This is the fourth coaching letter in a series offered as part of my regular column. It responds to real questions managers in small or medium enterprises have asked me. Both company and individual information has been disguised and sometimes blended with others to be relevant to more people. In previous columns I described taking a first management role and then moving into more strategic responsibility for a function. Now we look at taking full profit and loss (P&L) responsibility for a business unit. In a small company this would usually go with being CEO, but in this case the person I am writing to has been given full P&L responsibility to create a new unit within the company. The company has about 100 people. The current focus on wholesale customers will continue, and the new business unit will package smaller amounts and sell directly to consumers. I wrote: Congratulations! Now you get the chance to test yourself against the “bottom line” criterion of business: can you create a sustainable return on investment? Increased autonomy brings great opportunities and some threats. Although your colleagues in the top team are really supportive (a rare gift!), in a sense you are on your own. In creating a whole new market for the company, you will have to gather data, compare alternative strategies and choose one, implement fiercely, stick with the task even when no one is noticing, and justify your existence by increasing cost efficient revenue. Then you should add your legal, social, ethical and environmental responsibilities – as a leader you join all other leaders in influencing society, whether or not you are aware of it. The position brings huge opportunities for growth. You will develop even greater self-reliance. You will need to grow a new network with the most senior members in the industry and beyond, including government. You will develop heightened judgement. The strategic “helicopter” view is wider, longer and deeper and requires noticing things you may not have looked at before. Strategic matters include the competitive landscape; social, cultural, political and economic trends with implications for at least five years into the future; legal requirements in each jurisdiction you work in; and environmental considerations. You cannot rely on anyone else to make things happen, so initiative is important. You will need to devote time to thinking; it’s part of the job. Leadership requires being comfortable with paradoxes and trade-offs. You have to balance short term and long term results. You will need to allocate resources and resolve the competing demands of your team. You will have to be both implacably hard on performance and affirming of people, as your success depends on their commitment and competence. And you will want to build capacity in the team so the unit thrives after you leave. Success also requires leading yourself. You will make mistakes, but as leader you cannot afford to give up or fall apart. What are the possible personal challenges? It can be lonely. Find yourself a good mentor or a few trusted peers to bounce ideas off and to generate energy. People will relate to you differently – as the boss rather than yourself. Being new to the role, you have to balance portraying confidence while learning as fast as you can from everyone around you. There will be times when you feel anxious – “Will I cope? Is this taking me where I want to be in my career? Am I aligned with what is expected of me?” Your success will be partly dependent on factors beyond your control, like market conditions. But this is the opportunity your career has prepared you for. So enjoy it! Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 25 July 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-07-25-jonathan-cook-bonuses-and-burdens-of-being-a-boss /). If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

In this series on coaching managers in SMEs I have moved up the ladder of seniority. This time I look at when to leave as the leader of the company. The person I wrote this to co-founded a successful venture with a staff approaching 100 people located in six countries across Africa. So it is no longer small or a start up and is structured for the next big leap in growth. Some founders stay too long; others leave to soon. Which is he? I wrote: You mentioned that you would need at some point in the future to consider stepping aside to allow someone to bring different skills to the company. You are creative, have ideas, and enjoy initiating new things, but you don’t think you are so good at keeping things going over the years. You don’t resonate with the corporate world and don’t get around to networking at the top level. Nor are you excited by negotiating corporate deals. To become the kind of leader who can guide a larger company would take a lot of learning. That is an interesting challenge and would extend your influence; but is it worth it? Then you need to consider your own physical and cognitive health. You are already past normal retirement age. That in itself is not a problem – even older people have complex jobs like presiding over countries. But both age and length of tenure can dissipate the passion with which you began, and energy percolates from the top to infect the whole company. Do your colleagues need the vitality and fresh vision of a new person? You regard yourself as steward of the vision and values that inspired the founding of the company. Have you built them sufficiently deeply into the DNA of the company that it will survive your leaving? Or is there still more to do? Guiding values last longer than strategy. Strategy must change as circumstances change, but values and the company culture they create provide both the true north that informs strategy and the foundation on which effective performance is built. Possibly the biggest legacy you can leave is a robust, deeply-held