When I was recently asked to summarise the key factors of a successful operating investment in Africa, my response was:
- A well thought through business concept, which starts with viable market offtake and factors in political and environmental risk
- The right timeline and funding profile for this – everything takes longer than expected
- The right management and leadership team
It is the third element that I want to focus on. This is not just about efficiency ratios, where management is efficiency in climbing the ladder, but leadership is ensuring the ladder is leaning against the right wall. No management success can compensate for failure in leadership.
Every company in an isolated location in Africa, looking after a significant investment in a dynamic environment, needs to have leaders who can guide the company and its staff and interact with its investors – with the right purpose and the right principles. Efficient and technically competent management are then a subsidiary need.
Many investors are enthused to invest in Africa, and largely driven by the potential future size of this market, but also about the managers that they meet – these demonstrate many attractive attributes:
- Desire to learn and advance
- Energy
- Technical capacity
- Patience and acceptance
- Friendliness
- Drive for self-development
- Cultural Awareness
What is often overlooked are the shortcomings:
- Confidence in commercial matters
- Proactivity
- Taking responsibility
- Interacting synergistically with others – building wider relationships
- Telling it as it is
- Owning up to problems and offering solutions
- Cultural Hinges
This has been exacerbated by the number of talented individuals who look further afield to study and then stay abroad to gain experience, with very few returning to make a difference at home. Public service is not seen as a worthy route to take, leaving the terrain to those who see the public service as an easier way of life and opportunity. The end result – a dearth of strong and influential young management skills available for growing businesses and the reliance on expensive and sometimes inappropriate expat managers.
These skills therefore need to be developed with imagination in companies:
- You cannot be an effective manager if you are not an effective person
- Developments in many African countries distract staff and reduce effectiveness
- Real incomes are reducing with poor macro-economics
- Companies need to develop their people – improvement and retention
- Identify management gaps so companies live up to their own value statements
There was no obvious off-the-shelf course that can fill these gaps – it needs to be developed, and so I set about this task blending some of the best and clearest thinking with my own experience gained through both success and failure in a variety of African countries.
The course aims to address many of the shortcomings listed above.
The Personal Effectiveness course is a combination of face to face lectures to a group of like-minded learners + online content to ensure that there is a constant learning process + an exercise book to ensure theory is translated into practice + a blog section to allow all participants to share thoughts and experiences.
Recent Comments