Change Begins with the Leader

The “Change begins with me” campaign launched by President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday, 8 September, 2016 has attracted mostly negative feedback from Nigerians and even from The Economist of London. Some persons have even accused the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Lai Mohammed, who appears to have originated the idea, of plagiarizing the underlying concept from some other Nigerians. I offer my additional perspective, not in jest, but as a patriotic independence anniversary contribution to the debate over Nigeria’s vexed leadership.

In his Harvard Business Review (HBR) classic, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, leading management scholar, John P. Kotter identifies some reasons why transformation efforts fail. The remarkable thing about those reasons and the remedies he suggests is that they all can best be accomplished by the leader(ship)-the leader is best placed to establish a sense of urgency, form a powerful coalition for change, create the vision of the future, communicate the vision, empower others to act, plan for and create short term wins, consolidate improvements and institutionalise new approaches to change.
In another HBR article titled “Managing Change: The Art of Balancing”, Jeanie Daniel Duck writes that “e even in large organisations which depend on thousands of employees understanding company strategies well enough to translate them into appropriate actions, leaders must win their followers one by one. Think of this as 25,000 people having conversion experiences and ending up at a pre-determined place at approximately the same time”.
Most management writers now agree on the place of emotional intelligence in successful leaders. The reason emotional intelligence is more important than IQ is because its five elements- self awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills enable the leader to successfully play his role of leading, motivating, inspiring and yes, changing the people and society. That is why Daniel Goleman in “What makes a Leader” describes emotional intelligence as “the sine qua non of leadership”. He adds that without emotional intelligence, “a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive analytical mind, and an endless supply of great ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader”. If a leader doesn’t have these pre-requisites (analytical mind, etc.) and lacks emotional intelligence, then whatever entity he or she leads, is a tragedy in progress…or waiting to happen!
John Kotter explains the critical importance of leaders in change contexts in “What Leaders Really Do”. While management is about coping with complexity and bringing order and predictability to a situation, situations of change require leadership to set direction, align people and provide motivation, inspiration and communication. Implicit in this role of the leader is motives, the right motives. The leader is expected, assumed or required to help elevate the attitudes and motives of his followers; to do this, his own motives must be higher and better than those he purports to lead! Robert Gofee and Gareth Jones argue in “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?” that only leaders who excel at capturing people’s hearts, minds and spirits can get anything done!

In the context of nations, is it possible to conceive of the transformation that Lee Kuan Yew accomplished in taking Singapore “from third world to first” without his leadership role in catalysing, envisioning, leading, inspiring and executing the change? As Henry Kissinger wrote in his foreword to Yew’sbook, “…ordinary calculations can be overturned by extraordinary personalities.
In the case of Lee Kuan Yew, the father of Singapore’s emergence as a national state, the ancient argument whether circumstances or personalities shapes events is settled in favour of the latter. Circumstances could not have been less favourable. Located on a sandbar with nary a natural resource, Singapore had in the 1950s a polyglot population of slightly over a million … of which 75.4 percent was Chinese, 13.6 percent Malay and 8.6 percent Indian.
It adjoined in the south with Indonesia, with a population of over 100 million (now nearly double that), and in the north with Malaya (later Malaysia), with a then population of 6.28 million. By far the smallest country in South-East Asia, Singapore seemed destined to become a client state of more powerful neighbours, if indeed it could preserve its independence at all. Lee Kuan Yew thought otherwise.
Every great achievement is a dream before it becomes reality, and his vision was of a state that would not simply survive but prevail by excelling. Superior intelligence, discipline and ingenuity would substitute for resources. Lee Kuan Yew summoned his compatriots to a duty they had never previously perceived: first to clean up their city, then to dedicate it to overcome the initial hostility of their neighbours and their own ethnic divisions by superior performance. The Singapore of today is his testament”.
Lee Kuan Yew’s book, “From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965 – 2000” is a magnificent story of leadership, strategy, policy and execution championed by an exceptional leader who succeeded in one generation in not just changing, but transforming his nation’s destiny. In the same way as Singapore, it is difficult to think of most great nations without great leaders – the USA without George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR and Ronald Reagan; the UK without Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher; South Africa without Nelson Mandela; or Ghana without Kwame Nkrumah.
In the change and transformation as Nigeria earnestly desires and so desperately needs, a leader or leadership is a sine qua non- a leadership that would rise above base motives such as ethnic and/or religious irredentism; a leadership that is knowledgeable and competent; a gracious, open-minded, tolerant, ethical but firm leadership; and one that holds itself accountable to all of Nigeria’s people, and to history.
In their seminal book, “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty”, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson suggest with significant evidence that countries escape poverty and under-development when they have appropriate economic institutions, especially private property and competition within the context of an open, pluralistic political system with competition for political office, a widespread electorate and openness to new political leaders. The challenge of Nigeria’s transformation is to find whether by accident or design, a leadership that seeks to build the right institutions and a political, economic and legal context that would unleash the potentials of the country. While good citizens are required to achieve such a change, only leaders can catalyse the process.
Both John Kotter in “Leading Change” and Robert H. Schaffer and Harvey A. Thomson in “Successful Change Programs Begin with Results” emphasize the importance of short-term wins in successful change efforts. In fact the sixth step in Kotter’s eight steps to transformation as I stated earlier is planning for and creating short-term wins while Schaffer and Thomson dismissed many so-called change efforts as activity-centred “ceremonial rain dances” i.e. the ardent pursuit of activities that sound good, look good, and allow “managers” to feel good but in fact contribute little or nothing to bottom-line performance! They suggest a focus instead on “results-driven improvement processes that focus on achieving specific, measurable operational improvements within a few months”. The benefits of early results are clear – followers are encouraged and inspired, buy-in and conversion gains momentum and the leadership can leverage early successes to drive the next phase of change.

Opeyemi Agbaje