company culture built on values to which all staff are committed. Culture is created through symbols, words, stories, actions, consequences, recruitment, training, and continual two-way communication. What people talk about and do habitually should be soaked in the values. Is there a potential successor? Although you could recruit from outside, that is risky. So I think there should be at least one person internally or on the board that you would be happy to hand over to. Don’t leave succession to chance. What about your personal aspirations? What competing commitments do you have that could take the place of this company in your daily life? If you don’t have any, you should begin creating at least one! Renowned management author Peter Drucker suggested that everyone should have a “second career”, in the form of a hobby or involvement in a social cause. He suggests beginning it in mid-career, so it is ready for your retirement or even earlier as a new career. Retirement will leave a big gap in your time, your relationships, and even in practical things like keeping current with the latest technology and vocabulary. For example, would you ever have subscribed to Zoom for family and social events, had you not required it for work? Several of these considerations that can influence the decision to move on require preparation. The time to begin thinking about exit is years before it happens. So whatever your decision now, do begin preparing! Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 22 August 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-08-22-jonathan-cook-deciding-when-to-go/ ). If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

I wonder whether paradoxically getting too involved in your own business could actually damage it. The proverb, “If you want to go fast, walk alone. But if you want to go far, walk together” can be applied to business: If you want to grow fast and exit, and have the energy to carry every detail in your head, do it yourself. But if you want to build a sustainably growing business, you need colleagues committed to the same vision as you. And you need to create space for them to take initiative. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but I have seen leaders work so hard that others slack off or just focus on their own function without thinking about the company as a whole. It is contrary to efficient human nature to worry about things you know someone else is covering. I think I saw this on a country scale on a recent visit to Kigali in Rwanda, where the equivalent proverb could be, “If you want to develop fast, be an autocrat. But if you want to develop a sustainable country, be a democrat.” Kigali has spotlessly clean streets, paving for pedestrians, cycle tracks, and well-tended, irrigated gardens on the roadside and in the median strips. The city surprises visitors from other African countries and encourages them to believe that this sort of civic quality is possible on our continent. So well done to the government, that tends to be quite autocratic. On the other hand, Rwanda is one of the poorest countries in the world, and infrastructure in rural areas lacks the Kigali standard. That’s hardly surprising, given its history. I came across some really bright, energetic and competent people in responsible positions, but again unsurprisingly, it struck me that many ordinary people tend not to speak out or take initiative. So having plucked the low-hanging fruit of development in the form of the beautiful capital city and relatively thin layer of well-educated managers, the next challenge is to empower the mass of people – and by definition that doesn’t happen by exercising power over them. Returning to business, one should offer training, resources and opportunity, but will the people make use of them? Personal initiative has been shown to be at least as important as business knowledge in the success of small businesses. Personal initiative is not something one can force onto people; it comes from within once the barriers are removed. All organisations need direction, energy and resources. Effective autocratic leaders provide direction, but cannot be sure that others share that commitment; they provide energy, but only as far as their direct influence extends; and they provide resources only by their personal ability to attract support. Their effectiveness is limited by their capacity to enforce followership, and it seldom survives long after the leader leaves. Empowering leaders provide direction by coordinating and leading a shared commitment to an agreed goal; they provide energy by example and by removing barriers to enthusiastic participation; and they provide resources by attracting talented people and then getting out of their way. It’s often a slower process, but I think it lasts longer and brings more happiness to the workplace. Jonathan Cook is a Counselling Psychologist and Chairman of the African Management Institute. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 20 September 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-09-19-jonathan-cook-encourage-initiative-if-you-want-to-go-far-together/ ) #JonathanCook

