If I was hiring a Chief Executive Officer for any Ugandan company and I had to tell them, but only three things, it would be this. These three things are the triad of duties that a leader must take on every day, every moment, everywhere. If a leader did these three things well, everything else would take care of itself.
Create and Set Culture
This is the first and number one duty of a leader. The leader is responsible for the culture. They exist to transform and keep the right culture. If the culture is of sloth, the leader is responsible for changing that. If it’s a panic culture, the leader is responsible for that. In any organization, whatever the culture, it comes down to the dial that has been moved by the leader. The leader must set the right performance culture and maintain it at the right zones. When a leader hands over to another, what they do handover is culture.
Create Value for the Community of Stakeholders
A company is made up of stakeholders. It is made up of the employees, the customers, the shareholders, the government, the general public, the suppliers to mention but a few. The role of a CEO is to identify the conflicting needs and interests of all these stakeholders and create value for this community. It’s not just about creating value for the shareholders. If this shareholder value is maximized at the expense of the employees, or while the society is being destroyed, then the leader has failed. And value is created in many ways, it could be through partnerships and collaboration, innovation, strategic oversight, cost efficiency. You can think of anything, growing market share, but all this eventually boils down to creating value.
Embedding Sustainability Frameworks
Ultimately if the leader succeeds at creating culture, and creating value and yet there is no continuity, then they have failed. The end goal of all this work is that it should be sustainable. It should not be about the needs of today, it should be considerate of the needs of the future generations.
The triad of leadership is summarized by these three anchor points. The leader that focuses on these three and makes them their daily scorecard, that’s the leader that’s going places. That’s the leader we all remember. It’s the leader that touches lives. Unfortunately, these leaders have become scarce.