'Employee engagement will drive passion and bottom line'

BEFORE leaders ask for a hand, they need to touch a heart.

Speaker on economics, author and director of various businesses Brand Pretorius inspired business leaders attending the Nelson Mandela Bay Leadership Summit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) Business School yesterday with this message on what makes a servant leader.

"Leadership matters – everything rises and falls on leadership. However, leaders need to earn the commitment, confidence and support of people."

He said it was not easy to inspire employees to volunteer their energy but that in his 40 years in business he had found a direct link between a lack of leadership and productivity and the levels of engagement with staff.

"You need soft skills to drive hard results. Servant leaders are bold not bullies, proud not arrogant, humble not timid, firm but also fair, rigorous but not ruthless and kind but not weak," Pretorius said.

Pretorius shared a time when he took over at McCarthy Cars and was responsible for 10 000 employees while the company was technically insolvent in 2001.

"I learnt a lot about leadership during those difficult days. We turned the group around within three years by investing in our employees. I spent my days going around to the branches and being inspired by the people," Pretorius said.

He said a good leader was the "light switch every morning – someone who engages, involves, respects, coaches and encourages employees. Leadership is not about charisma but about character."

Pretorius said the tyranny of an autocratic boss would cause employees to spend their days at work in darkness and that these types of leaders needed to acknowledge that leadership was not a right, but a responsibility.

"Good leaders see it as a privilege to lead. You can't demand or instruct people to have confidence in you. It is often easier to manage than to lead. Many businesses are over-managed and under-led. Leaders drive change and focus on tomorrow. Leaders inspire trust. Leaders do the right things and do things right," Pretorius said.

Another speaker, Human Resources consultant Prof Shirley Zinn, said throughout her years in human resources in the corporate and public sectors she had always tried to put the "human" back into human resources.

"Many leaders speak about people as the greatest asset of their businesses, but this does not reflect in their companies. We need to narrow the gaps between people's own values and those of their organisations, to get their happiness index up," Zinn said.

Zinn said if these values were not reflected in the business and lived by the leaders, employees became seat warmers, doing the minimum and being disengaged from the organisation.

"The human element has to prevail for organisations to be effective. We need to bring the element of humanness back into the organisation. The struggles people are facing are tough. Sometimes its just as simple as greeting employees," Zinn said. - Cindy Preller