I ate crickets last month. They came crispy in three flavours at a stand at an agricultural conference in Kigali. I preferred the salt and vinegar flavour, so was given a packet of them to bring home. Not sure my family is as keen to sample the little insects. Food systems and food security are important in Africa just now. With fertilizer supplies disrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, wide spread weather disruptions, fuel price increases and infrastructural challenges, many people are in danger of starving. Even without these challenges, aggravated increasingly by climate change, it is anomalous that Africa with its vast agricultural potential should be a net importer of food, and that maybe a quarter of the population is malnourished. So we need innovation, whether that be in the form of harvesting insect protein, improving the yield of more conventional crops, or finding more efficient routes to better markets. There are indeed many examples emerging of innovative technology solutions (agritech), such as bringing connected devices to farmers to help them analyse their soil and weather conditions and provide just the amount of water and fertilizer their seeds need. The logistical challenge of getting food from field to fork sometimes seems intractable. In many countries half of food is spoiled before it can be consumed. Innovation here may not require technology so much as political sophistication and negotiation – as in considering the entrenched interests of traders who buy the crops of smallholders for low prices, but provide an essential service in the form of credit for the next season’s inputs. Agribusiness deserves to be big in Africa, but so far it is only partly Big Business. The rest is smallholder farming supported by small, and often informal markets, logistics and other support services. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows agriculture still to provide about half the livelihoods in Africa – far ahead of the next biggest employer, which is the services sector. But if African agriculture and agribusiness are to approach the efficiencies enjoyed in more developed countries, we will need innovation at every link in the value chain. It’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs. I have been involved in a senior management programme for leaders in agriculture in government and industry across eight African countries. Participants formed 16 teams of five people each to tackle an actualproblem or opportunity in their country. One I really like is enabling the use of solar pumps to irrigate rice fields in Nigeria. It builds on the initiative of an entrepreneur who rents out solar pumps to small farmers who cannot afford to buy their own. The monthly rental is less than the increased value of yields, or the cost of fuel for pumps that run on diesel. This is a three-way win for the farmer, the entrepreneur and the environment, and most importantly, the idea looks economically sustainable. This is a neat illustration of entrepreneurship in the service of development. What participants in all the projects discovered (an insight each generation seems to need to discover afresh) is that to avoid repeating failed policies they had to leave their offices in the city and talk to the farmers and communities on the ground. The most helpful organ in creating innovative solutions that work has to be the ear. That leads us back to grilling little crickets as snacks. I don’t really think this alone is going to solve Africa’s nutrition problem, but many creative ideas can combine to have a major impact. The field is open for entrepreneurs. Investment in agritech in Africa is increasing, but it is still a small fraction of the billions flowing into fintech. Maybe the smart money should be looking now at agritech as the next big thing. Jonathan Cook is a Counselling Psychologist and Chairman of the African Management Institute. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 3 October 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-10-03-jonathan-cook-innovation-can-feed-millions-in-africa/ ) #JonathanCook

Everyone in South Africa is angry. This is an opportunity. The unemployed see their lives slipping away. Young people fear joining them. The employed fight about wages as the cost of living rises. Business people seethe about the failure of the basic services we need to run businesses. Everyone is fed up with load shedding and water cuts. And now the Transnet strike threatens our capacity to produce goods and/or access markets. Through no fault of their own, entrepreneurs see their dreams and their savings drain away. And it feels like those who should care just don’t. They seem to care more about selfish intrigues over position than they care about the livelihoods, health and happiness of the desperate millions they purport to serve. No wonder many people have moved beyond anger to blind fury. Anger is good if it motivates us to do something constructive. It is bad if it drives us to be destructive. It is wasted, just giving us ulcers and high blood pressure, if we do nothing but rant. Anger management is good, but tends to focus on reducing our anger and managing its impact on us. A better approach may be to harness anger for constructive action to change the conditions that made us angry. It takes great maturity to respond assertively. Assertiveness seeks a solution by expressing our views clearly and forcefully while listening openly and accurately to what others say. But the natural response is either to submit quietly and go away, or to fight back aggressively. Aggression insists that I am right and they are therefore wrong, and refuses to listen to their perspective. Both aggression and submission merely invite further aggression, making things worse. So one very constructive use of anger is to practise acting assertively. When our civil servants or politicians fail to serve the public, especially when this damages the poor and voiceless, we should be angry enough to act. That may include talking to the officials directly, provided we can do so decently, with basic respect for their humanity. It may include joining with neighbours to complain higher up. Most useful would be to mobilize the neighbourhood to step into the gap. Similarly, when company representatives are dishonest, we have the right, and the duty, to insist on proper service. If we do nothing, exploitation, lying and greed are assumed to be normal. That is what is happening. So let’s all refuse to allow this. Let’s at least make a commitment to a daily letter, phone