• It’s critical for businesses, small or big, to choose leaders who are optimistic, energetic, level–headed, and people–oriented
• How you handle your staff determines how your business performs;
When one starts a business, he or she anticipates two outcomes: success or failure. According to Bloomberg business, eight out of 10 businesses fail within the first two years.
Success or failure depends on various factor—people, process, systems, market, policies, practices and execution.
The process of failure starts early and often goes undetected till that moment when departments start to underperform; prompting firefighting, which often leads to austerity measures to stop the haemorrhage of funds. This also triggers a review of the structure and strategies.
Frequently, failure results in a lot of blame game. Employees are blamed for their lack of commitment or inability to manage their expectation. It is a pity that this drives the business invariably into downstream. It helps if the management can realise from the outset that people are a critical factor.
How you handle people who work for you affects how your business performs. Blame game is a tactic that people choose to protect their interests and cover their ineptitude and discrepancies. However, this approach pollutes the environment and dilutes the brand equity, if any.
Blame game is common in a highly politicised environment. People who gravitate towards blame game are cynical and negative-minded. They should be identified and isolated. The cause of their cynicism is incompetence or the inferiority complex.
Organisations that fail to realise this and clean up would, in the long run, experience a slow death. Hence, it becomes critical for businesses, be it small or big, to choose leaders who are optimistic, energetic, level headed, and people-oriented.
This calls for change management; a discipline that guides us on how to equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change that is suitable for the company. It is an all-inclusive approach to touch base on culture, people, style and processes.
This calls for an aptitude to learn and adopt positive thinking and encourage team work. These are much-needed virtues. The prime task for a business leader is to ensure alignment of people and their aspirations to the corporate goal.
Besides the systems and processes that are transparent, every business aspiring for success and sustainability must have a clear vision and action plan for tapping the full potential of the employees and show a clear growth path.
Identity creation with any brand or business will be possible only by appropriate communication and offering the best value proposition to the stakeholders.
There are well-known businesses across the world wherein people are proud to be working for or associated with, even as an outside stakeholder. Those businesses stand out in terms of their culture and value addition to the environment they operate in.
Apart from the healthy financial status, every business must realise its social obligations and manage them both internally and externally.
People make or break brands. People become brands of their own by dedicating themselves to build businesses. It is a choice they make but empowerment is the key factor.
It is not possible to live one’s dream if you are not empowered. So, leaders must empower their subjects. They must keep the promises they make for them to be considered credible and command authority.
Not all businesses have this luxury package of empowering leaders to drive their mission. In some cases, some are scared to hand the baton, whereas some play hide and seek, while others it is not an option to pursue.
This unwillingness to empower perhaps explains why very few people succeed in institutionalising their business. Those who succeed stand a chance of withstanding economic turbulence and challenges and sustained to grow from strength to strength.
The evidence of success through transformation is no brainer, even in Africa, we have testimonies.
Look at the big brands and business houses across Africa; increasingly, both local and regional brands are exploiting the full potential of the emerging status of Africa. Goes to show that if the organisational culture is people-centric they claim profitable growth and hefty enterprise value.
For businesses to make an impact in the economy they should look at social obligations, brand equity, sustainability and making sense to their customers both inside and outside the business.
A culture nurtured with a human touch across the business is the magic to managing any situation in the passage of growth. It is thus imperative that businesses must put their houses in order and project the culture through everyone associated with them, which meets the social accountability requirements, covered by SA8000.
Many companies secure certification of various kinds and some win prestigious awards but to live by those standards calls for building of performance culture and engaging people in constructive and creative activities.
That is how to build a successful enterprise of the future.
Business leader and CEO, Bidco Africa Ltd