‘Banking sector needs servant leaders’

19 Jan, 2020 - 00:01 0 Views
‘Banking sector needs servant leaders’

The Sunday Mail

Enacy Mapakame

What comes to your mind when Zimbabwe’s banking sector is mentioned?

For many, it is long queues, a difficult monetary environment for businesses, the ever-changing regulations and the nightmares of the “banking tsunami” of 2004/05, as well as that of the 2009 era when the economy dollarised and depositors lost their trillions and quadrillions of dollars.

While this will be the clientele’s perspective, imagine the bank employee who has to deal with the disgruntled clients. Bank tellers, in particular, have to interact with customers on a daily basis.

Some are enraged corporate clients who have due payments, or are inquiring about their forex allocations.

The management staff at banks need high emotional intelligence to keep their staff engaged and with high morale. Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional leadership or emotional quotient, is described as the capability to recognise an individual’s own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and then label them appropriately.

Good leaders then use this emotional information for the benefit of their respective organisations and the employees. They manage and/or adjust these emotions to adapt to the environment for the purposes of achieving goals.

Perhaps one can empathise with the professional, emotional and technical stress for banking’s managerial strata. In his book “Enhancing Leadership Performance Through Soft Skills”, Dr Jeskinus Mukonoweshuro explores what it takes to navigate through those challenges and thrive on them.

The book is a research based guide for leaders.

It improves their leadership skills through employing the fundamentals of servant leadership, which derives from the notion that a good and effective leader is a servant of his or her people.

Christian leaders across the globe cite Jesus Christ as the epitome of servant leadership, which is one of the most popular modes of leadership.

This method of leadership emphasises that a good leader should be a servant first before amassing power, thus there is need for collaboration between the leader and his or her people. Trust, teamwork, empathy and engagement are required to achieve better performance.

Dysfunctional, restrained and constrained leadership, where low servant leadership is exhibited, has a negative impact. Leadership goals are not met in such an environment.

 

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