call or visit to someone to affirm good work or call out the opposite. Most of us want our public life to be honourable and generous, so let’s say so loudly and let’s insist on ethical and generous behaviour in our companies and our social circles. One advantage of weak leadership is that it can generate energy and initiative among the rest of us. Now is such a time. Here is my assertive statement. The job of a leader or manager is to achieve the results you are employed or elected for, even if inconvenient or very costly to you. If you do this, you are a hero. But if you just don’t care and fail to maintain the machines / infrastructure / service you are responsible for, or leave people waiting in queues all day and night, you are a disgrace and possibly a murderer. If you appoint an incompetent or dishonest person to a position because they will support you or pay you, you are a traitor to our country. If you tilt tenders in favour of your family, you are a thief. You are not just bad at your job; you are destroying the country. Fix yourself. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 18 October 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-10-17-jonathan-cook-what-shall-we-do-with-our-anger/  ). Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

Infrastructure is critical for the success of all business, and in particular small businesses. This seems obvious, so why is infrastructure allowed to deteriorate? Looking after what we’ve got is usually a good deal cheaper than replacing it. A 2021 World Bank report estimated that poor maintenance and mismanagement of infrastructure cost households and firms in low- and middle-income countries at least $390 billion per year. In South Africa electricity provides a highly visible case study in the negative effects of poor maintenance. Neglecting to maintain power stations adequately years ago has cost the country billions in lost opportunities now. Similarly, small holes in the road that could have been repaired easily become big potholes that cost far more to repair, and damage tyres. Leaving storm water drains blocked leads to destructive flooding. Larger businesses may be able to generate their own electricity, use satellites for communication, and in some cases even build road or rail access to markets or suppliers – although all of this reduces their cost competitiveness globally. But small businesses have to rely on what is available. In India, a study of underdeveloped districts found that infrastructure maintenance grants to district authorities improved outcomes for rural microenterprises. Two infrastructural areas stood out for their effect on microenterprise success and employment: electricity and roads. If maintaining existing infrastructure is so obviously important, why is maintenance so often neglected? One reason for letting things deteriorate could be the incentive structure. Building new stuff is recognised, whereas the daily work of maintaining existing resources can pass unnoticed and unrewarded. Another reason is that maintenance budget allocations can be cut or siphoned off without anyone noticing for years. By then it is too late and the guilty party has moved on to destroy bigger things. A third reason may be that the importance of, and methods for, maintaining things can be lost as manager succeeds manager, especially when there is a rapid sequence of changes and new incumbents do not have time to absorb lessons from their predecessor or pass them on the next person. A fourth reason could be simple lack of experience, understanding or skill. These create what is called agency – the belief that you have the freedom, right and ability to act. As a child I was taught how to maintain my bicycle myself, and I expect that taught me later to service my car regularly and have the house roof painted before rust set in. Managers without a sense of agency will wait to be told what to do – the opposite of what is required of managers. Fifthly, one fears one answer may be that politicians and officials focus on who gets to control what, and forget that the purpose of their jobs is to make things work in service of the people. Do they know that their distractions are destroying lives and livelihoods by the thousand? It’s a slow, quiet bleeding to death of the economy, denying people food on the table and dignity in the heart. Politicians and officials who believe that their role is just to drive the vehicle of state in a direction they choose, and not to maintain it, destroy our future and will eventually find themselves without a vehicle worth driving. So alongside important calls for investment in infrastructure, let’s hear more about maintaining what we have. This should be prominent in budgets, in training officials and politicians, in what is reported on and rewarded, and in what the media watch. And each of us can check the sense of agency among our own staff. What goes wrong at a national scale provides a sobering lesson for business owners to ensure that they and their teams take responsibility to maintain capacity for the future. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 1st November 2022 (https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-10-31-jonathan-cook-maintaining-infrastructure-should-be-higher-on-the-agenda/) Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook

