Leadership is the ability of a manager to influence subordinates to willingly strive toward the realizing of organizational goals. This definition is confirmed by Hersey et al., (1998) when they opined that leadership is the process of influencing the activities of an individual or a group in effort towards goal achievement in a given situation.  This definition does not also deviate from the position of the Mother of modern management, Mary Parker Follet, when she said that Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led.  Follett also maintained that. “The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.”

It is clearly evident from the definitions above that, without effective leadership, organizational activities would be un-coordinated and devoid of unity and direction.  Second, leadership is a process, which comprises an ever-changing interplay of relationship amongst the leader, the led and the situation. This simply implies that leadership is a dynamic process, which must be adapted to the changing needs of supervisor, the work group and the varying situations in the environment for it to be successful. For instance, what makes for successful leadership during war may fail woefully during the time of peace and vice versa. To succeed therefore, leaders must adapt their style to the situation rather than expect the situation to adapt to their style. In this wise, the leader must continually scan the environment to know what traits and skills that are required in a given environmental context to influence the subordinates and adopt them. This is what is generally called the law of the situation. It requires the delicate balance amongst the leader’s skills, the led and the context.

 Challenges of Leadership towards Organization Growth

Growth is not an easy thing to come by. Every organization desires to grow; it is something for which most companies, large or small, strive. Small firms want to get big, big firms want to get bigger.  However, growth comes along with its challenges which leadership must face and surmount if it must grow. Below are some of these challenges:

Challenge of Managing Competition: Business organisations naturally co-exist with others as they pursue their mission in an industrial setting. Each player is locked in competition with the others in seeking to get and retain the attention of the market. Except where the market is not saturated with the products, for a firm to grow it would invariably have to diminish the market size of the other competitors. This is not an easy task and a tall order for leadership of organisation to cope with. Globalization, deregulation of most sectors of the Ghanaian economy and advancement in information technology further make the challenge of handling competition more daunting.

The Challenge of Management of Change and Uncertainty: Human beings by nature operate better in an atmosphere of certainty, predictability and stability. Paradoxically, the environment in which businesses operate is anything but stable. The rule is change. This variableness has been there but has assumed a turbulent profile lately. The premise for projection and planning quickly changes soon after the planning. Demands and expectations of the stakeholders – government, society, employees, market, etc – are more than ever before, very volatile. So a major challenge that faces leadership across organizations is to acquire the skill of maintaining focus amidst change and direction in the face of chaos and/or instability.

The Challenge of Innovation: The twin-forces of globalization and advancement in Information Technology have made innovation the rule of competition across various industries. To survive, let alone growing, leadership has the onerous task of creating and introducing new products. For organisations, which desire leadership in the market, this is a must. In the face of increase in the expectation of customers and the high technology-driven society, anything short of new products and new methods of delivering them will not suffice. Therefore, organizations must get innovative or get dead, as opined by Peters (1990).  This challenge requires huge amount of money set aside for research and development activities.

Challenge of Maintaining Industrial Harmony among Organisation Members: Growth comes with increase in complexity. It also makes the work environment take in more people with diverse backgrounds, opinions and proclivities. All these will lead to conflict of interests. Growth inevitably comes with control problems. The tendency for cliques and sectional groups with diverse interest to emerge becomes very high. All of this will thrust the leadership with the challenge of attaining industrial harmony. That is why, the larger the organisation the more the leadership requires integrative and industrial relations skills.

 The Challenge of Building Capacity for Growth: Growth comes with demands for increased capacities in various areas. Diverse skills and expertise are required as organisations grow from small to big ones. Capital needs grow tremendously as well. 


The Challenge of Meeting the Demand of the various stakeholders: As organisations grow, their activities start impacting on a wider spectrum of people. Growing organisations attract the attention of government and the communities where they operate more than smaller ones. Diverse persons and group who finance the organisation take greater interest in the welfare of the organisation than they should have ordinarily. All these stakeholders make claim on the organisation in one-way or the other. Governments ask for more tax revenue, the community demands that the organisation be more socially responsible, and yet workers and shareholders ask for increment in salaries and dividends. These conflicting demands of the various stakeholders become a major source of challenge to the leadership of such organisations. 


Leadership Responsibilities for Promoting Organisation Growth in the Face of Challenges

For leaders to move organisation along given line towards its destination, they must perform a number of responsibilities including the following:

Visioning and proactivity: Leaders must peer into the future to interpret with clarity the direction the organisation should head in order to attain its objectives. In practical management language, it entails birthing of clear mission statement and crafting strategic plans. No organisation can grow beyond the vision of the leadership. This is what Steven Covey (1989) calls ‘Proactivity’ – taking initiative and dictating what happens rather than reacting to things after they have happened. These documents (mission statement and strategic plans) will encapsulate the kind and the level of growth that should be pursued.

