Maturity and Corporate Leadership

“Maturity comes when you stop making excuses and start making changes!”

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As I always love to put it, The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of bad leadership. (My slant on Karl Marx’s opening words of his Communist Manifesto). It goes without saying that a people can never progress if they have bad leadership. Thus even though humankind as a whole has made tremendous progress in science and technology, sociology, psychology, politics, economics and so on and so forth, the human race continues to sink deeper into retrogression triggered by lovelessness, crime, injustice, corruption and what have you? All this can be traced to one thing—immaturity in leadership.

You see, where you have leaders who think first about personal and at best national interests to the neglect of the common global good, what can we expect? In the name of nationalism, party and self-interests they are always right; they hardly admit their mistakes. Instead, they package these and present them as heroism. What is the result? Fractured or warped thinking that has given birth to a fractured globe. And this type of immature leadership has not spared corporate leadership.

Thus in this piece, my focus is on corporate leadership.

Corporate Leadership

Corporate leadership in the global world has been cheapened beyond all measure. I know many will cringe at those words but that is the reality in today’s corporate world. The main reason why I make that assertion is that rating leadership in corporate organizations has been skewed in perspective, limiting it to the attainment of shareholder value. In other words, the emphasis on the balance sheet and upholding of good corporate governance as the main criteria for determining good corporate leadership, while useful, is grossly simplistic and misleading, to say the least. While individually there are some very fine leaders in corporate organizations, many companies that are highly rated have shabby human resources, lack transparency in management, employ under-handed tactics to secure contracts, engage in cut-throat competition, maintain a bad environmental footprint and many, many more. Good corporate leadership should therefore go beyond the embellishment and deal with the real qualitative issues which are more difficult to tackle.  

This is very important because since most or maybe all MSME’s look up to especially corporate organizations as role models, if these do not sit up to do the right things, those MSME’s will continue copying bad example which eventually would lead to society at large sinking further in the quagmire of social and economic hopelessness. While regulatory frameworks and their stringent enforcement by relevant authorities may seem plausible, all that would fail if corporate leadership themselves do not get responsible enough to eschew making excuses for their misdemeanor in order to make the right changes towards maturity.

Let’s take a look at some of the issues.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): This is a concept that corporate organizations claim to cherish and uphold by beautifully couching it in business plans and touting it. But how deep does CSR go? While the provision of social amenities is very crucial and appreciated, do corporate organizations do things in other respects that could be regarded as crazy? For instance, corporate organizations engage in fierce competition to gain a bigger market share. Some do so with the overt and/or covert intention of pushing the other company out of business. If they succeeded, how many corporations would be there to provide employment for the people? How much social amenities can be provided? And wouldn’t the mentality of “Each one for himself; God for us all” be further entrenched in society, leading to more and more social vices that make our communities less safe, even for these corporate organizations themselves?

This thus calls for a redefinition of corporate social responsibility and its application by each corporate organisation.

Respect for Humanity: Humanity is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “the quality or state of being human: the quality or state of being kind to other people or to animals: all people.” To what extent does corporate leadership measure up to this? Usually, corporate leadership tends to forget that the decisions they make that impact even just one person impacts all humanity, let alone whole communities and nations. While political leadership is equally blamable in some instances of blatant disregard for humanity by corporate organizations, that does not absolve corporate leadership of their absolute culpableness. A case in sight is with the exploitation of natural resources.

In the rush towards the mirage of development, political leadership, especially in Africa, have become extremely vulnerable to large multi-nationals. An example is what is revealed in the documentary movie by Brad Pitt titled Big Men, which focuses on Ghana’s oil. That alone is enough to, in the least, anger any right-thinking person. Sheer greed and gross lack of respect for humanity on the part of corporate leadership coupled with naivete and greed on the part of political leadership. The common denominator is thus greed disguised as a means of development, leading to the impoverishment of humanity and the satisfaction of a greedy few. And as this plays out daily on a global scale, such despicable organizations are still held in high repute. Extremely incredible and ridiculous; but such is the state of affairs in the global economy. Now, if so-called violators of humanity in political Africa must face the Hague, where are same cases perpetrated by corporate organizations addressed? Are not their actions akin to maiming and killing women and children when they rape and impoverish communities and humanity?

Exploitation of Human Resources: Many employees (maybe most) in large organizations hate their jobs; for, any employee who looks forward to the week-end and dreads Mondays hates their job. But they need to pay bills and feed themselves and family. And those are the reasons they continue to endure. In other words, every figure quoted in the corporation’s financial statement at year’s end is the sweat and blood of the employee. How these are treated is thus a critical basis for rating a corporate organization. Yet this factor is blatantly ignored. Spurred on knowingly or unknowingly by the philosophy of the survival of the fittest, human resources are continually impoverished to line up the pockets of just a few. Certainly, a continuous re-evaluation of how this very important resource of corporations is used should be encouraged if corporations would continue to flourish.

Greed Is Immaturity

Certainly, those are not exhaustive enough. But as stated before, greed is the negative force that permeates all of this. It is very easy to make excuses why corporate organizations continue running their affairs the way they do. But those excuses simply smack of immaturity. For, if base instincts, as in animals that do not have higher intellect and sense of morality as humans do, are what corporate organization knowingly or unknowingly operator by, how can we say they are mature?

It is time to discard hurtful and selfish philosophies that degrade humanity for higher social and human values to steer the affairs of corporate leadership. Then will corporate leadership make changes towards maturity and accept responsibility; then will the full value of corporations be seen and felt.

The author is CEO/Managing Partner at Soleil Consults (US), LLC, a Strategy, Management and ICT firm.