adminHannan Chitate Business Correspondent
Without foresight businesses fail or fade off the landscape and drag good people under. Men at the helm are escaping cataclysmic failures with impunity, gifts, and are often elevated in their next project or job appointments elsewhere.
The majority of workers pay dearly for others’ mistakes and conceit. Meanwhile shareholders are asking; how far should we be chauffeured by the drunk while we fret, shiver and look aside and yet remain seated passengers to our doom?
Frighteningly we begin the year with more fears of mounting economic pressures worsened by company closures and deteriorating business. Central to solving this dilemma are leaders expected to possess transformational skills and without satisfactory leadership foresight within company managers inherent limitations hindering business survival, prosperity and dominance will triumph.
Madness is commonly defined as doing the same wrong thing over and over and expecting a changed outcome. Unfortunately many of our managers are in this disconcerting category. Incredibly easy on the other side, sanity is when managers choose to use available resources and enhance leadership practices particularly those related to creating organisational vision.
By mapping a desired outcome businesses will give themselves an opportunity to stretch their resources further, define their unique core business, understanding their customers and basic reasons why they still are relevant in the market place.
Therefore, transformational foresight is the proverbial torch that should be raised high to reveal traps, thorns and the deceitfulness of current trends.
Not only is Zimbabwe immersed in an ever changing business environment, but universally pressure to change comes from how interconnected the world has become.
Understanding the position of a business and how all other parts link to areas of resources allocation, use and specific outcomes is important. It is in this holistic understanding that important parts like profits or output are not definitive goals. Ideally leaders will also consider other spheres of success including organisation learning, employee happiness and societal acceptance or preservation of the environment relative to monetary gains (Kaplan, 1996).
Therefore, managers are a basic business resource. Leadership is the ideal next level when managers distinguish their roles and match the business climate demands of the twenty first century. Inevitably, foresight becomes a fundamental principle in preservation of shareholders value.
Noticing subtle changes to status-quo or market position deterioration, industry trends, competition, technology relevance among many are chores that distinguish leaders from managers. Furthermore, leaders notice that the current competition analysis is a snapshot that looses meaning when entire scenarios rapidly change as in commerce today.
Ordinary Zimbabweans will agree that businesses in demise or folded have unsavoury obituaries. Revelations of facts, in hindsight, leave many distraught and up in arms with the supposed leadership.
These facts reduce once clever man to impossibly stupid and incompetent, liars who bungled willy-nilly with people’s livelihood. Why did these apparently witty managers overlook such open solutions?
In the hit of the moment or in battle, were they such committed they lost objectivity, common sense or a systems view? Needless to say, managers can learn and become better predictors of business outcomes; if they currently are worthy business pathologists.
Business foresight and deliberate navigation are tools to avert business shipwrecks and in my generation I have seen enough.
Given this, transformational leadership first postulated by (Downtown, 1973) and later developed by (Burns, 1978) becomes a valid proposition to attempt to link the roles of leadership and followership.
Transformational leaders’ goal is to transform people and organizations in a literal sense – to engage them in mind and heart; enlarge vision, insight and understanding; clarify purposes; make behaviour congruent with beliefs, principles or values and bring about changes that are permanent, self perpetuating and momentum building (Bass & Avalio, 1994). Transformational leadership goes beyond exchange relations and is comprised of four dimensions of idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration.
Leaders should always consider followers needs and ensure that they are consistent in their conduct.
This would promote their being respected, admired and trusted by their followers. In our organisations are the leaders respected, trusted or even admired? If not then there is need for change of strategy on the leaders’ side.
Leaders are expected to further possess the ability to inspire followers by personal motivation not through coercion. Leaders by simply providing a vision and a sense of vision, followers would want to identify with them thus enhance business performance.
Leaders should provide meaning and challenge and initiative and persistence. In instances where this is coupled with the quality of being sociable evidenced by promotion of participation and co-operativeness, stupendous results will undeniably be achieved.
Thus, if this inspirational aspect is not synonymous with our organisations then let 2014 be the year of focusing on transformational leadership aspects in order to enhance shareholder return through motivation.
Leaders with congruent visions with their employers communicate high expectations to followers, inspiring them to be motivated to become committed and bring enhanced performance results.
Thus existence of a shared vision in organisations is of paramount importance and this rests with astute leaders.
Leaders in an effort to promote performance they should stimulate followers’ efforts to be creative and innovative whilst at the same time promoting motivation with morality.
Thus it remains critical that employees including the leadership should challenge organisational beliefs and values and even their own.
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