LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
By harnessing leadership talent in a structured manner leadership in Africa can become a powerful development agent within organization frameworks. But this calls on organization frameworks to provide for two important features within their organization structure expression and participation. In this manner leadership will be able to identify, harness and develop group potential for organization good. The absence of expression and participation dulls and stifles the contributions of leadership and heaps undue pressure on the leader to carry the burden of leadership. The net effect is that leadership becomes lazy and irresponsible by leaving the business of leadership to one person the leader.
Leaders on the other hand tend to become unresponsive or despotic when expected to carry the burden of leadership alone. Leadership in Africa should take note it is possible to create own problems in organization by discarding the contribution of leadership in the organization. Leadership becomes mischievous when not held accountable.
EDUCATION
Surely Africa has invested in the development of leadership, take Education for example! The answer to that is yes! Education generally produces people with knowledge and skill. Leadership requires people able apply knowledge with skill. Leadership does require basic education (to empower leadership communication) and education has placed many in Africa on equal footing with the rest of the globe but leadership is more about initiative, enterprise and industry. Africa has plenty of engineers produced over the last 50 years who know about cars. And there are plenty of cars in Africa. But Africa is yet to produce its first car!
Leadership is not even about expertise its about invention and innovation. Leadership is integrating what you know with what needs to be done. Leadership is to create social advantage. Education alone as an avenue for leadership development is insufficient. Education has not realized many of the expectations pegged to it. A worrisome trend is the migration of (educated) leadership capital in Africa.
EMPOWERMENT
Should we develop leadership by empowerment? Shall we give the people resources, power and authority to facilitate development? The resources reserves and riches of the people and pasture are some of the most enviable on earth! But No! Leadership development is firmly not about experimenting with power and privilege. Leadership development must be deliberate detailed and designed to produce a designated result – sound leadership. Leadership is about developing responsibility, competence, integrity and wisdom and applying these within the context of ones social responsibility. It is about measured empowerment coupled with training and trust. Leadership and responsibility can be taught from a very early age.
EXPERIENCE
Surely we have experience in Africa. Does that not say something for leadership development? Yes leadership in Africa has in fact had a great deal of exposure. Experience is more than going through some specified exposure. It means learning from exposure and modifying future behavior against exposure. It is participating in a process and developing competencies. It is observing mistakes and avoiding them in future. Experience must add value and be seen to be creating improvement. It is deriving lessons from your successes and failure and applying them in future situations.
Some of the mistakes leadership has made have been replicated and repeated in multiple environments with agonizing predictability. Previous learning has not placed much value in the hands of society. Experience is of no value to leadership unless leadership can condense wisdom from it for the future and apply it in the context of social responsibility.
TALENT
Doesn’t Africa have any leadership talent available? We have our share of unmistakable brilliance in Africa but to wait for occasional brilliance to turn up and sustain national development would be presumptuous. We need a continuum of supply of good leadership. If we class leadership as a talent or a gift then we have the responsibility (like any other gift) to develop it. Raw talent is brash, immature and in experienced.
THINKING
We must start with thinking leadership. We need to promote creative, deductive, analytical and constructive thinking to design and produce social value. We must also encourage initiative to improve living environments. Nobody holds the copyrights to the thought process. It is freely given. These leadership competencies must be cultivated and developed early in line with social responsibility.
TECHNIQUE -TRAINING
How much does leadership technique contribute to successful organization leadership? Much as technique cannot make up for talent, technique can and does ensure consistency in the quality of service delivery. As a development strategy technique equips leadership with efficient tools to exercise effective leadership. Technique is important because it raises the average competence level of leadership within an organization. Organizations that do not invest in equipping staff with leadership technique experience vast internal differentials in terms of individual productivity leading to sub optimal organization performance. There will be a clear mismatch between organization potential and actual performance.
TRAINEES
One of the most popular mechanisms for developing leadership has been to select a chosen few and set them up for leadership development as “management trainees”. This group is recruited and trained to think differently. They are placed on fast track experiences to think for (like) the organization. This may produce good results, but it also speaks of wider neglect of the corporate responsibility for leadership development in the organization while creating and sustaining the view that leadership is for the chosen few.
ROTATION
In recruiting for leadership development organizations could create development paths or staff rotation programs that allow staff to be developed and evaluated in various leadership environments. This will ensure depth of dynamic leadership resources within institutions. Banks have some advanced structures that meet and sustain service continuity which also provide for a framework for leadership development. The culture in such organizations fosters leadership growth and a high performance tradition.
DELEGATION
Leadership can be competently developed through structured and graduated delegation of assignment tasks with judicious monitoring of the use of power and authority to develop leadership ability.
PROMOTION
One of the most popular methods of developing organization leadership is to start off at the lowest rank and keep promoting the officer as they master the requirements of each new job. Whereas this may be a powerful bureaucratic strategy of development, the process emphasizes “grasp” rather than development. It is a default exposure where the person being developed is constantly on trial rather than developing competence leadership at some future date. Participants tend to focus on the process rather than the subject and become leadership in waiting rather than leadership in practice.
SUMMARY
There is perhaps no ideal method of leadership development (and there are numerous others not mentioned here). The challenge is to design a development program that produces leadership that will support organization growth. The program will need to incorporate the development of trust, responsibility, competence and wisdom. The program will need to be sufficiently dynamic as to be practical in work environments.