ANOKYE’S VIEWS ON LEADERSHIP

By Dr. Kofi Anokye Owusu Darko
ACIB , LLB, LLM , EMBA, ChPA, CMC, DipFM, CIPM, RODP, PEM.ADR

What is Leadership About? - Anokye’s View

There are many definitions of leadership, characteristics of leadership, who a leader is, the values of a leader and so on. From my discovery I will attempt to define and explain leadership in four different perspectives:

in one word;
two words;
three words and
then a sentence.

Leadership in one word: Influence

A leader’s role is to influence people. A leader is in the business of influence period. Once you can influence someone to perform a given task or goal, you have performed a leadership role. This is why leadership is not necessarily about having positional authority and being given the title “leader”.

I have discovered in my research that everyone can be a leader, hence the concept of situational leadership and that learning to be leader, is basically learning to influence. It implies that you can be given the position of CEO of a company but if you are unable to influence the people you work with or supposed to “lead” then you have no leadership skills

With this one definition of leadership we can have Church leadership, Political
leadership, Corporate leadership, Family leadership, Sports leadership and so on. So
for me, as long as a person is able to influence, he/she is playing a leadership role.
How the person executes this role is irrelevant for now since of course there can be
bad influence and good influence that distinguishes between bad and good
leadership.

Leadership in two words: Influence and Empowerment

The word “empowerment” has been introduced to depict the fact that a leader’s primary role is to make themselves redundant, “get out of the way”.
Leaders must make sure the system works without their physical presence
to the extent that the people can add value to the process without
guidance or micromanaging.
Empowerment takes many forms such as building trust, using appreciative
inquiry techniques, mentoring, creating a learning environment for
innovation and being creative in an Achievement and Support culture

Leadership in three words: Influence, Empowerment and Execution.

Adding the word “execution” is to acknowledge the fact that a certain vision has to be accomplished.

Strategy must be put into “action” by creating a results oriented and a performance based environment.

Moving people into execution is the ultimate goal of leadership and requires influencing and empowerment.

Leadership in a sentence: The ABILITY to Influence and Empower people to WILLINGLY Execute a given COMMON SHARED VISION.

The word “ has been introduced because it makes leadership learnable since the ability to do something can be learnt.
The word “Ability” is the reason we read that leadership can be learnt even though we have people who by their very nature influence people and we say they are Charismatic leaders, Natural leaders or Born Leaders. We can all learn to be leaders.
Even the Charismatic Leaders as we have known them to be will at a point have limitations and will have to learn to be a leaders. For me, there is a limit to which that charisma will take any born leader. That person will need a top up of his/her natural ability at a point when human complications set in.
You just have to learn it since new types of human beings are being born after you with weird mindsets and behaviours which God did not envisage to give you that natural skill to influence them when you were born. You need to learn to deal with these new crop of people like the Millennials.
Those in the ICT world, it is like upgrading to a new version of a software or doing a software patch because of a new virus or a bug in your software you did not envisage.
Finally, I would say “Great Technical Ability “does not necessarily or automatically
translate to “Great Leadership Ability”.

Leadership in a sentence: The ABILITY to Influence and Empower people to WILLINGLY Execute a given COMMON SHARED VISION.

Another word that I have introduced is “
People can be influenced through coercion, threat, reward, punishment and that is still
influence but I intend to distinguish in the definition what we also read as “Good
leadership Skills”.
Yes , I have used coercion to influence people to do what I want but the question is are
they happy to do what they are doing? Will they continue what they are doing without
the reward?
Reward is of course important but will they continue to do what they are doing without
the threat, money I am giving?
I have introduced “Common Shared in the sentence for a simple reason.
One critical job of a leader is to “show the which we term “vision” and then get the
people to own that vision, that is process of getting to the destination and then “get out
of the way” which is called delegation.
This requires that the person providing the leadership is able to get everyone to a
common “BEACH”, that is common Belief, Expectations, Assumptions, Concerns and Hope as described by Dr. Nancy Love in his book “Pulse Conversations for Change”.
This is where the term leadership skills comes into play. Everyone has their own individual
BEACHES which includes that of the person providing the leadership role and even the
organization has its own BEACH.
Now the task is how to harness all these BEACHES into a common BEACH that will
translate into a “Common Shared Vision” is what leadership is about.

CONCLUSION

The dynamism of human behavior makes leadership a learnt process
rather than an event . The leader keeps learning whilst
There is no one best way to leadership, since influencing people is
dynamic Everyone has what it takes to get them to act, and that is the
leader’s quandary
Your goal as a leader is to influence people to execute to the point of
you not having anything to do but dream of the future