British psychologist Claudia Hammond has written a book called The Keys to Kindness, in which she documents the many health and happiness benefits of kindness to both the recipient and the giver. She was inspired to write this by watching the many acts of kindness that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Do you remember the paradoxical hopes we had during the depths of lockdown – that things would return to normal quickly, but also that normal would change? We glimpsed a world of quieter, cleaner cities with wild animals strolling through the streets. We enjoyed more family time and discovered new hobbies like the famous banana bread. We reflected on life and death and determined to live our lives in future with greater attention to meaning and especially to relationships. We dreamt of a world where the nations could come together in a shared urgency to overcome a threat to humanity. If we could do this against the coronavirus, why not against climate change, hunger, war and oppression, gender-based violence, child abuse and trafficking? From her research Hammond notes that kindness benefits the recipient, but also brings the giver happiness, health, even longer life and physical strength. And the effect on the giver is longer lasting than on the recipient. It is a healthy thing for everyone to be kind. In one study, when given money and told to spend it either on themselves or others, those who spent it on others turned out to be happier than those who spent it on themselves. There is evidence that older people who volunteer live longer. She defines kindness as doing something with the intention of helping someone else. Kindness can be expressed in small daily acts like smiling at or greeting someone, doing a small favour, bringing someone tea, noticing how others are feeling, including them in the conversation, listening with focused attention, affirming something another has done or said. Of course there are heroic acts of kindness too, but we don’t get to do those every day. Toddlers express kindness, even before they develop “theory of mind”, which is the capacity to understand what another person is thinking or experiencing. There seems to be an instinct for kindness and our brains reward us for it. Why do we hesitate to offer kindness? The biggest reason cited is apparently embarrassment. We don’t want our gesture to be misinterpreted. We need more courage to risk being kind! Kindness goes with confidence. Do you remember doom scrolling through the pandemic? The antidote was to ration exposure to news about infection rates and focus instead on the care shown by medical staff and indeed our neighbours. Similarly, we can take care to attend to positive acts of kindness while rationing our attention to bad news. Seeing kindness stimulates more kindness. So we can increase acts of kindness in others by demonstrating it ourselves. Kindness can spread through an organisation by the influence of a kind leader. Not only do givers and receivers of kindness feel better, but apparently they also report increased job satisfaction. Hammond reports an experiment conducted in Spain in which each week for four weeks, staff planned five acts of kindness for colleagues. Life satisfaction increased for both givers and receivers. A month later, the effects had worn off for the recipients, but continued for the givers. Maybe the job description of those of us who lead organisations should include organising to spread kindness. We could recruit colleagues to join us in spreading random kindness and senseless acts of beauty, as Anne Herbert suggested in her 1993 book. There are web sites with practical ideas for spreading kindness. That would be one way to fulfil our pandemic- inspired commitment to make a better world. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 15th November 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-11-14-jonathan-cook-spread-a-little-kindness-yes-even-at-work/ ) Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook

In my last column for the year, instead of adding to your beach booklist, I thought I would give you a challenge to augment your intelligence. ChatGPT was launched in November as the latest prototype from the artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI. It responds to requests in conversational English, allowing even non-techies to use AI. As a temporary research preview it’s free, but unlikely to be free forever. ChatGPT has been taught with information up to 2021, so won’t have recent information, but is amazingly smart and helpful. You can ask it to answer questions on anything, write software for you, or even write you a column. This is still a prototype and not perfect (it can provide very convincing answers that are totally inaccurate), but great for getting to know what the future holds. You might just need to know what is coming to a business near you. As I write this, hordes of astonished journalists are also writing about it, or better still, asking it to write their columns for them. So I hope you aren’t sick of ChatGBT by the time this lands on your breakfast table. But I haven’t seen much about using it in small business, so I gave it this instruction: “Write a 500 word column on how ChatGPT can be used to support small businesses.” It replied very coherently, tempting me to use that as my column while I watched the World Cup. But being conscientious, I asked it to write the column in fewer words. It came up with: “ChatGPT is a language processing tool that can support small businesses in various ways. By integrating ChatGPT into their customer service platform, small businesses can provide quick and accurate responses to customer inquiries, improving satisfaction and reducing response times. ChatGPT can also automate routine tasks and processes, freeing up time for business owners and employees. For example, ChatGPT can automatically respond to common customer questions. Additionally, ChatGPT can provide personalized recommendations to customers based on their data and previous interactions. This can help increase sales and satisfaction. ChatGPT can also be integrated into a small business's marketing and advertising efforts, providing targeted campaigns and personalized messages. Overall, ChatGPT can improve customer service, automate tasks, and drive sales for small businesses.” That’s not bad – human columnists beware! Then I