Leadership development key to organisational success — Kofi Dadzie
American author, speaker and pastor, John Maxwell once said the single biggest way to impact an organisation is to focus on leadership development.
In developing leaders, he recommended three things which include; recruiting good people, raising them up as leaders and continually developing them as leaders.
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Appearing on Springboard, Your Virtual University, a radio programme on Joy Fm, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Rancard Solutions Limited, Mr Kofi Dadzie, who was interviewed by the host, Reverend Albert Ocran, said he fully subscribed to the theory as he believed that recruiting good people and developing them were key to the success of any organisation.
He said recruiting good people was about making choices and developing them required further choices being made.
“Sometimes you may be making personal choices where you step aside and even allow them to make mistakes so that they learn.
“There is a stage where you have to be there to assist people to back them up and most importantly to express the confidence you have in them. Ultimately, I think we reflect the same in our parenting and when growing up, there is a sense of confidence that as a child, you have when you feel your parents entrust things which are important to them into your hands.
“It’s the same in the work place and professional world when you are now in that leading position and you have to entrust important and critical things into the hands of others, but before you find the courage as a leader to put those things into people’s hands, you need to have made some good and important choice in selecting the right people into positions,” he said.
Transitioning from his role
Commenting on how he felt about having to entrust the leadership of Rancard into another hands, he said transitioning from his role as the Chief Executive Officer of the company to another role came with a deep sense of pride.
“It is a deep sense of pride for me, particularly because right from the initial founding of the organisation, my co-founder and I had designed the organisation to be one that we will transition out and retire from our executive positions as founders while we were still young.
“It is a deep sense of pride in two dimensions, one being able to make that happen where there is a strong and evolving leadership team with a clear mission, vision, and a clear process of evolution and developing products cycle which have made it possible for me to step back and no longer have my hands on the reins, but watch from the outside and see the next stage of the company evolve,” he explained.
“It’s also a sense of pride to look at a team that has the understanding and the strength to take over the leadership of the company, and especially having been groomed internally,”he said
Is leadership difficult?
When quizzed on whether leadership was difficult, Mr Dadzie said, “leadership and execution of anything that is significant is significantly difficult.”
Ultimately, he said leaders came with three things which include understanding, skills and discipline.
“You are bringing a deep understanding of some problem you are trying to overcome and where it has impact, and hopefully, you are bringing skills in the form of tools and the ability to work at the elements of the problem you are trying to overcome and most importantly, you are bringing discipline and focus and what it will take to persist,” he explained.
“Execution of significant challenges often incur a certain amount of time over which you are going to encounter different obstacles for which you will have to bring in different tools and abilities, people and strengths to overcome, so that is where you need some focus and discipline,” he noted.
He said what was most important in leadership was to have a clear picture of what one wanted to achieve.
“What is most important is having a clear picture of what that future state you are trying to achieve is, and having real and deep empathy for the people or the circumstance that are going to be impacted by the change you are trying to bring out,” he stated.
Three outstanding values
Mr Dadzie also shared his three most outstanding values as a leader which included excellence, integrity and discipline.
“The first will be excellence. And excellence is a relentless pursuit. The second will be integrity and I am referring to continuously striving to be faithful to your commitments.
“Sometimes, it is difficult to stick through with something you have committed to, but integrity is when you have committed to something and you tend to be faithful to it.
“The third will be discipline. With discipline, I link expressions such as focus and reliability. Discipline is your ability to marshal your mental energy to apply to a cause you are focused on and pursue it until you have an outcome you desire,” he stated.
He said these were the values he applied, regardless of what he was working on.