The sustained quest for effective leadership in the pension has put the Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PenOp) on the track to nurture leadership masterclass in conjunction with Philips Consulting.
The masterclass which is part of PenOp’s monthly knowledge sharing session was tagged ‘Leading Self, Leading the Business, and Managing an organization.” The session was facilitated by Paul Ayim, who is a Senior Partner at Phillips Consulting Limited with direct responsibility for the Digital Learning Strategic Business Unit (SBU). He has over 25 years of experience in sales, leadership, people transformation and other pertinent areas.
The session, with over 100 pension professionals, sought to highlight the need for leadership transformation. Chief Executive Officer of PenOp, Oguche Agudah set the tone for the session by emphasizing that a team, organization or nation cannot rise above challenges if there’s no good leadership.
Agudah noted that there are leadership challenges across the globe. These are lack of a culture of execution, inspirational leadership deficit, shifting attention from developing employees, failure in change leadership, silo mentality, and managing internal stakeholders. Going further, he break down to three steps needed to be taken to leading oneself, leading others, and leading the organization.
To properly lead yourself, you have to be self-aware, emotionally intelligent, and develop empathy for others. To lead others, you have to improve your communication skills, learn to coach in the moment, lead through change, and motivate others; and to lead a business, you have to have the skill of fostering a culture of execution, leading innovation, and being fast at problem solving and decision making.
Paul Ayim advised leaders to be accessible (open door policy), good communicators, ready to listen, not be dictatorial, praise and reward when it is deserved, and equally impose discipline when there has been wrongdoing.
The CEO of PenOp challenged the participants to rise up to the leadership challenges in their organizations and the nation at large. He said Penop will continue to organize sessions that add value to industry, organizations and nation.