asked it: “Can you write a business plan for a consultancy advising businesses how to use ChatGPT in their businesses?” Its reply was perfectly cogent, but generic. So I replied, “Thanks. Specify that the consultancy includes a psychologist, a strategist, and a data analyst. We want to target fast-growing start-ups in developing economies.” It came back instantaneously with an impressive document with some good ideas. For example, under Market Strategy it wrote: “To reach our target market, we will focus on marketing to fast-growing start-ups in developing economies through a combination of online and offline tactics. We will create a website and social media presence to share information about our services and the benefits of ChatGPT. Additionally, we will attend industry conferences and networking events in these regions to connect with potential clients and build relationships.” One of my sons now uses ChatGPT instead of Google. The other linked it to DALL-E, an associated image generator, and is having fun asking it to write illustrated short stories for his young children in the mode of Dr Seuss. So Google ChatGPT and try it over the break. It requires no expertise and might just write you a business strategy for 2023. I wish you the deepest peace over this season of joy. The economy has been remarkably resilient, despite all the theft and silliness that has been thrown at it. May you too be resilient and thrive in 2023. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 13 December 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2022-12-13-jonathan-cook-artificial-intelligence-is-coming-to-small-business-near-you/ ) Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

As we begin the new year, most of us return from the beach with restored energy and stirring visions of what we can accomplish at work. So what actually would be wonderful to accomplish this year? I don’t know whether organisations filled with empathic people do better on the bottom line than those ruled by envy, cruelty, spite and revenge (although I suspect they do), but they surely contribute far more to human happiness. Is happiness not a great return on investment to put alongside the financial return? Of course, in the year ahead we have to find ways to grow margins, keep costs under control and explore new sources of revenue. That’s our job. But it’s a much better and more enjoyable job when we also grow talent, keep conflict under control and explore new ways to add to human and environmental health and happiness. After all, why should words like joy and happiness not be part of our strategic goals? And why should encouragement, affirmation and forgiveness not form part of our plan? It may not be taught in the textbooks, but leaders transcend theory to promote what is of absolute value. In his 2009 book, Empathic Civilization, Jeremy Rifkin uses the words empathy and entropy to represent the conflict between good and evil that humans have recognised from pre- history. Rifkin uses “entropy” to represent the threatening planetary collapse of ecological and human systems through unsustainable use of energy, weapons of mass destruction, exposure to disease, etc. But he draws on research to suggest that humans are naturally wired for empathy rather than aggression and self-interest. He even suggests that we are entering an Age of Empathy, if as a species we can win the race against the forces of entropy. This is on the global scale. Few of us have the opportunity to impact countries, never mind the destiny of the human species; but all of us can influence our colleagues. Paradoxically we might succeed better if we don’t mention this goal of love too explicitly. When the boss says, “Thou shalt spread love and happiness”, staff will cynically look for the catch and may fake their commitment to the boss’s wishes. They may begin competing with the practised warmth of their smiles, snidely exposing the hypocrisy in their rival’s altruism, instructing their reports how to fake empathy, and adopting all the right vocabulary. The cynical result could be worse than honest meanness. Instead we can simply be the different company we dream of, creating conditions in which empathy can thrive and, when appropriate, finding sincere words with which to encourage others. Is this utopian? Not at all. I have seen it emerge in several companies I have been fortunate to be associated with. Of course it is never perfect, but with persistent, patient emphasis, people begin to relax into a way of being that almost all of us prefer. In his book Human Kind: A Hopeful History, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman systematically debunks the reports on which many of us base our assumption that human nature is essentially selfish. He argues that, despite the corrupting effect of power, the evidence points to human nature being innately good and decent. He urges us to own our desire to be kind. Even if empathy does not contribute to the bottom line, what a wonderful contribution to make with our lives this new year. And maybe if enough of us quietly spread goodness it may infect the country and make 2023 the watershed when we turned the corner back to being a good country that cares for its people. Let’s assume this is our shared nature. What a wonderful vision with which to infect our own minds and the thoughts of our colleagues this new year. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 17 December 2022 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-01-17-jonathan-cook-use-2023-to-infect-your-workplace-with-empathy/ ) Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

