Business leaders abound globally, but what differentiates the good ones from the bad ones is the ability to maintain a lead for a sustainable period of time. Leadership is the ability to influence others positively. As in a ship with a captain overseeing the process of driving it, a leader is in every organised community of people overseeing its management process. Human beings, as a group, are generally not organised; a leader has to influence, organise and motivate them to achieve their common goals. “Leadership is essentially a continuous process of influencing behaviour of followers” says Khushbook Pathak in the book, Organisational Behaviour. Leadership is a mutually beneficial relationship between a leader and his followers.
The major objective of leadership is to direct a diverse group of people towards a common goal or destination. In business, the goal of a leader is to ensure that the business is sustainable, that is, can give value for money by giving the shareholders positive returns on their investments. The general, but not common, qualities of good leaders are communication skill, confidence, courage, empathy, integrity, goal-setting, humility, emotional intelligence, passion for success, creativity, honesty, innovation, ‘delegatability’, positivity, decisiveness, learning skill, decision-making, focus, self-awareness, motivation, resilience, empowerment and patience. The common qualities are leadership skills and managerial ability, business knowledge, competence and skills. All successful business leaders have a burning desire to achieve business goals.
Successful business leaders like Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation, Warren Buffett of Berkshire-Hathaway, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors, Aliko Dangote of Dangote Group, Abdulsamad Rabiu of BUA Group, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Richard Branson of Virgin Group, Nicky Oppenheimer of DeBeers, Femi Otedola of Geregu Power Plant, and Mike Adenuga of Globacom, maintain their lead by being innovative and always thinking outside the box about developing their businesses. They focus on managing their businesses through people using a set of principles relating to the functions of planning, organising, administering, directing, and controlling, and the applications of these principles in harnessing physical, financial, human, and informational resources economically, efficiently and effectively to achieve their organisational goals.
They have visions and communication skills to instil in subordinates the visions and missions of their organisations, and see everybody as an important member of their missions. Leaders seek cooperation of workers and usually build a cohesive team. Successful leaders prompt their organisation’s members to work together in the interest of the organisation. They create a positive attitude towards the work and goals among the members of the organisation. Leaders are directly involved in the performance of a function and see those involved in the tasks as associates. Successful business leaders are high-risk takers who, most of the time, ‘go for broke’. They are ‘good delegators’. Leaders are after the success of the project executors (delegatees) and achieve their goals through people.
Successful business leaders are good managers of resources. They are great thinkers and always see opportunities in every situation. In “How Successful People Grow”, John C. Maxwell said that you must observe the following laws if you want to be a successful leader: the Law of the Mirror: You must see value in yourself to add value to yourself; the Law of Awareness: You must know yourself to grow yourself; the Law of Modelling: It’s hard to improve when you have no one but yourself to follow; the Law of the Rubber Band: Growth stops when you lose the tension between where you are and where you could be; and the Law of Contribution: Developing yourself enables you to develop others. An important attribute of successful business leaders is that they believe in and abide by these laws.
Successful business leaders are organised, analyse competition, keep detailed records of their activities, plan ahead, understand the risks involved in each business and the returns, creative, analytical, focused, consistent, persevere and sacrifice a lot. Successful business leaders work more than their peers and see failure as a learning process. They are resilient and turn adversaries to anniversaries. Arthur Guinness invented Guinness stout. It was a product made from a mistake. A batch of beer was accidentally burned. Instead of throwing it away, Arthur Guinness sent his staff to the docks to sell the blackened stout at a discounted price. This was how stout beer, which became a success, was discovered. Successful business leaders are never afraid of trying their hands on new things. Colonel Sanders’ force about the success of KFC is the secret recipe blend of eleven (11) herbs just as Sweet Sensation Food chains in Nigeria relies on its unique recipe.
The mission of Sam Walton, the owner of Walmart, was simple: “Everyday, low prices”. Walmart has the biggest chain of supermarkets and is the largest private employer of workers in the world! The most crucial quality of successful business leaders is “never say die” – resilience. Ford Motors was founded on June 16, 1903 by Henry Ford and eleven other associate investors, starting with $28,000. The first car was sold on July 15, 1903. Ford Motors started with the Model A and produced 1,708 debutante cars. Only one was sold after a month. Today, Ford Motors has sold over 350 million cars. Henry Ford introduced the “moving assembly-line methods in factory production from the normal ‘crowding’ car production. Moving assembly-line ensures there is division of labour among workers and resulted in reduction in the time of a unit car production and more cars produced than previously done.
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