, and results suffer.
In How Not to Lead, seasoned Human Resources and leadership practitioner Jacinta W. Lwanga offers a candid examination of the leadership behaviors that quietly damage organisations across industries and cultures.
Drawing on over 30 years of executive-level experience across corporate, banking, nonprofit, consultancy, and public institutions, she reveals the subtle patterns leaders repeat — often unknowingly — that undermine credibility, weaken teams, and stall performance.
This book explores:
• Jealousy that suppresses talent instead of developing it
• Gossip that poisons culture from the shadows
• Pretense that replaces authenticity with performance
• Avoidance that allows dysfunction to grow unchecked
• Power used to control rather than to serve
Each chapter exposes a leadership failure and then offers a corrective path rooted in clarity, integrity, accountability, and stewardship.
This is not theory.
It is practical reflection grounded in lived organisational realities.
Written for executives, managers, board members, HR professionals, entrepreneurs, and aspiring leaders worldwide,
How Not to Lead challenges you to examine your own leadership posture and choose impact over image.
Strong leadership is not accidental.
It is intentional.
Sometimes the most powerful way to grow as a leader begins with understanding what never to do.
About the Author
Jacinta Were Lwanga is a seasoned Human Resources consultant and leadership practitioner with over 30 years of experience across corporate, banking, NGO, consultancy, and parastatal institutions in East Africa.
She is the Founder and Director of SageApex Consultants Limited. A former Head of Human Resources at Consolidated Bank of Kenya and Group Human Resource Manager at CMC Holdings, she is respected for strengthening people practices and aligning HR strategy with organisational purpose and performance.
She holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Higher National Diploma in Human Resource Management, and is a member of the Institute of Human Resource Management. A Certified Executive Coach and Mediator, she draws on deep professional experience in How Not to Lead to confront harmful leadership practices.
Product details:
- Publisher: Ssali Publishing House
- Publication date: March 5, 2026
- Language: English
- Print length:161 pages
- ISBN-13 : 978-9914951677
1 review for How Not to Lead: Reflections on Leadership, Power and the Habits that undermine Trust
Doreen –
Jacinta W. Lwanga’s debut is less a leadership book than a workplace confessional dressed up in structure — and that’s mostly to its credit.
The book’s biggest strength is its refusal to be vague. Instead of the usual “great leaders inspire trust” platitudes, it names nineteen specific failure modes: incompetence, insecurity, favouritism, ego, pretense, and illustrates each one with a fully drawn scene rather than a generic anecdote. Daniel, promoted by default after eleven loyal years at “Northgate Solutions” because he was “safe,” not because he was capable, is a sharper indictment of promotion-by-tenure than most HR textbooks manage in a whole chapter. The Lydia sections on ego are even better. The detail of her assistant Victor never offering an inconvenient truth, and the book’s line that what resulted “was not unity, but artificial harmony,” is the kind of observation that lands because it’s so recognisable. If you’ve worked in any Kenyan (or frankly any) office of a certain size, you will see someone you know on these pages, possibly yourself.
The prose is disciplined in exactly the way the book club discussed: short sentences, no throat-clearing, and a genuine command of the corporate register, “credit is claimed quickly and publicly… responsibility is quietly redirected.” That’s earned language, not borrowed from a leadership seminar deck.
This isn’t a book you read for novel insight, none of its nineteen failure patterns will surprise anyone who has survived a bad manager. Its value is in precision and usability: it gives a name and a vocabulary to things people have felt but rarely said aloud, and it hands you an action plan on the way out the door instead of leaving you merely validated. As a craft object it’s a touch over-engineered by the second half; as a mirror for anyone currently working under, or worse, currently being, an incompetent, insecure, or ego-driven leader, it does exactly what it set out to do. I’d call it a strong, useful 3.5-out-of-5: not a literary read, but an honest and well-executed one for what it’s trying to be.