Few of us are complete leaders. Most of us need at least one other person to complement our strengths and correct our weaknesses; but this complementarity requires trust. Sol Kerzner was a very successful entrepreneur, with Sun City as physical evidence. But I was told he needed someone to come after him as he moved through his company like a whirlwind shaking everyone up. Their job was to restore the shattered egos and damaged souls Kerzner left in his wake. President Mandela made the time to lead us so successfully because he left the daily running of the cabinet and government in the hands of his deputies, De Klerk and Mbeki. They had the management and implementation skills to complement his leadership genius. I wonder how much more effective Mbeki might have been later as president, had he been accompanied by a trusted lieutenant with an instinct for reading the mood of the people and relating comfortably with us. President Ramaphosa has a wonderful talent for listening and incorporating diverse and even contradictory views. He can steer turbulent groups towards consensus around a plan. It’s unusual to have someone with that as his prime ability at the head of a country or organisation, but it could be very effective – if he had a deputy who could ignore other opinions and push through the implementation of that plan with vigour and unrelenting determination. Could Paul Mashatile do that job as deputy president? Well, that introduces a key factor affecting the success of such a two-some – they have to trust each other. That’s not so easy in politics, where the number Two is likely to be eyeing and agitating behind the scenes for Number One’s job. But trust is a far more important factor in both business and political success than just the role it plays in leadership complementarity. Trustworthiness is required for any organisation to achieve its purpose. Just look around you for evidence. In South Africa, we lack electricity and a functioning rail network because people could not be trusted to put their responsibilities above personal gain. Basic services collapse because we can’t trust the officials to use our taxes for what they are intended. Coalitions fail to deliver because politicians focus on positions rather than delivery, stabbing each other in the back at the slightest hint of advantage. Who taught them ethics? Where is their social conscience? The more I learn about management, the more I notice how important trust is. Individuals may be productive while being untrustworthy, but an organisation or a country will not deliver its mandate if it is not led by trustworthy people. Without the assumption that our leaders in business and politics are reasonably trustworthy we stop doing our best for the collective and focus only on what benefits ourselves. Even worse, the assumption gains ground that we are not even expected to give our best for the welfare of all. We could interpret the current national malaise as a breakdown in trust. We no longer trust those in positions of authority, and our falling expectations become a self- fulfilling prophecy. Have we given up? I still believe that the majority of people are basically decent, caring and mostly honest citizens. Where this is affirmed, the quality of service we receive is overwhelmingly wonderful. That should be the norm and we shouldn’t settle for less in ourselves or others. If I had a second shot at my MBA teaching career I would emphasise, even more than I did, the imperative to be trustworthy. The question is not whether or not trust contributes to the bottom line; it’s whether we do all those things required for healthy profitability in a way that creates trust. Because without trustworthiness, the rest is wasted or worse. And it begins with me. This is a coaching columns for Business Day, published on 31 January 2023 ( https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2023-01-31-jonathan-cook-without-trust-the-nation-falls-apart/ ) Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

Niger is an interesting country. It is a democracy in a challenging neighbourhood, sharing borders with Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Algeria. It is on the list of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries. More than 10 million people in a population of 25 million live in extreme poverty. Despite 80% of its land being in the Sahara desert, its economy is based on subsistence agriculture and the export of raw commodities. Niger is also grappling with an influx of refugees fleeing conflicts in Nigeria and Mali. In this unpromising context, the government of Niger has a national programme to help women, most of whom have no education and are non-literate, to diversify their income-generating activities. Recently the government worked with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to run a large-scale field experiment to test the impact of adding psychosocial interventions to this national cash transfer programme (see the latest issue of VoxDev.org). The programme uses the methodology of BRAC, an impressive nonprofit organisation that began in Bangladesh fifty years ago, and now works around the world, including in seven African countries served from their regional office in Kenya. Beginning with micro-finance, BRAC has developed a wide range of programmes including what they call “ultra-poor graduation”. This is a holistic programme of enterprise training, coaching, healthcare, savings, a capital grant, and small monthly stipend over a limited period. To test the psychosocial intervention, the team offered group-based life skills training to one group of women in addition to the whole ultra-poor graduation, and to another group they offered it instead of the capital grant component. The training took place over seven half-days and aimed to strengthen their aspirations for economic mobility, their self-worth, and key life skills such as goal-setting, leadership, problem-solving, decision-making, and communication. They knew that building women’s personal sense of efficacy and skills without the support of their husbands, local leaders, and