Thinking Leadership in Africa by Allan Bukusi - HTML preview

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CHAPTER 25

LEADERSHIP II

 

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We have wrestled with the concept of leadership for two days and have shown that leaders providing leadership can make huge personal contributions but are also subject to human limitations. We have also seen that organization structure is needed to create order but structure in itself can hinder the efficiency of leadership performance.

Systems, method and ideology are important aids to leadership but can cramp leadership style and do not always yield prescribed results. Every system is limited by its design paradigm. To exercise leadership without the full inclusion of all the people within an organization is a pursuit with diminishing and eventually destructive returns

LEADERSHIP

Leadership is a corporate responsibility and organization competence that must be deliberately harnessed to realize the full value of organization and create social benefit. Leadership also can be interpreted as the degree of corporate social responsibility exhibited by the people (in an organization). Managing both formal and informal order is critical to the sustenance, survival and success of an organization.

BALANCE

It seems that effective leadership must strive to achieve and maintain a harmonious and constructive balance of all the elements in the leadership matrix to realize corporate growth in an organization. It also seems that an organization can order its formal environment, but cannot afford to ignore the informal order that it attracts into existence in its environment.

LEADERSHIP IN SOCIETY

Society will periodically contract the services of leadership bodies or empower individuals, agencies or organizations to exercise leadership on their behalf. But all the gains made by leadership should accrue benefits to society. Society is just as able to disempower such agencies at will (even though the organizations may remain in existence for a long time afterward). Such agencies will no longer be referred to for leadership.

If leadership does not realize social value then it fails. If leadership accrues personal benefits without securing corporate returns then it has neglected office. Leadership is not an end in itself it is a means to social returns. Leadership is a birthing agency that influences the outcome of any individual effort, group action, social function or corporate endeavor.

HOPE

We hope you appreciate the depth and detail of the leadership task. We hope you appreciate the need for definitive development of leadership to ensure the strength, stability and survival  of an organization.  We  also hope that you   appreciate the determination and diligence required to make a success of leadership practice. Equipped with both knowledge and understanding we must enter the third day.