Leadership foresight imperative for success

Hannan Chitate Business Reporter
Managers become leaders when their foresight not only produces comprehensible strategies beyond next year, but offer room for emergent scenarios. Faced with persistent change, managers are required to develop high stewardship agility. This ability to plan ahead and view the business landscape in 3D (dimensions) is important.
Hamel and Prahalad (2005) identified dynamic strategy formulation and business development as fundamental for good leaders.

Interestingly, critical analyses and responses to changes separate leaders from managers particularly on how to adjust, evolve, or ultimately revolutionise a business under pressure.

Such awareness of transient internal and external scenarios, coupled with the ability to pro-actively formulate communicable blue prints produces market leaders or pace setters rather than gullible industry followers.

In setting trends businesses will have a chance to innovate, dominate and enjoy the learning curve advantages longer than competitors.

However, it is noted that foresight is often a product of other activities including honesty, pragmatism and incessant knowledge search synonymous with good leadership.
Lest we forget that workers come to work with various and often ‘unspoken’ expectations.

Whilst managers control resources and their use for specific outcomes, workers control their personal application in the midst of all business resources to possibly match their worth in promised rewards or perceived opportunity cost of work. Informed managers will endeavour to decipher and influence employee expectations and in perpetuity realign them with business strategies.

Most important, all economic activities world over are subjected to volatility, scarcity and varying forms of competition.

Navigation through these hazards should be the call for a leadership aware of its role and capacity, employees, industry and a host of other stakeholders’ interests.

Employees are no longer passive and submissive at work. Failure to recognise employees’ contribution to foresight is a self inflicted shot to the foot for organisations.

Supported by research, employees will contribute to strategy formulation when their perception of work, managers/leaders and the organisation are positive.

However, managers and subsequently leaders will shape the work environment and significantly influence work output.

Aware managers only become leaders when they positively influence employees’ psychological contracts. Therefore, it is not far fetched to demand leaders that accommodate discourse, scrutiny and constructive criticism. Foresight is shaped by input from informed team players with shared passion for business success.

On the other hand, managers’ function in presiding over economic rent distribution has blinded them from the fiduciary duty to oversee growth of shareholders’ wealth.

Instead managers are failing to expedite foresight such as in promoting long term business direction; rather they in excess concentrate on present personal gratification (PPG) and profiteering.

In our humble Zimbabwe lessons should be drawn from such classic failures of global proportion of Enron (2001) or WorldCom (2002) in the USA.

In hindsight governments and regulating bodies are lamenting lack of executive incentives checks, accountability, strategy scrutiny and leadership, legislation and other moral values’ deterioration inclusive of perverse greed, arrogance and an entitlement mentality.

In agreement with general audit principles; an isolated manager, however intelligent is an economic risk if allowed to decide future trajectories, road maps, strategy selection and resources use outside of a sole-trade operation.

Considering the above statement, it implies that aware organisations and managers will harness people’s contributions, respect of diverse opinion and buy-in to achieve sustained competitive advantage.

Authority and power as often conferred by hierarchy, position or business politics should not arbitrarily form silos and take precedence over inclusion.

Leaders should exploit total organisational intellect, literally demonstrated by strength in numbers analogy hardly imitated by competition (Drucker et al, 1997).

Businesses do not operate in a vacuum and as such foresight should be a delicate distillation of organisational members’ vision.

By involving all employees from the recruitment stage, managers would have recognised deficiencies in individualism, importance of tested minds and diverse opinion, pluralism and other inclusion values.

It is therefore appropriate at this stage to announce the imperative of an engaging work climate that harvest the extra energy and application which employees can provide without coaxing.

Discarding employees’ input is the undoing of irrational managers. It begs the question why they hired the best employees in the first place. Or did they?

Employees where recognised become good corporate citizens, are committed and will provide extra energy to their roles beyond formal contracts (employee engagement).

As demanded by strategy change and foresight, included employees will likely adapt and accept change enthusiastically than non engaged employees (Saks, 2006).

Contemporary practitioners are candidly chided to consistently communicate with employees and establish common understanding.

Inevitably, such formal and informal search of ideas ceases to be a patronising or token exhibition of solidarity, but a genuine activity contributing to shared foresight.

Foresight is not privileged to specific or special people. With enough transparent search and use of information, involvement, and perseverance managers can evolve and become leaders.

Given the current economic activities and national drive to indigenisation; Zimbabwe will benefit immensely. Start-ups, small-medium enterprises (SMEs) and young partnerships will irrevocably require foresight and strategy formulation to claim a stake in any market.

Significantly, the nation needs business leadership based on strong ethics, justice and awareness of our current frailties, deficiencies and recent history.

Arguably, strategic intent is a product of meticulous foresight. Ambitious businesses in dire situations apparent to our nation should leverage limited resources and target niches and eventually main stream markets overlooked by established players (Hamel & Prahalad 2005).

However, our culture as depicted by popular and social media point to the cancerous finger pointing rather than solution generation.

Lack of rigorous analysis of business viability and vision is far outweighed by interest in post-mortems and hindsight charades at every street corner.

Immeasurable failures are only found after years of decay yet we had time at every moment to query the viability of that success or suspicion. Foresight in essence questions the state of affairs today in consideration for tomorrow.

Meanwhile let’s all think deep, far and wide and consider the validity of our current focus, strategies, vision, work, markets and stakeholder interests relative to the rest of the commercial world.