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In tough times like the world is experiencing today characterized by a pandemic, experts are calling on managers of companies and other entities to undertake well planned business models but also support the people they work with to achieve success.
| THE INDEPENDENT | This is one idea to kept coming through during the 26th annual seminar organized by the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Uganda (ICPA-U) from Dec.08-11 held both virtually and physically in Kampala.
Prof. Wasswa Balunywa, the principal of Makerere University Business School was the keynote speaker at the opening of the seminar and his topic was ‘leadership for transformation in a dynamic environment’. Balunywa said, in pursuit of organizational success, leaders must assess the environment and design strategies to exploit opportunities.
He said, leadership is important because it guides or directs others to achieve goals and coordinates people in pursuit of a common goal. It also motivates employees to achieve stated goals and maintain a good relationship among members, sparks productivity among followers which leads to organizational success.
In his presentation, Balunywa said, leadership starts at individual, organizational and goes up to national level. He added that leadership is about inspiring and influencing people to follow their managers to achieve an objective.
“Leadership is the creation of change in situations arising from the vision of the leader or that agreed upon by various members of the organization,” he said.
The other message, he said was that leaders much also guide and empower people to realize their vision by overcoming obstacles. It also involves lifting a man’s vision to higher sights, raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations, obtaining uncommon results from common men and turning common men into uncommon men.
in other times, he said, leadership is about being patient and involving coalition building.
“It is meticulously shifting the attention of the organization through the mundane language of management systems and listening carefully much of the time, frequently speaking with encouragement and re-enforcing words with believable action,” he said, “leadership also has to do with being tough when necessary, and usage of occasional ‘naked’ power.”
He also said, leaders must also create change, identify needs in the community including education, health, nutrition, road systems and security and support social-economic growth.
Balunywa said, leaders must create and share vision to enable others to act, stimulate creativity and cause transformation.
In creating and sharing vision, leaders must act by selling ideas and empowering people, and at the end of the day, they should cause transformation. Improving leadership skills involve having a mission, envisioning the future, acquiring knowledge, building skills, identifying community needs and then acting.
In line with his topic, Balunywa said, the environment consists of both internal and external elements. Internal environment is within the control of the leader while external environment are factors outside the organization and are beyond control of the leaders.
He said external environment consists of the economic, political-legal, social-cultural and technological factors.
More importantly, Balunywa said, in any environment, leadership is linked to the trends in the economy that has to do with macroeconomic policy, inflation, interest rates, financial markets, technological changes and competition.
He also spoke about the political legal environment involving elections, diplomacy and legal issues and the social cultural environment involving population trends, changes in tastes, fashions and culture that more often determine leadership strategies and organisational success.
The other key issue he spoke about was the emergence of industrial revolutions and emerging technologies, starting with the first industrial revolution (mechanization, water power and steam power), the second industrial revolution (mass production, assemble line, and electricity), the third industrial revolution (computer and automation) and the fourth industrial revolution (cyber physical systems).
Richard Byarugaba, the managing director at the National Social Security Fund said, organisational success has to do with culture, good strategy on dealing with uncertainty, finding focus on key deliverables, financial philosophy, culture and human resource capabilities. Building innovation capabilities and not neglecting the short-term priorities are key for transforming the company. He also said, it is important for managers in organisations to concentrate of their core avenues of revenue growth among others.
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