Building world class businesses in Africa

By Kormi Nobert Goodsman

The average African youth has now realised that the only way to become the billionaire many of them dream of is to establish a business of their own. You can never become one by working for somebody else. Then, on your journey, you must follow best practices in yourpersonal, social and corporate life. To derive maximum benefit from these practices, you must first submit yourself to learning and improving on some important elements of life; one for instance, is leadership.

    Leadership is the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal. In fact, leadership is based on ideas, but won’t happen unless those ideas can be communicated to others in a way that engages them enough to act as the leader expects. In other words, the leader is the inspiration and director of the action.

    Leadership is not limited only to politics or our national institutions. Everyone in his or her own right is a leader. We all have businesses regardless of how small they are. In fact, if for nothing at all, we are all leaders of our own lives.

    However, on a continent with lots of developing countries with so many companies springing up, it is important to throw more light on corporate leadership skills as part of the transformation process to build the next generation of organisations that will be truly competitive in the global market. Apparently, most of our organisations can boast of excellent management but they lack leadership. An organization cannot become a global giant without excellent leadership skills. Most often, people take management and leadership for the same thing; but they are quite different.

TELLING LEADERSHIP FROM MANAGEMENT 

   Before the 1980s, most business schools across did not see the need for teaching leadership. The important thing then, was to teach strategic management, marketing and others. But as the world began to change; globalisation began to take off and the world started experiencing lots of change, a significant number of hitherto “big companies” have collapsed. Upon research to establish why very successful companies were collapsing, it was realised that, although the top executives were better managers, they were not very good leaders, because when the world changes, the relative importance of leadership and management also change.

    In order to navigate a company through change, the skill required is not management but leadership. So in the first 25 years of the post-second World War period where the world economy was very stable partly because we have come out of the war and everyone became sensible, security also became stable and that was an excellent time to run a business. All you needed to do was to ensure good management to make incremental improvement every year.

    Meanwhile, as the world changed from the 1980s, many big companies fell apart because most of the top people were very good managers but poor leaders. Leadership is about leading people and management is about managing structures and making sure they work. Leadership is also about navigating companies through change and getting people to buy in.

    Leadership and management are not strictly mutually exclusive but they are not the same either. In fact when you look at the background of the top CEOs that ever lived, they combined good management and leadership. They learnt a great deal to improve upon their leadership skills to be able to adapt to change. Human beings are fundamentally conservative, so if there is a need for change and they are comfortable in their old ways, it becomes very difficult to get them to change which could often be achieved by great leadership and not management.

 LEADERSHIP IN RECENT TIMES OF ECONOMIC CRISIS

    In fact, it is the lack of leadership that has led to the crisis in the first place, because leadership is about leading people on the journey of success to paradise. Those who have been in leadership in recent times are greedy and selfish. They are not leading people to success but rather to satisfy themselves. Therefore, what is needed is a skill that determines the right thing to do; a skill that will incorporate honesty and fairness; and a skill that will get the people to follow once the right path is laid.

    At the continental level, we have had good policies which were blown away at the implementation level because, those in charge have not been able to get the people to understand them, buy into them, link up and agree to deliver the results.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A SUCCESSION PLAN AS PART OF LEADERSHIP

    Over the period on the corporate scene, there have been lots of companies set up but many of them have collapsed. So the question is, what should we do so that once we set up these entities they will last beyond generations and grow large to compete in the global market? The answer is making a good succession plan. We have to train and prepare others who can take over from us.

    Most company owners fail to hire competent hands for the job due to lack of trust. That of course happen mostly among owners who are not highly educated. Therefore what is needed for them is education. 

     In fact, in other parts of the world, especially in the UK, the Department of Trade and Industry send people out to industries owned by individuals to educate them on the need to hire competent hands to run their companies for them. The officials explain to the company owners that their companies started small but have outgrown their knowledge and competence, therefore they must allow for a government intervention. In most cases, they agree to bring in the experts. Thus, business owners in Africa must be ready to learn new ideas that can keep their businesses in sail after they have died.

BOTTOM LINE

    Leadership can be taught and can be learnt too. It is taught all over the world, and what is mostly done is to research about great leaders and try to follow their steps.

    Essentially, leaders don’t dictate; leadership is about influencing people and getting them to see the point in every decision being made. Because if you can get people to see your viewpoint as a leader and they know it will benefit them too, they will cooperate fairly well. Meanwhile, if you give orders to your followers, they often don’t give off their best.

    So, to my fellow youths, our attention should not only be on the politicians, but also on how to conduct our little affairs. We should be able to combine both management and leadership in our various offices, shops and even in our homes.

    Those who are blessed to be in helm of affairs for larger business organizations should update themselves with skills of leadership so as to transform their companies both at home and in the world market.

Africa Global News Publication