Recently I had the opportunity to listen to a conversation between two people.
One of them started by saying: ‘Is this my responsibility?’ ‘Has this been escalated?’ or ‘Did I follow the procedure? And who approved of this?’ By contrast, the other person quickly asked: ‘What outcome is the institution trying to achieve with this action?’ ‘And what is happening to the customer?’ ‘By the way, what responsibility do I carry here?’ ‘And out of all these, what action protects the mission and integrity of the organisation?’
As I walked out of the conversation, my thoughts were running wild. But one thing kept on ringing in my mind, ‘Does the mission and vision of an organisation or an institute defines the types of leaders that heads that organisation.’
The discussion I listened to just confirmed one thing. Currently in Africa, most modern organisations are increasingly characterised by sophistication without coherence. They possess strategy documents, dashboards, reporting systems, governance structures, data analytics, performance indicators, and highly educated professionals. And to affirm that, meetings occur continuously.
And while reports are circulated zealously, the dashboards remain populated. Yet despite the intense activities, reports indicate that many organisations continue to experience execution fatigue. Strategic initiatives are slowed, frustration increases. And most of the time, individuals begin protecting functional boundaries rather than advancing shared mission.
And the key question is always asked is: ‘What have we lost it when it comes to ‘Leadership Role.’
This paradox raises an important question. We cannot all be leaders. The instinctive response is often attributed to failure to poor leadership. This has also made leadership become the dominant language of organisational discourse. Institutions have continued to invest heavily in leadership development.
Many bookshelves overflow with leadership literature. Conferences continue to celebrate visionary leaders. who have been celebrated. On the other hand, all employees are encouraged to become leaders. Yet this intense focus on leadership frequently obscures a more fundamental organisational reality.
Because of these challenges, we are now forced to look into scholarly ways of leadership. And what is coming out clearly is that ‘Leadership Execution’ is complex in many organisations. And it depends less on isolated acts of leadership, but more on the collective quality of followership distributed throughout the institution.
According to studies, this involves turning high-level strategies, plans, and institutional visions into actual, measurable results. It also focuses on aligning staff, resources, and daily workflows so that decisions are reliably converted into outcomes.
While it is truly clear that a strategic vision without organisational followership remains an aspiration rather than an operational reality, many institutions do not rise or collapse solely because of their leaders.
But experts argue that they rise or collapse because of the extent to which ordinary professionals throughout the system assume meaningful ownership of institutional purpose as opposed to enhancing leadership in the system.
And while mission ownership is fundamentally different from task completion, many institutions unintentionally create cultures of compliance rather than cultures of ownership. The difference therefore arises because compliance is externally regulated. It depends on supervision, enforcement, and monitoring.
And ownership, however, is internally regulated. It persists even when direct oversight is absent. The compliant employee performs assigned duties. An individual with mission ownership assumes responsibility for outcomes beyond formal obligation and this is what is called true leadership.
This distinction becomes particularly important in large, complex, and matrixed organisations. In such environments, execution failures rarely emerge because people are inactive.
More commonly, they emerge because organisational responsibility becomes fragmented. Individuals perform their assigned roles competently while losing sight of the larger mission connecting their efforts. Functions optimise locally while institutional coherence deteriorates globally.
And departments pursue metrics while organisational purpose weakens. While on the other hand, institutions become active yet strategically disjointed.
And within large matrix organisations where no senior leader can directly supervise every interaction, operational handoff, customer experience, or emerging problems, such institutions survive not because leaders’ control everything, but because enough individuals throughout the system exercise intelligent judgment aligned to mission.
Indeed, some of the most influential individuals within organisations possess limited formal authority yet exert enormous executional influence. They coordinate teams, stabilise relationships, sustain operational continuity, identify emerging problems, protect organisational culture, and preserve customer trust.
Often, these individuals are not the most visible members of the institution. Yet without them, organisational coherence deteriorates rapidly.
This insight reveals another important organisational truth. Institutions frequently overestimate the role of formal leadership while underestimating the importance of distributed stewardship.
Organisational resilience depends less on isolated heroic figures and more on whether enough individuals throughout the system experience themselves as custodians of mission rather than merely occupants of roles.
Yet human beings rarely sustain ownership indefinitely for missions they experience psychologically empty. This introduces the profound importance of meaningful work.
Execution excellence cannot therefore be reduced merely to strategy, structure, or managerial oversight. This reveals a critically important developmental insight that the purpose of organisational leadership is not permanent dependence. And as maturity develops, leadership itself must evolve.
And most important of all, time has come for many organisations in Africa to start adopting Mark O’Donnel theory of leadership where he describes that great leadership is not a personality trait.
And that the first meaning of the word leadership is how you show up, whereas the last ones are what you build. The whole thing points in one direction: away from you as a leader.