Lead Yourself First: Dr. Michael Koku on Service & Integrity

Carter McKinney first met Dr. Michael Koku at a leadership conference in Bethlehem, where Koku was leading training and breakout sessions. On The Entrepreneurs’ Club Podcast, Koku introduced himself as a Maxwell Leadership speaker, coach, trainer, executive and independent director, and also as a trained physician.

He studied medicine at University College Hospital in Nigeria, practiced for three years, then moved to the United States with his wife, first to Raleigh, North Carolina, and then to Philadelphia. Today he pastors a church in Philadelphia, has written 12 books, and leads the LAMP Global community, a team of 25 leaders that has run more than 12 global leadership conferences. His view of all of it fits in one idea he shared early: life is most exciting when it is lived for others.

What medical school taught him about position

Koku’s interest in leadership started in medical school, where students were told they would be the head of the medical team. He saw how that assumed birthright bred resentment among nurses.

In his second year, a member of his church fellowship gave him two books by John Maxwell: Developing the Leader Within You and Developing the Leaders Around You. They introduced him to the five levels of leadership: position, permission, production, people development and, at the top, respect. By that measure, Koku says, he and even the professors he admired were level one leaders, followed only because they had to be. The second book taught him to grow others, which is when leadership enters what he calls the multiplication phase.

Leader, lead yourself

Koku joined the John Maxwell Team during COVID, after 11 years with the Salvation Army, when his hours were cut and he was later laid off. He used the time to run mastermind sessions for 12 groups over eight weeks, and says teaching what he was learning helped him grow fastest.

That environment also restarted his writing. He wrote his first book in medical school, after failing his first exam there, and then went close to 20 years without writing another. Between 2023 and 2025 he wrote 10 new books. The one he is most excited about is Leader, Lead Yourself, built on ten pillars of personal leadership whose first letters spell LEADERSHIP, from learning continuously and exercising self-discipline to inspiring yourself first and persevering through challenge.

To explain why self-leadership comes first, Koku told a story from the book. A mother walked a long way to ask Mahatma Gandhi to tell her son to stop eating sugar. Gandhi asked her to come back in two weeks. When she returned, he told the boy to stop, then explained that two weeks earlier he had still been eating sugar himself and had no moral authority to say it.

“It’s easy to tell people what to do. What is hard is to do it. Because the greatest gap in life is between what we know and what we do.”

The circle of success

McKinney asked what mistake high achievers make most when they step into leadership. Koku pointed to fear of failure. Borrowing from Maxwell, he described two loops. The circle of success has five steps: test, fail, learn, improve and re-enter. What he calls the cycle of doom has only three: test, fail, re-enter.

He shared a failure of his own. At one paid speaking engagement, he packed the schedule so tightly that attendees, who had just come off vacation, had little time with their teammates. The poor review taught him to build in more time for interaction. His advice is to stop asking what happens if you fail and start telling yourself that even if you fail, you will learn something.

“The real failure is when you don’t learn.”

Serve your way to the top

For Koku, service is the heart of leadership, and the measure of a leader is how many people they serve, not how many serve them. He learned it as a young house physician, when new doctors were reminded of their place in the pecking order. Instead of competing for position, he took on the patients nobody else wanted. While others were gone from the ward before noon, he stayed on his feet caring for two critical patients, one of whom had just had a transplant.

One of the ward’s consultants, a nephrologist Koku describes as very hard to please, told him he was operating at the level of a resident before he was one, and later offered him a job. That experience became what he calls the ARE A code: accept responsibility to serve, and you will be able to exercise authority.

The same standard shapes how he uses AI for writing and content. He treats it as a thinking partner for research, then corrects and deepens what it gives him. AI, he says, makes smart people smarter and lazy people lazier.

Integrity and remembering your why

Asked how a leader rebuilds confidence after a setback, Koku says confidence comes after action, not before it. He turned the question on McKinney, asking whether he had ever felt like quitting. McKinney said yes, all the time, and that his mission and love for serving people kept him going. That was Koku’s point. “We don’t burn out because of what we do. We get burned out because we forget why,” he said. His own why is the name of his company, HOPE: helping other people excel.

He also urges listeners to find a mentor. For his book The Mentorship Advantage, he surveyed seventy leaders around the world on why people avoid mentorship. A mentor, he says, turns what would take many years into a few.

His final word was integrity. He described a friend who overpaid him on a business deal, a mistake the friend could never have caught, and how he gave the money back. Success, he says, is when the people closest to you respect you the most. For him that is his wife, who has watched him change over the six years since he began this work.

“Integrity is when how you live is in line with what you say. That means your life is the same in public and in private.”