I know you will want to search for Aquipris’s theory as you read the headline. Don’t stress Google! You won’t find it anywhere. I was telling one of the readers of the column from London that I write based on intuition most of the time and no extensive research except for my past voracious reading and training as a leadership coach. Aquipris’s theory is one of my writing innovations.
Trust me. You will know the origin and how I coined the word Aquipris at the end of this article. Some months ago, we agreed that leadership is behaving in a certain way to influence people to achieve desired results by treating them with dignity and without denying them the self-fulfilment from being part of the team. It is also delivering a sustainable result without damaging the brand essence of the organisation, the team’s commitment to one another and the process created to support the Organisation’s strive to achieve its objectives.
Leadership success has been the bane of many organisations, institutions and countries. Great companies collapse if the succession plans produce ineffective, less competent and selfish leaders. Countries in Africa had taken one step forward and many backwards due to poor institutional controls and leadership selection processes that put politics, religion and tribe ahead of competence. A notable example is the moderate achievement of OBJ, which has been either eroded or scrapped due to factors within and beyond his successors. A success without succession was said to be a failure. Indeed, it is retrogression to lead without developing other competent leaders.
Below is the analogy of two leadership behaviours that builds or destroys upcoming leaders.
Barbara Bamidele was attending the strategic meeting of her company for the first time because of her appointment as a regional sales manager. Her company is into retail services playing the catch-up game with two leading competitors in the industry. Barbara, a passionate and an eloquent person was keen on making an impact in her new role and knows that a paradigm shift at the top will help in realising her personal and professional objectives.
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She was allowed to speak at the strategy session. Believing in the words of the moderator, the chief strategy officer of the company, Barbara took advantage of the proclaimed amnesty for the staff to speak their minds in the interest of moving the company forward. As she took the microphone, her body was radiating with passion and love for her job. She eloquently made her points. Barbara took the lane less travelled by being courageous instead of the usual conformity of the staff not to say things that might be considered outrageous by the executive staff irrespective of the motives and the relevance of the comments.
She opinionated that the company should look into the revenue and the profit figures of the two leading industry leaders holistically and matched them with its strategies for sales, advertising, customer service, people management and the culture of the organisation. She was pushing for a shift in the way results are compared without adequate consideration and working on factors like products, brand awareness, leadership support and policies that affect the perception and performance of the company in building loyal customers and sustainable market leadership in sales volume, revenue growth and deepening product penetration.
Barbara received resounding applause and ovation from her colleagues for her honest opinion, eloquence and vigorous articulation of her turn-around points. She, however, entered into the ‘red book’ of Kate Osumba, the deputy chief executive officer, the most powerful iron lady and personality in the company. Kate never liked Barbara’s audacity despite the acknowledgement of the truthfulness and fairness in her comments. This experience marked the beginning of Barbara’s ordeal in the company and ended in her resignation despite being one of the top performing regional sales managers.
The contrast to Barbara’s story was the experience of Apollos, a Christian Jew from Alexandria, Egypt. Apollos was an eloquent speaker who was preaching the gospel based on his little exposure to the faith. He was teaching the gospel with vigour. When Aquila and his wife, Priscilla who have hosted Paul and learned the full story of the gospel of Jesus, heard the teaching of Apollos, they knew he hadn’t heard the complete message. Aquila and Priscilla (the forerunners of my Acquipris theory) took Apollos aside and explained the gospel more in full to him. Priscilla and Aquila’s action made Apollos preach with greater effectiveness and accomplish his call and in the advancement of mission of the early church.
Imagine if Priscilla and her husband, Aquila have behaved Kate’s way. They would have condemned Apollos instead of being leaders who train others. Apollos’ vigour and eloquence would have been limited or wasted by Aquila and Priscilla’s criticisms just like Barbara’s passion was weakened.
Leaders who do not want to be criticised are leaders who will in their triviality destroy other leaders. The primary duty for leaders is to identify and train others to be able to lead. Level 5 leaders are transformational. They do not think in terms of bottom-line performance only but think ahead on strategy for business survival in different economic and regulatory climates, and most importantly is the going concern of the organisations they are leading with an emphasis on leadership succession.
Kate as a top-level leader has the responsibility to identify the right people for her company. She is to equip the right people to be the ambassadors of the company thereby making them believers in the vision and culture of the entity. By making them the voice of the brand, she would be aligning personal objectives with the professional aspirations before involving them in the wider business. The foundational behaviour for the leadership succession process is to be objective and transparent. Kate’s lack of objectivity allows her emotions to override her thinking by interpreting Barbara’s comment as an assault on leadership.
A behaviour where leaders want to hear things that are soothing to them will limit initiative and frustrate the attitude of ownership thinking from the employees. Such behaviour turns the office meetings, which are platforms where ideas are incubated into a one-person show where the employees make selective statements for fear of not being marked for subsequent castigation. Where free flow of real ideas is stiffed, people who are good at praise-singing prospered from the culture by giving accolades to the executive officers even when it is not necessary. I have seen where demand for questions at a meeting led to the showering of praises on the chief executive officer by a top management staff that had stayed longer with the company and have mastered the sycophancy culture of the environment.
Another case I witnessed in 2001 was the reward of ‘gut’ by a leader. Akin, an assistant general manager in one of the banks was frustrated by the show of sycophancy by the senior officers at the weekly executive meeting of the bank. On a particular day, he caused a paradigm shift and was rewarded handsomely. As the custom was in the bank, the chief executive officer and the chairman will introduce the purpose of the meeting and make his suggestions. It is usual for all other comments to start with the word ‘I agree with the position of the CEO’ followed by repeated comments or information that is out of relevance to the issue at hand.
Five officers of the ranks of deputy general managers and general managers made comments before it was Akin’s turn and they all started with the norm, ‘I believe or support the CEO’s position. Akin took his chance to make a transformational change by asking people not to start their contributions by supporting the previous comments. He noted that his comment is not in agreement with the earlier comments including that of the CEO. Alas, his comment was superior, and the Chairman accepted that as the decision taken at the meeting. Akin got a new perception of the CEO and was given more responsibility, which led to his redeployment to the subsidiary of the bank (another bank) as the managing director.
What Akin’s boss did was to reward his gut. Any behaviour rewarded will be massively repeated. As a leader, you are to reward courageous action that moves the company toward its objective.
One of the best ways to identify and train more leaders is to reward courage and be less favourite to the conformists who are mostly acting for self and not necessarily in the broader interest of the business.
