NOMINATE COMPETENT PERSON TO MANAGE YOUR BUSINESS, ACE ANKOMAH TELLS GHANAIANS

By Joyceline Natally Cudjoe

A legal practitioner, Ace Kojo Annan Ankomah has attributed the non-sustenance of many family businesses in the country to ineffective leadership skills of successive managers.

Expressing worry over the phenomenon, he stressed the need for business owners to nominate competence persons to manage their business and protect their legacies.

The managing partner of the Bentsi-Enchill, Letsa and Ankomah (BELA) law firm was speaking on effective leadership at a breakfast meeting of the Union Ghana, a social club in Accra on Friday.

He said leadership was not about the quality of the individual at the helms of affairs but the team, stating that “if your business collapses when you die, you are not an effective leader.”

Mr. Ankomah, explaining the various leadership traits, said   they included coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pace setting and coaching leaders with their respective strengths and weaknesses.

He said for a leader to be effective, the various skills must be combined or a particular one adopted, depending on the circumstance or environment.

He said that the measure of good leadership was not based on how one managed a situation but the quality of the result that determines, saying “If you are a leader and you don’t get good result, you are not a good leader”.

Focusing on the story of the Biblical Joseph, Mr. Ankomah said some leaders were effective because they were “to comfortable” at home when they were growing up.

He charged members of the union to make wise financial decisions, control their tempers, among others to improve their respective businesses.

The president of The Union, Mr. William Arthur urged leaders to be strategic thinkers in order to become capable of sensing challenges ahead to pull out the right measures in overcoming those challenges.