Leadership Trends in the Height of Uncertainty

Behavioural leadership trends in South African SMEs.

In many companies, we often see businesses promoting an employee into a leadership position because they are good at their jobs but not because they have leadership potential. This leaves them with more responsibility and having to take accountability for being a great leader with little to no leadership training. You would never promote a Bookkeeper into an HR Manager role if they didn't have the right skills. Why then, do we promote exceptional employees into leaders without equipping them with the necessary leadership competencies, thus setting them up to fail? As a young leadership team, we felt that it would be interesting to explore different leadership skills and how competent leaders are perceived to be in South African SME businesses. We did this across multiple industries with data from over 500 people. Importantly, this data is from 2020-2021, the year of the biggest global pandemic in the last century which is very important context to keep in mind.

By far, the 5 highest leadership behaviours identified across SME leaders were:

• Professionalism

• Positive Energy

• Tolerance & Respect

• Inspiring

• Results Driven

If we think about the climate that leaders have been operating in due Covid-19, the emphasis on these specific leadership behaviours makes a lot of sense. By partnering with multiple leaders in the past year, we saw first hand that most businesses needed to drive results and achieve goals in order to make it through one of the toughest economic times of our history, with the intention of staying afloat and securing jobs. Simultaneously, there was a lot of pressure on leaders and people within the business which is why displaying positive energy and leading from the front was critical to leadership success and ‘bringing people along’ in a very complex and uncertain journey. Leaders not only had to drive business success, but they needed to inspire their people to push through the hardest times (on both a business and personal level), check in with them and be tolerant & respectful of what each person was faced with - impact on family financials, managing children and work in the same space for months on end, health, anxiety and the loss of loved ones.

On the other hand, interestingly, the 4 lowest leadership behaviours identified across SME leaders were:

• Self-Awareness

• Communication

• Conflict Management

• Self Improvement.

Given the pressures being faced by leaders to ensure their businesses survived during the pandemic, it makes sense that self-awareness and self-improvement would be areas that would suffer. We found that the leaders did not take or have the time to recognise the impact that their words and actions have on others or to work on themselves. Communicating whilst transitioning to a work-from-home culture was also a difficult obstacle the leaders needed to overcome during the pandemic. Leaders often took for granted that because their companies are smaller that important messages would get around but due to ‘broken telephone’ & people not being in the office, this became detrimental to some company cultures. What we have noticed is that companies with communication challenges due to working-from-home, love to keep adding more communication channels which leads to more confusion and mixed messages. Our tip is to keep it simple and have fewer but focused channels of communication. Lastly, throughout the year we noticed that leaders avoided conflict at all costs. They struggled to have honest and frank conversations with others especially when everyone has been going through so much personal turmoil during the pandemic. They wanted to be respectful and tolerant & not add on to the current pressure everyone is experiencing.

Other than the top & lowest leadership competencies, it is also interesting to understand the patterns with which the raters scored the leaders. Leaders received the highest ratings from their direct reports, through our experiences across many organisations we believe this could be because these leaders, through the chaos, did such a phenomenal job holding everything and everyone together and as such their direct reports think very highly of them and appreciate their efforts in doing so. The leaders’ managers provided them with their lowest scores as they indicated that the leaders could be more proactive & decisive. We have seen that this often results from leaders, especially in SME's, doubting their abilities and as such not taking the initiative to do new things or make difficult decisions. However, that being said, the leaders actually scored themselves quite highly on the leadership competencies. We also found that the leaders’ colleagues rated the leaders’ quite low which may be because the leaders actually show their true selves to their colleagues and peers & used them as a support during this difficult time or there is often a competitive nature between colleagues and as such, rating them slightly lower may be a way for them to get ahead.

After reflecting back on this data, one thing can be said, is that during the pandemic, this group of South African leaders still seemed to effectively lead the people around them. Leading during chaos and such intense uncertainty is extremely taxing but from what we have seen of these leaders, is that they support, inspire and guide their staff regardless of how traumatic the context is.

Leaders have had to manage a lot of responsibility especially during the pandemic - they have had to be confident yet vulnerable, communicate transparently but remain positive and adapt quickly whilst still remaining cautious and using good judgement. This reinforces the competencies required of leaders today and hence why leaders cannot just be promoted overnight and expected to flourish. Being an effective leader requires focused training, guidance and development otherwise they are being unfairly set up to fail.