How organisations thrive amid wrecking balls like Trump, ANC
- William Gumede
Organisational resilience starts with curious, imaginative and emotionally intelligent leaders.
With rising global and South African uncertainty, as US President Donald Trump up-ends global politics, trade and markets, and the ANC battles to transform from the unilateral decision-making of one-party dominance to collaborative multiparty governance, threatening the life of the country’s Government of National Unity, organisations, whether state, private or non-profit, have to be resilient – the ability to thrive in adversity, to navigate these shocks, and see opportunities in uncertainty.
China has been regularly using its dominance of the global supply chain of critical minerals and rare earth elements, the ingredients of everything from smartphones, electric vehicles to submarines, to disrupt global supply chains. South Africa’s Government of National Unity (GNU), which includes the diversity of the country’s colours, ideologies and ideas offer a fantastic opportunity to build society-wide resilience against domestic and global uncertainty.
Sadly, the ANC, the previous majority party, continues to govern is if it is still the majority party, insisting that its policies – which are most instances outdated for current domestic and global complexities, automatically become that of the GNU government, instead of collaboratively come up with new ideas, policies and decisions that are appropriate for these uncertain times. If the ANC can grasp that it is now part of a multiparty GNU, which requires genuine collaborative decision-making with its coalition parties, including partnering with business, civil society and professionals to form a kind of GNU+, to come up with new ideas, capacity and energy, South Africa will thrive in this new era of frightening uncertainty, unpredictability and complexity.
The Bank for International Settlements, for example said in its latest assessment of the state of the world economy that the world is entering a "new era of heightened uncertainty and unpredictability", because of the US driven trade war, climate change and supply chain disruptions. Furthermore, the geopolitical, economic and market disruptions appear with overlapping other shifts such as climate change and technology transformations. Technology is changing faster than business or society can adapt. We are seeing the merging of human and AI and of physical and digital worlds – which makes many old business operational models outdated.
Resilience is the ability of individuals, organisations, and societies to navigate dramatic changes, crises, and setbacks. A key part of resilience is the ability to adapt, and use crises to come back stronger afterwards. Organisations, communities, and countries that quickly recover from sudden crises, are better positioned than their competitors to grasp the opportunities of the upturn.
Not surprisingly, organisational resilience starts with curious, imaginative, and emotional intelligent leaders – that sets the resilience culture, the collective mindset and right organisational focus. Leaders must have a growth-mindset, what Carol Dweck described as understanding that your basic qualities, like intelligence and talent, can be changed or developed. The ability to have curiosity beyond one’s expertise, role or competence is critical to a growth-mindset.
A core aspect of individual resilient leadership is the ability to lead oneself. Leaders must be able to see opportunities in challenges, in order to nurture a culture of seeing opportunities in challenges throughout organisations. It is critical that organisational leaders have a deep perspective: the “ability to widen the lens, to stay present with complexity, and to read the moment with nuance.” Furthermore, deep perspective is “about cultivating the ability to see beyond the obvious, to recognize nuance, and to navigate ambiguity without collapsing it into certainty.”
Perspective “integrates emotional intelligence, systems awareness, and contextual depth.” Leadership depth goes beyond just technical competence, “accumulation of certificates and purpose alone.” Priyanka Dutta, an Indian human resources expert, talks about leaders that have depth across multiple areas: work competence, physical, emotional, and spiritual. These are the reasons “why despite of external influence, opinions, bad economy, difficult situations, challenges some people come out successful and some don't.”
Leaders must set an active example of good behaviour. Incompetent, corrupt leaders and unfair leaders undermine organisational resilience, as it breeds distrust, toxicity, and lack of organisational cohesion.
Organisations need to nurture resilient organisational cultures – which need to be built in peace time. Having dependable processes, rules and routines are key for companies if they want to navigate uncertainty. Role clarity, responsibilities and reporting lines must be clearly defined. There has to be clear, transparent, and consistent ground rules for communication in organisations. All these must be put in place during good times.
A resilient culture means an individual, organisations or country can make changes during the crisis – meaning there has to be the capacity to make adjustments of strategy, policies, and products during the period of crisis. Organisations must nurture the ability among individuals, teams and organisation-wide to improvise during crisis.
A resilience culture must permeate through organisational staff, units, and teams. Individual, team, and organisational resilience is continually built – it is not a once-off process. For organisations to be prepared for uncertainty, organisations must prioritise reflecting on the state of the organisation, the trading environment it operates it and on strategies to improve performance. A key part of resilience-proofing organisations is the identification of risks, planning for uncertainty and evaluating the systems beforehand.
A learning organisational culture is key to a resilient organisational culture. Organisations must adopt a continuous learning, upskilling, mentoring, and industry reading culture. A learning culture, one where new ideas can be openly shared – is key in uncertainty. Organisations must have the psychological safety for team members to proposes changes, adjustments, and product adaptions. Technology must be embraced, rather than ignored. Data-based learning and decision is key to anticipate market changes – and to respond to these.
Leaders must be transparent to employees about company strategies, direction, and objectives – and challenges. There must be a common understand of success which permeates across business units and teams. This build common ownerships – and provide the space for employees to provide unique ideas, innovations, and strategies. Leaders are critical in ensuring a culture of psychological safety in their organisations.
To this, it is critical that organisations have open lines of communication – where management and employees are able to share information honestly, without fear of negative reprisals. This means having an open-door approach, allowing feedback whether direct or anonymously. Part of an open communication strategy is to give space to feedback. Not all feedback will be useful, but explanation why feedback would not be used or implemented is critical. Leaders are critical in ensuring a culture of psychological safety in their organisations.
Open cultures in organisations important to foster high-performance organisational cultures; but also, to reduce destructive behaviours, such as bullying, gossip, manipulation, and belittling. Organisations must prioritise the well-being of individual employees.
Worse, in organisations without open cultures, a toxic culture could spring up, in which employees are reluctant to speak up or share ideas. In a toxic environment unethical behaviour, such as cutting corners, lying and racism thrives. Open cultures has the ability to lift organisational morale.
Healthy workplace culture includes encouraging healthy work-life boundaries for employees; supporting employees’ career development; allowing for some space for mistakes; refraining from micromanaging – empower employees to make decisions within their spheres of authority. Employees contribution to success must be recognised. In fact, employees must be seen, appreciated, and rewarded for sterling efforts.
Innovation must be a key component of organisational culture to keep up with market, customer, competitive and technology changes. There has to be a regular assessment of how things are done – and whether these are still relevant, and what can be done more efficient, with new technology or with new processes.
A pillar for resilience strengthening is for organisations to fully adopt sustainability as part of the organisational culture. Sustainability must be incorporated when investments decisions, policies and products are decided on. Customers, investors, employees, and stakeholders are increasingly demanding companies be serious and genuine about sustainability.
Finally, individuals, teams and organisations must see uncertainty as an opportunity to not only fortify the organisation, but to innovate, and find new markets, make new products, and provide new services; and seeing challenges brought on by uncertainty, change and crises as chances to strengthen both the tangible and intangible assets of the organisation.
Professor William Gumede is Professor of Practice, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, and author of the bestselling Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times (Tafelberg).
This is an extract of his recent talk at Chelete Management’s conference on business resilience given increasing domestic and geopolitical, trade and market uncertainty.