Leadership choices for 2024

Greetings to Nigerians and congratulations for this new pivotal year (2024) when our businesses will bounce back and deliver better outcomes in spite of the present turbulent economic environment.

Let us give kudos to the leadership of various enterprises. We survived! However, the challenges brought out the ingenuity in us. We made choices in the face of shrinking SOPs (size of packets). We reworked perspectives and also shuffled norms. Innovation became our organisational strategy and with painstaking efforts as well as hard work, we made very significant progress in value delivery.

The fundamental challenge for this new year is that we must deliver more value to our organisations and improve outcomes to our esteemed customers. We must positively impact standard of living. This is the year when business leaders will achieve greater influence in the scheme of things in Nigeria because it will be clearly seen that we are on the driver’s seat of efforts to revamp the economy.

Leaders more than ever before, must ignite in the workforce energy and passion to serve and faithfully contribute. This year, with a strategic intent, leaders must align HR priorities with business strategies. The human capital must be enhanced to achieve greater-than-ever employee engagement.

Trust must be engendered in teams to remove costly complications and achieve collaboration as well as creativity. I recommend the five basic drivers of comradery in the workplace. It is the SCARF model. This acronym stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. STATUS is how employees feel in relation to their colleagues. When an employee feels lesser, it affects his ability to trust others. This inadvertently, affects value delivery. Team Leaders must ensure that every employee feels valued.

CERTAINTY drives away the “unknown” feeling. When things are certain, employees relax and do their work. Human nature detests the unknown. Uncertainty scares employees, unsettles them and makes them vulnerable. Leaders must therefore communicate often to checkmate negative scenarios. Valuable information deliver certainty and this, definitely builds trust.

AUTONOMY is achieved when the employee is allowed to contribute to next steps. He is imbued with confidence and feels valued.

RELATEDNESS is the ability of human beings to connect with themselves. It is in their nature and the surest conduit to thinking, creativity and collaboration. When an employee feels he is not accepted, his threat response is activated and valuable talents locked in. Instead of being authentic in his decisions and actions, he becomes a shadow of himself. Leaders must create a sense of belonging to genuinely engender trust.

FAIRNESS is a fundamental need the human brain craves for. Employees want their leaders to be equitable. Trust is compromised when employees perceive that leaders are unfair.

Another key uptake that will make organisations thrive this year is the wellbeing of employees and customers. Experts have said organisations can deliver high performance when employees are happy and they work optimally. It is called the neuroscience of leadership. Leaders must ensure employees enjoy working with each other, working with their leaders and acting out their responsibilities diligently as proud associates. The workplace must be healthy; so healthy that employees can resolve conflicts amicably and give feedbacks without qualms or fear. The workplace must function at maximum capacity (MC) with mutual accountability (MA).

Gareth Morgan in her book: “Images of organisations” used some descriptive metaphors which she called “lenses”, to draw the much-needed attention to dynamics inside organisations. She used the “machine” metaphor to lampoon hierarchy lines and highhandedness to achieve discipline, control and execution. She warned that human beings can never function creatively as machines. According to Gareth: “human nature thrives on informal networks, creativity and innovation”. What we need as leaders to achieve organizational strategic goals are openness, collaboration and creativity. These ingredients for high performance are “naturally deployed by human capacities”.

There are two essentials of creative leadership that I want to draw your attention to. They are the SBI model (Situation Behaviour and Impact Model and John Maxwell’s popular formula on relationship). The SBI model emphasizes high premium on employee wellbeing to achieve optimum deliverables in the workplace. John Maxwell’s formula states that that Rules and Regulations without Relationship will only deliver Rebellion and Rejection (R+R minus R= R+R).

Another strategic choice is the Selling Continuum Analytics. We must sell intelligently using analytics combined with creativity. There must be deep sensibility to customers. We must sense, feel and fully understand what customers want and match products or services (solutions) to customer options. Inflows by way of revenue is the measurement for sales success.

People buy for physical, logical and emotional benefits. marketing dynamics must therefore tailor customer conversations or value stories to feelings and Interests. Hard selling will not work but customer-determined brand content. Leaders must effectively utilize sales’ leads, word-of-mouth and the word-of-mouth loop. Marketing team members must become reliable advocates of customer needs. We must grow the list of loyal customers to prevent churn.

There are also smart developments in the areas of operations and efficient delivery of goods and services that we must adopt. Operations must be so exceptional that they become key essentials of organisations’ competitive advantage. We must achieve close collaborative relationship with partners for efficient flow of goods and services. Valuable and timely information must run consistently through the value chain. To reduce costs of deploying resources because of the heterogeneity of external markets, leaders should align people with the needs of the market place. We must efficiently deploy integrated network capabilities and operations capability to achieve the right quality, efficient and timely delivery as well as dependability.

A choice that organizations cannot ignore is enabling innovation as an organisational strategy. Please, note that inside the commitment to existing markets and processes, lies potential failure. Current markets can be destabilized. Leaders must therefore constantly think about alternatives. We must continue to engage in enlarging and creating new markets as if we are starting new businesses. Let us keep tweaking the capability of our organisations’ tools, structures and resources with innovation, in order to achieve more.

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