Last week, we discussed the need to change focus to the team and the workplace culture to make the difference in the year 2020. The difference between a leader that focuses on his or her people, help them to be better to deliver on the commitment to the stakeholders and the one that focuses on self is perspective.
Perspective is a little difference between leaders and followers. Still, the slight difference makes a significant difference in how organisations achieve sustainable results and transform into institutions that last the test of time. The significant difference is what all the leaders desire without much focus on the little difference that enables the vast difference.
A person could be in a leadership position but have the perspective of a follower. If your leadership perspective is deficient, you will be self-conscious and focused. Leaders who operate with followers’ mindsets and perspectives breeds followers and leave the team worst-off than they met because they focused on personal rewards in the process.
So, the starting point is to check your leadership perspective to make the 2020 difference. Perspective is defined as a mental view or prospect. It is the worldview of yourself and your position in the workplace. It is how you see your role as a leader that dictate your action and disposition to others. A savvy person with a wrong perspective of leadership in this dispensation will be inept in the way he manages his team and the result the organisation will achieve.
In the machine age, the focus of leadership is on the equipment and the process. Processes are more important than people, and people are made to function in line with the existing process to produce the outcome. But in this emotional age, people’s emotions are essential to keep productivity high. Hence, leaders with the perspectives of enablers will focus on the team’s feelings and work to create an enabling culture and environment to aid sustainable productivity. Leaders with views of positions and entitlement with focus on the perquisites of their offices ahead of the team effectiveness might achieve results, but the results cannot be sustainable in the long run with stiff competition.
Peter Chao did excellent work in his article on leadership perspective. He identified two lenses that determine our perspective and influence leadership behaviours as the ‘Beings’ and ‘Vision’ lens. The Being lens reflects on the personality of the leader. It is the lens that determines the identity of the leader, his or her understanding of the process and posture of leadership. The outcome of the perspective of the person (the being lens) of the leader in the emotions and depth of his or her role as reflected by the identity and understanding of the process of leadership. This is what I termed the knowledge attribute of a leader in last week’s article.
The vision lens is how leaders perceive and define reality which determines appropriate actions or directions to be taken. It is the leaders’ insight, foresight, hindsight and lifting sight, which connects vision to possibility and reality when actions are made toward the realisation of the concept.
It is essential for you as a leader to examine your perspective at regular intervals and ensure your vision and being lenses are in alignment with the reality of your environment and nature of your team. A clear view that your role as a leader is to deliver value through others with a positive and purposeful relationship in a process will focus your attention on what is truly important for your team to succeed.
A compelling scenario is a case of our process as a nation at the individual and collective leadership levels. Though we have exceptional leaders among us, we have limited results due to the environment and culture which attribute leadership to the persons rather than the process. At the individual level is the example of Kolawole. Kolawole was a divisional head in his organisation ten years ago. His perspective to leadership at the “Being” lens was about his person. In his division were five teams with managers as the team leads. Kolawole, though intelligent as a person, his perspectives and vision to get noticed at the top affected the process of leading his team. As his team member, you must not reply or send emails to other departments without his review and corrections. No team members can go home until he leaves office even if he’s waiting for traffic to his house to subside.
You must put others in the copy of emails based on seniority instead of the need to know. Kolawole succeeds in advancing himself with his politics but left his team without a trace of leadership before his forced exit after ten years. He did achieve his personal career progression at the detriment of the development of the team he was leading. He denied the organisation the services of smart staff who resigned their positions due to his defective leadership perspective.
Another corollary of a defective leadership perspective is Nigeria’s political offices where leaders amass wealth as rewards for being elected and get power arrogated to them. Seeking political offices have been a journey to self-enrichment rather than services to the people who are impoverished due to leaders’ perspective of ‘milk them die’. The trend is broad as the political elites have started planting their children and cronies in the offices to replace them aside from the massive looting of public fund. Imagine what the children of today’s senators will do when they succeeded in getting to the senate in the future. They have seen how their parents’ wealth grew geometrically due to allocations not worked for, and the community project funds siphoned into private pockets. The children are not only learning from the self-oriented perspectives but are equally learning to be heartless to the plight of the poor masses being denied of a good life. I’m sure when they get to the senate, they will be chartered “Stealnators” than their parents.
For things to improve, leaders must review their perspectives at every stage of their leadership journey. The starting point for being an institutional leader with generational impacts is to have an attitude that leadership is not about you but about the number of others you influence positively to achieve outcomes that will outlive you.
We are in search of leaders in all spheres of our public lives and the search start from the re-orientation of what leaders do and how leaders see their positions and roles. The first port of call is your perspective if you want to be a better leader in 2020 than you were in previous years.
Conclusively, the word of Peter Drucker that leadership involves “the lifting of a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, and the building of a person’s personality beyond its normal limitations” is relevant to you only if your perspective about your roles as a leader is clear and beyond the benefits to you.
BABS OLUGBEMI
