According to J.C Maxwell, everything falls and rises on leadership. People in leadership positions must embrace the fact that for their organisations to grow and glow into the world, there is a need for mutually exclusive but conclusively exhaustive efforts in all departments that make up organisations.
While boundary spanning may be a necessity, departments must largely focus on their areas of behavioural, cognitive and managerial competences to realise the success goals of their organisations. Organisations mirror the tapestry of a basket, without which there would be no basket to talk about.
Organisations do not exist in a vacuum but in VUCA environments- it is the object of this opinion article to major on leadership in VUCA environment.
VUCA is an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. A VUCA environment therefore is an environment that is fluid, if not jelly. Leaders who operate in a VUCA world need therefore to adopt 4 x 4 mindsets that also go an extra mile where there is very little traffic jam. The business environment is complexified by continuous changes that impact the performance of these organisations.
These changes may be political, economic, technological, social, environmental, legal and global. For example, civil society organisations that largely depended on USAID funding have experienced professional earthquakes because oftrumponomics (fiscal and economic policies brought about by the reign of Trump). With the coming of Trump into the State House geoeconomics and geopolitics have taken another twist leading to the withdrawal of official development assistance (ODA).
Essentially, there has been a paradigm shift from the discourse of aid to that of trade. Lessons learnt for the leaders in the civil society organisations are that sources of funding in a VUCA environment need to be diversified.
In the light of a VUCA environment, leaders need to put a premium on co-creation, co-decision and co-production. A good leader is one who realises that he or she has no monopoly over knowledge and skills and should therefore create opportunities for his or her team members to create, innovate and manage change management systems.
Organisations need creativity, innovation and change management systems to survive in a VUCA environment. Arguably, leaders must facilitate creative blocks for their team members. The enhancement of creative blocks come with the leaders’ abilities to foster good management practices, organisational cultures and availing resources.
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Where leaders delegate, brainstorm, brain net, mind map and brain write with their team members and other stakeholders, they stand to gain diverse insights that can be used to stay ahead of their competitors in a VUCA environment. Creativity comes with no costs at all but is dependent upon an enabling environment that is associated with both tangible and intangible resources.
Wide scale research has established that informal environments do motivate people to think creatively as compared to structured environments like workplaces. With this foregoing understanding of intuitions of creativity, it is important that leaders take their team members out for team building and brain circulation exercises.
Taking your team to Victoria Falls or Inyanga, in the case of those leaders in Zimbabwe should not be associated with a cost but an investment. It is an investment in that it leads to brain exchanges between and among the team members that can be exploited to take the organisation to the next level.
An outing for team members aside, the formal workplace environment can also be used to stimulate creativity through teatime. Rather than serving tea in individual offices, leaders should create a common room where team members converge for tea. Leaders should also mix with team members during tea -break. It is during these informal times that insights are born and developed.
The creation of good management practices by leaders fosters a spirit of deploying and controlling resources in a manner that benefits the organisation. For example, good management practices are also about having square pegs for square holes, where an engineer is needed, let there be an engineer and where a monitoring and evaluation specialist is needed, let there be one, and not a procurement officer.
Good leaders deploy human personnel according to their skills-set, and not according to pork barrel politics. Leaders must accept that cross-functional collaboration is key, especially in a VUCA environment. For example, every organisation now whether itis about marketing or any other venture, must embrace the need for information communication technology specialists who can help the organisation to remain street smart and afloat.
Organisations that are led by leaders who are self, people, word and number smart will survive VUCA environments as they can combine the understanding that business is not only transactional with the knowledge that it is also relational, ethical and communal. To that effect, leaders in the twenty first century where technological changes, geoeconomics and geopolitics are always at play should essentialise the need for increased knowledge, skills, networks, reputation and resources for adaptability.
Aribino is a law student at the University of Zimbabwe. He writes in own capacity.
