by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
Having screamed ourselves hoarse supporting the incredible Nigerian women's basketball team captained by the amazing @_thenigerianqueen Ezinne Kalu as they lost (only just) to USA in their opening game of the Tokyo Olympics, we remembered that sports has an incredible ability to allow us to transcend our normal, stress-ridden, coffee-induced sleepless nights (oh the joys of being an entrepreneur!). We imagine for a moment that we too could be on the court with Ezinne, obviously ignoring for a moment the 10,000 painful hours of training, gym circuits and mental drive (oh and the hours that our parents would have had to put aside driving us to games and training - as Melanie knows only too well!), that it takes to reach the top of sports or higher still - to have those immortal letters ‘OLY’ after your name…
Although terribly disappointing to see a loss, such a dreamlike state was essential as we have for the past two weeks been concentrating too much on the incredibly dark changes that have hit our world and businesses since the calm days of December 2019 (remember those?), when we at Lionesses of Africa were excitedly preparing ourselves for what turned out to be a fabulous Lionesses/UK Govt evening only a month later in front of 300 guests showcasing some of our incredible and inspirational Lionesses (here).
We have also been warning that in addition to Covid being an ever present danger and one that will stay with us for sometime yet, Mother Nature is also fighting a rear-guard action against man-made climate change. This is not going to stop anytime soon. So be prepared for yet more floods, more ice melting, more tropical storms, and of course in agriculture, a changing climate, strange seasons and a slow realization that where you once grew Tea, you will now either have to move your entire business to follow the perfect ‘Tea Climate’ or grow Opuntia Cactus, more commonly known as ‘Prickly Pear’. No joke, just see how the French winemakers are snapping up South African Vineyards and even buying (this must really hurt) English ones…(here)
And then as if that were not enough, the dangers ahead from an increased use of cyber attacks and malware. To add to our long list of recent attacks, South Africa’s Transnet declared ‘force majeure’ this week to avoid being sued when its systems, including its essential cargo tracking software went down leaving them totally blind. Without this software, “operators at the ports cannot tell where containers are and what they are carrying, customs cannot calculate taxes, and some incoming ships are forced to turn back, incurring lost revenue and non-delivery penalties, which they may ultimately pass on to Transnet.” (here) Although they will not say if this was a malware hit or the result of years of underinvestment and of course (this being Transnet) Corruption and Fraud (not for the feint-hearted - see here) - the effect is the same. Indeed having avoided the riots and looting of the previous week in the Durban area, because of Transnet’s issues, Cape Town is now being hit by a lack of goods and the Danish shipping giant Maersk announced “…only refrigerated cargo was being accepted for export, while it did “not have clarity yet on when dry cargo acceptance will open up”. No wonder insurance rates for businesses have gone through the roof!
Through all of this we have great minds saying that ‘every crisis is an opportunity’ and ‘great leaders always find a way’.
We fear this makes it all sound too easy…
Business schools have always taught by looking at the rear view mirror at historical case studies and from these have championed great leaders and have put them on a podium collecting Gold and accolades from their adoring and grateful public (yes, still the Olympics on in our office!). As Andrew Hill says writing in the FT (here): “One problem is that exhaustive analyses of real-life business dilemmas are by definition historic, nudging students towards conventional solutions. Another is that they exaggerate the role of individual leaders: 62 per cent of cases feature heroic managers acting alone…”.
How will ‘conventional solutions’ work in the future with all the great unknowns that we have discussed above and for the past two weeks?
Just as important, how will we manage if we have to wait for the right heroic leader to come along who can do the impossible like these 62%?
As we wrote (here) - ‘May you live in interesting times’, is a curse, not something that should be celebrated just “because it creates opportunities”!
As Adam Bryant, a former reporter, editor and columnist at The New York Times, where he interviewed over 500 Chief Executives for the “Corner Office” column says (here): “This is a breathtakingly transformational period we're living through and we need to step back and take stock of everything that's changing. This crisis isn’t one and done; many tsunamis are breaking across the corporate landscape all at once: the death of command-and-control; stakeholder capitalism; a younger generation that cares deeply about purpose and mission; and leaders being held accountable for social justice. In the words of John Donovan at AT&T Communications,
“tear off the rearview mirror, because we’re not going back.”
[N.B. Adam doesn’t even mention all the natural and not so natural issues we have mentioned, so those are in addition!]
He continues (here): “Despite all the effort through the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive; even today, most CEOs don't last five years in the job. The demands to deliver at a consistently high level can be unforgiving. The loneliness. The weight of responsibility. The relentless second-guessing and criticism. The pressure to build all-star teams. The 24/7 schedule that requires superhuman stamina. The tough decisions that often leave no one happy. The expectation to always have the right answer when it can be hard just to know the right question."
