Leadership Africa21: 25 Principles for Excellent African Leadership

By Prince Lamourd Thiobiany

The book is a blend of western leadership styles with the Best African leadership values. Through a traditional humanistic Sage, the jewelry of 25 Principles for excellent leadership are told, using the style of legends. The Sage in a Skype conversation, seating under the Baobab tree in the center of the village, shares his wide experience of leadership and management for organisational business successes in the emerging Africa era. The Sage Twenty five Principles are pulled from the inherent wisdom of African leadership, providing the very solutions we are seeking, which can be tailored to respond to even the most complex modern issues for business successes within the continent. the Caribbean and the Afro American and Diaspora environments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9782955441619

Book preview

America

CONTENTS

Preface

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Sage Speaks

1. The Power of History and Stories

2. Sharing a Vision

3. Strategic Positioning

4. Capacity Building

5. Communication and Symbols

6. Listening Skills

7. Walking the Talk

8. Developing Mutual Respect

9. Setting and Maintaining Quality Standards

10. Accountability Matters

11. Building Teams and Managing Conflicts

12. Negotiating and Consensus Building

13. Ensuring Justice in Decision -Making

14. Leadership and Supernatural Powers

15. Ensuring Transparency with Privacy

16. Risk Management

17. Managing Internal and External Influences

18. Ensuring Security and Safety

19. Coping with Environmental Challenges

20. Attracting Financial Investment

21. Shaping an Ambitious Future

22. Promoting Innovation and Invention

23. Managing Time for Action

24. Addressing Work and Family Life Balance

25. Maintaining Health and Fitness

Conclusion

Notes

Preface

As the African saying goes, "As long as the Lion does not have his own hunting stories, all of the hunting stories will be told from the perspective of the hunter." African leaders are glorious lions, and to this effect, we need to tell our own stories.

The purpose of this book is to pull jewelled insights from traditional African leadership to add richness and context to modern practices of leadership. The combined force of the old and the new is the new art of African leadership. Oftentimes, the very solutions we are seeking may be pulled from the inherent wisdom of traditional leaders, which can then be tailored to respond to even the most complex modern issues.

Foreword

The idea that there is a specific African leadership style is intriguing. It also challenges everything we have all learned at school and in our MBA programmes.

I have reflected on leadership styles during my 26-year-long career. I first worked in Africa and then worked in the United States of America before returning to Africa to continue my career. As a Black African woman, I have often found that I was obliged to adjust to others around me in terms of how teams were to be managed. After completing my MBA, I found that my biggest challenge was when I worked on Wall Street, New York, where I learned that what was considered to be strong leadership starkly contrasted with the style of leadership that I admired, which is a style based on the African values with which I was raised.

I have also had the amazing opportunity to work with colleagues from every region in the world, including Europe, Latin America, Asia and Southeast Asia. Working with that degree of cultural diversity was challenging, but then again, I learned that the most effective leaders were culturally sensitive. But even cultural sensitivities were managed by using the principles inherent in western styles of leadership and management.

When interacting with our Caribbean and African-American brothers and sisters, I have often been pleasantly surprised about how much of our basic African values have survived time and distance. I had always thought that they would be more changed by their long exposure to the western world.

I have learned, like most of the readers of this book, about the various leadership styles: authoritarian, paternalistic, laissez-faire, democratic, transactional, and transformational, with each style being useful depending on the context, including but not limited to, the characteristics of the team. Nonetheless, cultural and social issues defy these perfect descriptions. And this book, replete with so many refreshing insights, helps us to understand that our values can be translated into highly effective leadership styles.

I met the author several years ago in the Congo Basin, where we were both representing international organizations. What stood out was his sage behaviour, and I think the sage he is referring to in this book is actually himself! His ability to transform tedious meetings into efficient ones and to lead his organization to success is testament to his expertise in leading Africans to achieve compelling goals.

The 25 principles that the author discusses will be familiar to every African who reads the book, and to those persons who have spent time in our continent, or who are interacting and living with us. I think it is very important that we Africans remember the greatness from which we came. We should never let our history and our values die, especially in the modern world which often dictates that the old is useless.

The future of Africa is bright. Indeed, Africa is the continent of the future. There is still so much to do in terms of developing our abundant talent and natural resources, but at the same time, many new African leaders are emerging. These include business tycoons such as Aliko Dangote and Patrice Motsepe and senior leaders in global institutions such as the World Bank Group and the United Nations. Globalization is changing how we interact with one another, and increasingly, others are coming to Africa to live and work and do business. Happily, many more Africans are also returning to the Continent to take advantage of the great potential of our continent, evidenced by the emergence of organizations such as homecoming revolution which seek to reverse the brain drain that Africa experienced between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Reflecting on the 25 Principles will help readers to exploit our potential and opportunities across the spheres of business, politics, entertainment and sports which will ultimately yield better results for Africa.

Oumma Keita

Acknowledgements

It is virtually impossible to write a book without the assistance of others, especially those persons who commented on the manuscript.

I am indeed grateful for the excellent coaching and encouragement from Dr Roli Degazon-Johnson, who helped me to view leadership in novel ways. I would also like to acknowledge the poet Dr Angela Ramsay for her excellent editing of the manuscript and Robert Harris for the immaculate book design. To my friends at various levels of executive and leadership positions all over the world, I thank you in abundance for your advice.

I thank my entire family for their great support, especially my wife, son and daughters who continue to provide enormous inspiration, wisdom and love.

Introduction

The principles of successful leadership are considered to be unversal. But most of the literature on leadership has originated in the West, influenced by cultures that differ from African culture in a multitude of ways.

Anthropologists and social scientists understand that culture exerts enormous social pressure on individuals and societies of the most subtle kind, shaping behaviours in a way that people are largely unconscious of. The best features of our culture are invisible assets that harness the history, traditions and values of African society to build the economy and boost social development.

The ability of leadership to wear the jewels of the culture becomes imperative in a continent that is emerging through a long and dolorous relationship with the external world, a continent for which the emphasis on communal welfare diverges from the Western focus on individual achievement.

Though Africa is indeed different from the West, there are sharp differences within the continent, which contains thousands of ethnic groups. For the most part, there is an overarching African culture, much as there are overarching European, North American and South American cultures, based on commonalities in traditions and history: virtually all of Africa had, tribal chiefs and kings who shared a composite comprehension of certain struggles. The African traditional mores and norms are still deeply ingrained and rooted in the psyche of Africans, and, to some extent, in the psyche of persons of African descent who live in other regions.

Though this book