 Aligning others to the vision: Sequel to vision development is the task of getting other organisational members to share the vision. This is very critical. A failure at this point will jeopardize the attainment of the vision. People are not motivated to put in their best unless they fully understand and own the vision. To do this effectively, leaders must ‘lead from the front’. They should match their words with positive corresponding behavioural actions that are in line with the professed vision.

Mobilizing resources for the pursuit of the vision: Once the vision is shared and accepted by organisation members, the next responsibility of leadership is to mobilize the resources for the pursuit of the vision for the growth of the organisation. Resources span human, financial and other capital goods like buildings, machines, etc. This is vital because growth is synonymous with capacity building, which mirrors the resource profile of an organisation.

Motivating staff into action: This is a very vital responsibility of leadership when it comes to organization growth. It is necessary to craft vision, share it and mobilize resources for its pursuit, but if the staff who will implement the vision are not sufficiently motivated to run with the idea, then the likelihood of realizing the essential thrusts of the vision will be remote. So a vital aspect of the leaders’ role is to motivate workers. Another word for motivation is empowerment. This could come in the form of good pay, participation in decision making, facilities to work with, praises, challenging job, to mention but a few.

Evaluation and control: It is the responsibility of leadership to pause in the course of the work to appraise things and ensure that everything is working towards the desired goal. Distraction and bottlenecks are identified and done away with; where necessary, corrective actions are taken to move things in the right direction.

Adopting/Implementing Generic Strategies for Organisation Growth

Growth strategies usually involve the means and ways to attain significant increases in performance objectives (Thomas, 1988). These objectives in a typical business organization include, but not limited to, increase in market share, sales, profit, etc. There are basically two broad categories of growth strategies. According to Wheeler and Hunger (2000) they are called concentration and diversification. On the other hand, Thompson (1993) calls them internal and external growth strategies respectively. The three types within these two broad classifications forms the discourse below:

Intensive Growth Strategies: This is one of the internal strategies, which lead to expanding the market coverage of the products of the same organisation. This can be achieved via:

Market penetration: this is usually used when new products are being introduced or when 
the same products are taken to new markets. It entails entering into markets that are hitherto under the control of other competitors. In most cases people penetrate by lowering the price variable so as to attract the loyalty of customers who used to be with other providers. 


Product development: this is substantial modification of an organization’s present products or services to increase their market penetration within the same market group.

Market Development: this entails an organization finding entirely new markets for its existing products. In some cases, it might require extending the products to various areas and regions where the products were not hitherto in use. 


Integrative Growth Strategies: This is one of the external growth strategies which essentially occur when an organization widens the horizon of its operation by doing what others used to do, it has three variants: 


• Backward integration: This happens when an organization either acquires or does what its 
suppliers used to do. A typical example is when a bakery firm decides to invest in 
manufacture of flour, which is its major factor input. 

• Forward integration: This occurs when an organization takes over the activities of its 
 This can be done by acquiring the firms that used to distribute or form a parallel 
distributional channel.

• Horizontal integration: This entails a firm acquiring or merging with one or some of its 
major competitors. The merger between Tigo and Aitel in Ghana and Facebook and Watsapp in America are typical examples of horizontal acquisition. 

• Diversification Growth Strategies: This is another external growth strategy and entails branching out into new product manufacturing entirely. It has three types: 

• Concentric Diversification: This is the type of branching out that is not a clear departure 
from the previous product line and/or market. An example of this is if a bank diversifies into a mortgage or an insurance firm. Though a new service line from banking they belong to the same industry and make use of the same expertise. 

• Horizontal Diversification: This happens when an organization branches out into an entirely different technologically based product line but meets a complementary need of the same target market. A restaurant may add bar to its service line for example. 


Conglomerate Diversification: This is a diversification that requires marked departure from the present market, product line and technology of the company in question. An example is when a bank branches out into motorcar manufacturing.

To infer, organisations have a soul reflected by its leadership. It is the wheel, which drives organisation to its destination and creates the milieu of enthusiasm, optimism and inspiration among organization members as they collectively pursue joint goals. It has been the missing link in the governance of our dear nation Ghana and indeed, most Ghanaian organisations. The consequences of poor leadership are too fatal for any organization, nation or group to ignore. It is on the strength of the foregoing that CILG is rooted and therefore saw the need to provide training to organizational leaders in many different areas including the present topic under discourse.

About the Author:
Mr. Ibrahim Alhassan, FCILG is the Editor of Leadership and Governance Magazine. He is also a Data Analyst at University for Development Studies (UDS), Tamale, Ghana.

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