Strategic Leadership: How the MBA Drives Organisational Success

The importance of leadership skills in business

Leadership is the action of leading individuals or a group of people within a business. Leaders can influence and guide followers toward a common goal and overall vision. There is often some confusion between the role of leadership and management. The former is typically inspiration-driven while management relates to coordinating resources. Discover more about The top 8 differences between managers and leaders.

Leadership skills are critical for business success. Here are some of the essential leadership factors that drive success within an organisation:

• Assists in navigating change and uncertainty: Leadership helps businesses mobilise in a changing market environment. They’re confident and make tough decisions when necessary to support the company in moving forward and remaining competitive.
• Promoting organisational culture: Leaders should inspire and motivate others to work towards common goals. They do this by building trust and driving clear and transparent corporate communication.
• Drive staff engagement and better productivity: They’re good at ideating new and efficient strategies and leading teams to implement them. Along with their vision and creativity, their ability to lead people creates an environment where work gets done and productivity is optimal.
• Effective conflict resolution: Leaders can handle conflict constructively and build strong relationships with employees, other managers, clients, and stakeholders. They’re excellent at facilitating collaboration and building strong teams.
• Strategic decision-making: They’re excellent at setting realistic long-term and short-term goals. This includes project goals, collaboration goals, and more to help the company grow in all areas.
• Inspirational: Leaders imbue authenticity and role-modeling behaviours. They impact their subordinates and inspire them to perform to the best of their ability.
• Proactive: Leaders are excellent at identifying possible problems and threats and taking precautionary steps to avoid those problems. This way, companies save considerable sums of money on situations that could have had a negative impact on the company.
• People-centred leading: They consider how their decisions affect employees, stakeholders, and clients. Leaders showcase high levels of empathy and will always try to do what’s best for their teams and the company.

5 Types of leadership skills enhanced by an MBA

An MBA can provide a solid foundation for building leadership skills in business. It can also contribute to expert knowledge, and personal development. Furthermore, leadership is multifaceted — meaning leaders can combine their unique skills and qualities with practical leadership approaches.

Some of the primary skills that Master of Business Administration will provide your employees are the follwing benefits:

1. Strategy-thinking: Strategic thinking involves considering the long-term results and making purposeful decisions to achieve these goals.An MBA will allow your employees to analyse data, market trends, and past project results. For example, the employee can analyse key performance indicators, such as sales due to specific marketing campaigns, to gain an understanding whether the campaign was successful. This helps the company or department see the ‘bigger picture’ and identify opportunities or solutions.
2. Communication: Communication involves verbal and written dialogue for articulating concepts, pitching ideas or proposals, difficult conversations, conflict resolution, and negotiations. The Master of Business Administration provides your staff with a superior communication skillset. This will afford them the benefit of conveying complex ideas clearly to a diverse audience and to listen appropriately clientor stakeholder concerns.
3. Decision-making: An MBA graduate is better positioned to make informed decisions because they can make sense of critical data. They can assess the risks and plot the best course of action for the business. They’ll often make these decisions based on analyses to ensure they base their decisions on facts.
4. Change management. Change is inevitable, especially in business. An MBA graduate has the skills and mindset to anticipate change based on their analysis of market trends and the ability to respond accordingly. They can also manage employee resistance to change by using their inspirational abilities to ease all concerns.
5. Ethical leadership. South Africa and its businesses have often been plagued by scandals of unethical behaviour and business practices, including fraud, lies, and corruption. A Master of Business Administration programme will foster the importance of ethics within the business. Graduates are afforded moral principles, ethical best practices, and social responsibility skills.

Training for corporate leaders

It’s highly advisable to invest in staff training should you wish to develop strong business leaders within a company. Once you’ve identified possible leaders within your organisation, you can look at different training for corporate options to equip these employees with adequate leadership skills. The Master of Business Administration is one of the most accredited postgraduate programmes. It can also be pursued by many graduates from business to engineering majors.

MANCOSA offers a wide range of programmes for corporate training, including:

• Postgraduate programmes such as an MBA Degree, a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Management, and more.
• Short business courses to enhance leadership skills, such as Emotional Intelligence, Communication in the Workplace, and High Impact Leadership.

Invest in staff training with MANCOSA

Leadership and management training is advisable for those companies looking to develop strong leaders in the business. With many training options, including long-term and short-term courses, you can improve individual leadership abilities or all these skills in a single course. MANCOSA’s MBA programme will turn your most promising employees into leaders who can help propel your business onto the road to success.