Preparing people for leadership : Kweku Bedu-Addo’s experience
If there is one corporate mistake that almost every Ghanaian business is guilty of, then it is their inability to develop and operationalise a credible succession plan that will help groom leaders to take over from existing ones.
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Because of that defect, most indigenous businesses almost always fizzle out with their founders. The few that make their way past the founders do so after staggering through the leadership hurdle, a journey that normally leaves the business bruised and incapacitated from properly satisfying customers.
This is obvious, given that everything rises and falls with leadership. Thus, the failure of an organisation to have a credible succession plan in place means that such an organisation is indirectly planning to fail. That is bad for national development.
So, how can businesses, especially the indigenous ones, inculcate succession planning into their organisational structures to help avoid the pitfalls that its lack brings?
Mr Kweku Bedu-Addo, one of the direct beneficiaries of the credible succession planning that exists in multinationals, points to a clear, well cut-out structure that gives room for mentorship and nurturing.
He advises that businesses lay down systems and structures that will ensure that existing leaders consciously mentor young ones to take over from them.
"You find that multinationals or companies with foreign parents tend to survive several generations and it is because they built a system that grooms people through succession and I think that is what lacks in our society and culture," Mr Bedu-Addo, who is the first Ghanaian to head Standard Chartered Ghana Limited, said on the Springboard, Your Virtual University, on Joy FM.
This starts with identifying talents, nurturing them through trainings and retraining and consistently exposing the protégée to the challenges of leadership. This could take years to materialise, he said, using his rise to CEO of Stanchart in 2010, as an example.
"They will never really tell you because circumstances really change and it’s a fluid situation," he explained.
Mr Bedu-Addo, who became CEO of Stanchart in 2010, said he started suspecting that he was being groomed for a leadership position in 2001, when he was taken to some training programmes that he would have, under normal circumstance, not qualify to attend.
"I think I had just worked for the bank for nine months to a year, when I started suspecting that may be there is something in mind or they have seen something in me," he recollected.
The personal effort
Although a junior at the time, Mr Bedu-Addo was, in 2001, asked to attend a senior credit workshop in South Africa, where only credit approvers were in attendance.
That workshop gave him an idea into what was in stock for him. In response, Mr Bedu-Addo said he stepped up his game in a bit to prove himself..
"It was a source of motivation that may be, I have some potential but I still had to justify it because in our world, you are as good as the current situation," he said.
"Much as you could get on the fast-track list, you could also drop off that list," he added.
Beyond the personal effort, Mr Bedu-Addo said he was also trained and retrained at workshops and seminars attended by people of higher ranks and positions, the type of exposure he now recommends for organisations wishing to develop succession plans.
Taking notes
Expatiating on the need for mentorship, Mr Bedu-Addo said organisations needed to conscious get their staff to be mentored similar to what happened with him in 2003. In that year, he was attached to a mentor, one Nigel, in the Britain, with whom he shared difficulties with and asked for guidance and coaching.
"When you are a mentee, you have to reach out to the mentor; you don't wait and expect the mentor to reach out to you. That is a common mistake we make. It is not for the mentor to be making up his/her time for you; you have to organise that and be hungry for it," he explained.
This idea of mentorship fits well into the structured leadership development programme that most multinationals operate with, he said.
As entitities with various stakeholders, Mr Beddu-Addo said they prioritise value creation for shareholders, employees and customers and that requires that every leader has little room for mistakes.
"You do not learn on the job. You should be quite ready to jungle all the balls when they come your way," he said.
Doing this, he said required that the person involved take personal efforts in developing him/herself for the task ahead.
He said that in the earlier part of his days in Stanchart, he once approached the CEO at the time, requesting to know what made so successful in the financial sector.
"I tasked if he mind if I took notes and he said 'go ahead.' He gave me about eight points, which I wrote down. I think seven years late, I was moved to Singapore and he was also in Singapore. I showed the notes to him and he was so fascinated about it. So, yes, even way back then, I had that ambition but it was so remote," he said.
He, thus advised that bosses make it a conscious effort to help develop talents that can take over from them.
"My advice to bosses is that do not feel threatened by young talent. I feel happy when young ones tell me they want my job one day. Culturally, people think threatened by, as we call them, 'the young techs' but I think that we should rather be happy and help them to develop their full potential," he said. –GB