It’s early Saturday and the weather is just pleasant. Out from the shopping plaza’s steps, he emerges with a T-shirt and earphones, firmly plugged in his ears. The smile on Adekunle Alonge’s lips when he recognises you is heart-warming. With one reflex action, he pulls the phones from his ears and extends a hand with the smile still intact. This warmth is also on display if you work into Willows Projects Limited, Abuja where he is the managing director and chief executive officer.
The fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Estate Surveyors is a busy man.? Phones are an important part of his schedule.? He spends a lot of time on the phone but rises early to his day.?? “I actually wake up very early in the morning – say 5a.m. or 5:30 a.m., “Alonge speaks, with a trademark coolness. “When I wake up, the first thing I do is to have my morning ‘ritual’ – prayer.”?
Two glasses of warm water after prayers is another ritual for the man of many hats.? The morning ‘rituals’ list seems to be unending if you add his everyday work-out in the gym and his cup of coffee.? All of these ensure that he doesn’t get to the office anytime before 10 a.m. But he keeps track of his outstanding work and e-mails in his ‘small’ office. “I have a small office in my house and it has been absolutely indispensable to me,” he says.
As an estate developer and project manager, Alonge basically handles projects and he has to shuttle between meetings.? “My daily routine is meeting people, site visits and mostly monitoring and co-ordinating. I coordinate consultants and manage contractors,” he reveals.? This coordination also extends to his basic office work: “I get regular reports from each unit, and that actually influences my relationship with them. The reports also spell out the requirements for me to stay in the office. We do have weekly meetings where everybody reports and we strategise for the week.”
Flexibility is something the youngest cardinal of the Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church enjoys with a certain relish. “You can imagine what my role is like and I have a family. I am blessed because my family is in England. So I have that flexibility, if not it could have been absolutely crazy,” Alonge opens up. That ease is what affords him the ‘luxury’ to be a season ticket holder of Manchester United football club, enjoy football, travel and read books.
He appreciates the fact that his team members are eager to learn and also work as a team. “When I say my team, I also refer to the consultants I work with because I have several teams, project by project, and then in the office. We are always improving, the ability to work as a team and [we] also work for each other,” he says with an air of fulfilment.
Alonge avows that Nigerians are extremely gifted: “The ones we see as failure here take them abroad and you see that they will do well…the education and environment matters.”
For Alonge, everybody is at fault for the many instances of building collapse in the country.?
?“I think everybody is at fault because if you look at the government angle, we have building codes and laws guiding building development. The government is also supposed to enforce them.
“Professionals too, have not been able to consistently articulate, and add their voice. You agitate consistently till you get what you want; that is our role. But we are not doing that.? We are to do that for the corporate interest of society.? We need to develop also and sort of update our skill in line with modern practice.”
Two types of CEOs exist in Alonge’s world: the entrepreneur and the formal. “The formal is the one who is appointed. All he has to do is to keep the sheep.? There are then those who possess entrepreneurial spirit,” he explains.
If you put this passionate entrepreneur in a room full of CEOs, he would not hesitate to speak to them on the significance or need for delegation.? “In a real sense, all we need to know is that delegation is absolutely necessary. There is no way you can do everything. You will end up overworking yourself; I have had to learn that,” he says.
? For him delegation improves quality. That quality, you will only discover if you put his advice to practice.?
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