It is all about the people

COMMENT | Doreen A. Muhangazi | In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape worldwide, the caliber of Human Capital in any given organization has become pivotal to its success. Collectively, human Capital refers to the set of skills, knowledge and experience possessed by the Organization’s workforce, and these have since emerged as the number key driver for competitive advantage in any industry or sector.

With increased automation, companies can no longer give lip service to the centrality of people to their businesses and eventual success or not. Therefore, effective management and development of Human Capital “people” are foundational to building a resilient organisation that is capable of navigating uncertainty, disruption and always emerging atop.

As a leader you have two jobs, your 8 to 5 job that entails overseeing operations and achieving targets as well as leading people. In my mind, the second is harder than the first.

Improvements in technology over the last few decades mean that most of the more mundane tasks have been eliminated. This poses unique challenges for leaders in the workplace.

There are various leadership models but broadly speaking you have performance driven leadership and people centered leadership. In previous times, performance driven leadership where results were achieved by any means necessary was encouraged and celebrated. It was as easy as setting up to do lists and making sure everyone adheres to them come hell or high water.

Leaders could get away with this in a time when automation was not widespread and driving teams hard was necessary. The people centric leadership, however, recognizes that teams are made of people and to extract maximum performance recognition of their individuality and fit in the team is critical.

In previous eras, companies could have a competitive advantage from being the most mechanized or automated, but now that is standard. So, emphasis has shifted more to how to lead the teams as a key competitive advantage – hence the greater emphasis now on people centric leadership.

And this not just a catchphrase.

They say that people do not work for organizations, they work for leaders. If there is a poor relationship between the leaders and their reports either the leader doesn’t trust the competence of his reports or vice versa or there is mutual suspicion of each other’s motives and doubts about whether they are working in each other’s best interests it will be impossible to get maximum value out of that team.

Invariably this affects revenues and the bottom line.

At PostBank for instance, we are shifting our purpose to fostering prosperity for Ugandans which aligns with our tagline, Grow. Prosper aimed to grow and prosper our clients as part of the wider national goal of economic transformation. However, an old adage says that charity begins at home and for us to be able to achieve this renewed purpose, we have had to go through an internal journey of change coupled with a lot of surveys and conversations.

Recent feedback has shown that the gap between our staff and their leaders is not where it should be.

And this compounded by the fact that we are more than 1000 employees spread across 58 locations in Uganda.

To achieve the bigger vision, which will require growing the business to multiples of its current size, the people element cannot be ignored. Aligning every single employee with the bank’s purpose and strategic objectives has become more critical.

So, what does the people’s centric leader look like? I like to say the people centric leader has to turn up to work a human, aware of their own limitations and flaws and those of their teams but achieving the organisational targets in spite of these.

The people centric leader has to “demask”, break the imaginary walls between them and their team, be authentic and transparent with employees if he or she is to lead them effectively.

Leaders have to expand their perspective beyond just achieving targets but also while leading teams that will be called upon to replicate success over and over again into the future. Invariably leaders have to develop a higher level of emotional intelligence to motivate the team around the Organisation’s mission. The people centric leader must lead with empathy and create an environment of psychological safety where individuals feel heard, understood and supported.

At PostBank, we have repurposed ourselves to apply the same rigor and discipline in the “soft” stuff; the same way we sweat the hard stuff- the numbers, the profit and performance. This year, we have revamped our appraisal system to focus not only on whether the employees have hit their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) but whether the behavior they exhibit will lead to a sustainable performance. Our behavior assessments are premised on competences embedded in our values of Passion, Integrity, Innovation and Teamwork.

To us in the Human Resource space, it is clear to us that while a lot of leadership competencies are intangible, their absence can be detrimental to Organisations. So, the challenge is often communicating these in a way that their urgency is appreciated. To embark on the change journey knowing that our old ways of managing people, our entrenched habits, our resistance to new ideas, these are no longer our strengths; they are our liabilities.

People centric leadership is a learned behavior. People are not born with it. The leaders of today and tomorrow will be successful to the extent that they can evolve and embrace the new demands of the leadership calling whilst putting people at the center there really is no option.

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The author is the Chief Human Resource Officer of PostBank Uganda Ltd