Not being a fortune teller, it still makes sense to us to look at the great leaders of our times, to filter out the noise, to distill down until we find that elixir of management that might just work in these volatile times, but then always be ready to be nimble. Remember no one talks about all the great CEOs who failed, yet as we mentioned before in our letter ‘Failures are Silent’ (here), this is because although they had also read all the great management books and were probably following all the same ideas, somehow they failed. People talk in awe at Sir Richard Branson and the 8x $Billion businesses he has built, yet never mention his many failed businesses along the way (there must be some - he is after all human, we think!). This is called survivorship bias and is very real. So be ready to be nimble, to adapt, after all, you, not a book, but you know your business the best…
But for every great podium leader, there is without doubt an important team behind as our heroine this week, Ezinne Kalu, will we are sure confirm. Indeed we would argue except in very small situations it is actually the team that creates the perfect opportunity for the wins, the planning, the coaching, the training, the health and safety (physio plus Doctors), the tacticians, the personal brand/sales people (everyone loves a great Social Media campaign) and of course the agents/chief negotiators who pin down the detail of the deals - these wins don’t happen by accident!
Let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. There is absolutely no doubt that leadership is essential, granted leadership may not come from the one in the spotlight, on the podium, but it has to come from someone. Indeed this was put to the test when Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, the footwear retailer in the USA, went out of his way to hire inexperienced leaders for 'Downtown Project’ that he set up in Las Vegas in an effort to generate innovation. In fact all that happened was that “chaos was normalized” (here), so leadership and even the management of a business does not happen by accident.
One of the issues we as entrepreneurs have is that the business is our baby. Our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations. We work 24/7, we get bogged down in the minutia, as business sales writer Joey Coleman (see here) said of many leaders of growing companies “[they] get burnt out because they have stopped envisioning the future and are in the slog of managing people, calling it “office babysitting.”
What needs to be done to avoid this is to “empower your team”. Why is this necessary, surely you as the entrepreneur have taken the business this far - why can this not continue forever?
The problem is as Joey points out is: “As small businesses grow, typically so does the owners' stress level. Many find that they soon have more direct reports than they can effectively lead. Once you add a zero to the number of staff you’re leading, you must have good leaders who can manage and guide those people…Many people can effectively lead four team members; few — if any — can effectively lead 40.”
This is a major point. “Once you add a zero to the number of staff you are leading” things change dramatically. 4, 40, 400 - in reality the jump from 4 to 40 is just as difficult for leadership of a small entrepreneur driven company, as the jump from 40 to 400 is to a company moving into the medium sized world.
By empowering your team, by giving more responsibility you as a leader create time for other issues. The HoF tells of one entrepreneur-led company he came in to turnaround where the Owner did everything. Although he had at least stopped packing the boxes and sticking the labels on, he was micro-managing everything else, to such an extent that he called all his operations team ‘secretaries’ and just dictated daily and during the day, what they should and should not do. An example being that in this multi million €uro business one of these ‘secretaries’ had to ask the boss what to do about a $20 bank charge on the back of an invoice paid from Kenya that had not included such charges when paying. How can a company operate in such a situation?
Answer was that it had been very lucky to have reached such heights (with distributors in 58 countries and manufacturers in 8), but that was more about the tide coming in and lifting all ships as their business had a historically well earned name for quality that made them almost the go-to product and the industry had been in a boom - BUT the tide had started going out and the owner just worked more and more hours, deep into the night, unable to understand what was going wrong as sales slipped and losses mounted. First thing the HoF did was to empower the staff. With their years of experience this was like a breath of fresh air to them and although incredibly fearful for the owner for a time, he soon came to recognize the blue sky and oxygen this simple move had created (certainly cleared up some of his sleep issues!).
Of course it is fearful to empower others when for years you have dreamt, birthed and grown your baby into something serious in the business world, but sometimes, if you love something enough, you just have to set it free…
There is absolutely no doubt that the world has changed, that the rosy times we last saw in 2019 are not going to return, so stop looking in the rear view mirror hoping they will return. Businesses have to become far more nimble to shocks and surprises, and for that the Leader, the CEO must have a clear head from the day to day clutter and noise. This can only happen if you have the right team, if the team is empowered to do the job they were employed to do for which they have the skill.
This freedom allows you to find the blue sky for thinking, to allow you to recognize issues before they become truly serious. These issues are not in the rear view mirror, but on the road ahead. If you have your head down working all hours or distracted by problems that happened before or dreaming of a life previously lived (in 2019), then although you might think you see the light at the end of the tunnel and you just have to find some more hours, working deep into the night in which to get there, you will be so distracted that you will not realize that what you thought was the light, is simply another train coming towards you…until too late.
This is the new world we live in.
To keep the road ahead in focus, build the right team and then truly Empower Them.
Stay safe.