other people in their community would have limited impact on changing behaviour and economic outcomes, so they showed the entire village a twenty-minute fictional film that told the story of Amina, a woman overcoming economic and interpersonal challenges to start a new business. Then a social worker facilitated a guided discussion to relate the film to their experiences, values and aspirations. Over 18 months, adding the psychosocial components to the other interventions increased household revenue by approximately 70%. Offering it instead of the capital transfer component of the existing programme led to similar outcomes, but at half the cost of the capital grant. There are several lessons in this. One is the main finding that psychosocial interventions can have a substantial positive effect on the economic and psychological welfare of poor people. I expect the same is true for many less poor people too. When a nation or a company is feeling heavy, it needs lifting emotionally. Helping us feel empowered and encouraged is an intervention in the economy, encouraging small businesses to survive and thrive. Then there is the finding that targeting the whole community boosts the effect on individuals. There are further lessons. One is that governments can do great things when humble enough to work with experts searching for creative new solutions. Another lesson is that we can learn from countries like Bangladesh and Niger, countries we may consider less developed. In South Africa maybe Eskom and our long list of dismal failures will teach us humility and openness to such lessons. No doubt companies that compete globally should learn from developed economies like the USA. But for work with microenterprises run by people who may not be literate or numerate, we need to find lessons elsewhere. Sometimes those lessons come with very sophisticated thinking, and it would be tragic if hubris blinded us to their lessons and leadership. Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook

You may have noticed that the costs of going to the doctor, consulting a lawyer and enrolling for an MBA have increased relentlessly over the years compared to prices of things we buy in shops. There is a good economic explanation for this. New technologies bring productivity improvements (i.e. fewer people producing more) to manufacturing, farming, logistics and related activities, bringing prices down, while professional services like medicine, law and education rely on the time of experts. Their opinions take as long to deliver today as they did a hundred years ago. The key ingredient, the time of a doctor, lawyer, or teacher, cannot be condensed. Until now. Might artificial intelligence (AI) be the first technology to bring about a productivity revolution in the professions? To do so, AI will have to process professionals’ expertise to offer the same quality of advice in a shorter time or to more clients over the same time. History suggests that when technology helps fewer people produce more, this may reduce the number of people in the original jobs, but also increase employment in related fields. Take information technology. “Computers” originally referred to people sitting in rows calculating manually. Those jobs disappeared when machines were created that did the job much more quickly and accurately; but that created a huge number of software, hardware and administrative jobs, and it enabled us to do vastly more with the same resources. Might the same happen in services? Just as I expect far fewer accidents when self-drive cars finally take over, so I look forward to more accurate and comprehensive medical diagnoses using an AI app instead of (or better, with) my GP. I will have far greater confidence in the carefully prepared machine with access to the universe of medical knowledge, all the most recent research and my whole medical history, and without any of the biases, foibles and dodgy memory of the human. I might still want my GP to help me frame my questions and interpret the answers, and sometimes I may need a physical examination to feel things my smart watch can’t measure. But give me a machine any day for routine answers! As this will be available online, I expect I shall consult such a facility more often, without the barrier of making an appointment and traveling to see the doctor. And it will be cheaper. And maybe we’ll all spend more time asking how to be healthy than how to cure illnesses. We might need even more doctors to update the AI and help patients use it. Or we may have fewer, more expert doctors, with more technicians to run the machines and more nurses to hold our hands. I can certainly see the number of jobs growing. That’s how AI could improve productivity in one profession. What about education? We have already seen online learning take off, but what AI will offer is about as far from the old computer-based instruction as motorcars are from improved horse carts. Watch this space. What should small professional firms do about this now? Once a way is found to help chatbots stick to verifiable facts rather than making them up, the worlds of information search, knowledge management and learning will be transformed. Keep an eye on what Microsoft (Bing with improved versions of ChatGPT), Alphabet (Google with Bard) and several smart start-ups are creating that might either wonderfully enrich your practice or remove it entirely. Meanwhile, used wisely to supplement your work, with careful fact- checking, the tech can already give you a competitive advantage. It generally takes about twenty years for a new technology to yield substantial productivity improvements, so there is probably no immediate threat. But what opportunities are opening up for the entrepreneurially minded! Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit  http://www.africanmanagers.org/jonathan-cook #JonathanCook