Lonehill - GOOD Thing, Bad Thing?

Imagine my surprise as I arrived at the LRA AGM venue last Wednesday at 8:10 p.m. (after wrapping up my own weekday business meetings) to find that the AGM meeting had finished after just 40 minutes.

Now there's a refreshing turn-up for the books: a +-R15 Millon p.a. community enterprise put to bed with minimal issues apparently raised from the floor.

I put this down to the timeous presentation and pre-circulation of the AGM financials and Chairman's Report. Well done!

I'm told that there were between 50 to 80 people present... and I wonder whether this reflection of public interest in the Lonehill community is a good thing or a bad thing?

Let's face it, Lonehill now appears to be pretty-well managed on the surface. A very welcome change from this time last year. The security presence seems reasonably alert. The environment is looking neatly maintained. There is an improvement in communications efforts. And the timely circulation of the annual financials and reports shows a measure of basic management skills that we all want to see.

These are GOOD things!

All of this may well have created a sense of comfort that 'someone else' has got things nicely under control, thank you. Making it easy to stay at home in front of the TV and warm fireplace, while others get on with the job. That would truly be a magnificent compliment to the immediate past Board and Chairman, if true. And, I sincerely hope it is.

However, even if true, if I were in the position of the current Chair, a personal mantra about communities that I developed from participating in and watching this initiative evolve would continually run through my mind:

'Apathetic Communities arise from Pathetic Leadership'.

This statement always served to remind me that the success of the original launching of the Lonehill Security Action Group initiative was founded upon the mass-inclusion of everyone who wanted to play a part - no matter how small. This was deliberately counter-intuitive to, and our unique differentiator to, the way that community associations had been run before.

Just days before the massively successful launch of this initiative, I was told by the then cash-strapped LRA that this community was too 'apathetic' to care. This cash-positive initiative swallowed up the LRA in a necessary merger for the LRA within the year.

So my concern as the current Chair - especially with the AGM feedback email also pointing to the fact that no new faces stood up to make themselves available as directors - would be as to whether I have over-managed the turn-around to the exclusion of others in Lonehill. After all, there is no point in doing a fantastic job of managing an enterprise back to health, only to have it collapse within a few weeks or months of the few remaining directors leaving it for whatever reason.

Too few people involved in the community-management processes is a bad thing in my view. It leads to the danger of the co-opting of like-minded thinkers, group-think-mentality, 'yes-wo/men' too scared to challenge autocratic command and control, and myopic assumptions leading to disastrous decisions. Where've we seen this before?

There is no greater legacy that a leader can leave than to have a quality management process and leadership succession plan in place to ensure a smooth transition of an enterprise to greater levels of growth.

In a clipping that I garnered some years ago from the Business Day, Steven Covey once identified four fatal mistakes that tend to occur in organisations.

1. 'The first mistake comes at the idea stage. All too often, good ideas are squelched by negative energy, self-doubt and fear. Without that core idea, the organisation has no purpose.'

2. 'The second mistake occurs in the production stage. It's hard to come up with a great idea, but even harder to properly execute it. This is where most new organisations fail — more than 90% within two years.'

3. 'The third fundamental reason for failure occurs at the management stage, as the founder tries to do it all, micromanaging to death. Formal systems are never set up to control company practices, especially cash flow. Even founders who concede they can't do it all single-handedly often sow the seeds of future failure by hiring “clones”, people who think the same way they do and who have the same strengths and weaknesses. But strengths become redundant and weaknesses are just multiplied.'

4. 'The fourth and final flaw occurs at the change stage. Initially successful organisations often fail to reinvent themselves and adapt to changing market conditions and new opportunities. They get so bogged down in their own bureaucratic cultures that they can no longer meet and anticipate the needs of their targeted customers.'

Says Covey: 'To survive and thrive over the long haul, organisations need to be led by management teams that are capable of perceiving and short-circuiting the critical threat at each stage of this cycle. Most importantly, a successful team must have a spirit of mutual respect, acknowledging and utilising the strengths of each member while offsetting the weaknesses of one by the strengths of the others.'

'Four different kinds of strength are needed: the strengths of an entrepreneur, a producer, a manager and a team-building leader.' 'Very few individuals possess all four of these strengths, which is why successful leaders must focus on those areas that are most vital to their specific roles and surround themselves with a team of people who will fill the remaining needs.'

'Every one of the four roles is vital, but in my experience most organisations are overmanaged and vastly underled.'

So what does this vested-interest observer believe are some key points of stimulation for thinking stakeholders and leadership in this community:

i. That the LRA leadership be motivated to bring together the widest array of key community stakeholders, decision-makers, interested parties to find ways to work TOGETHER to the maximum benefit of the community - a BIG indaba - no matter how pro- or anti-community they may appear to be. Every input in a collaborative environment will be valuable.

ii. That a solution be researched/proposed/developed whereby all community stakeholders be motivated to share the 'proactive community security service' load with equivalent parity.

iii. That openness and transparency should return to the reporting of critical performance figures and proceedings in monthly LRA Board meetings - after all, this is an OPEN community initiative and contributing stakeholders should be entitled to see how their directors represent their interests at such meetings.

iv. That marketing & communication efforts, whilst vastly improved in the past year off a piddle-poor base, offers greatest potential for significant quality improvement befitting of the size of this initiative.

Some numbers that we might like to know each month are (amongst others):

- The numbers of contributors by breakdown: individual households / complexes / enclosures / business etc.
- % of contributors vs. non-contributors related to total households in the LRA defined area
- % Revenue applied by contributor breakdown to PROACTIVE guarding force
- Possible vs. Actual contribution by total community households
- % allocation of community events revenues to reducing load on contributors
- Target revenue projections from special events/promotions/programs designed to reduce load on contributors
- % of emails that actually reach total no. of households
- etc.

Many of these figures we used to know in the main before they were taken behind closed doors... for obvious reasons, in my opinion, of becoming a little embarrassing to those tasked to grow them.

Finally, I was also told that some pointed reference was made at the AGM to the comments made by this writer on this forum as somehow not being in the community's best interests - and their apparently having proposed draconian actions be taken by the LRA to shut this forum down. Have no idea whether that is true or what such commentators might be referring to, but if they were referring to this writer then they are more than welcome to enter into open debate on their perspective on this forum and correct any statements they believe to be inaccurate in this forum. It's all about maturity of discussion and sharing of differing opinions.

I must say that I find it hugely amusing that almost every resident/stakeholder I have ever met in this community has almost always been scathing of the lack of open transparency exhibited by Political, Government and Municipal figures, and the same residents are almost always universally disgusted at and disapproving of the draconian clamp-downs on freedom-of-speech perpetrated by Hitler-, Amin-, Apartheid-, Mugabe-era style leadership as precursors of the very worst of societies disasters. I have yet to find one that openly stands up to declare their support of any of the above leadership-styles and/or their resultant cowardly acts of supression of contrary views.

And yet, we apparently still find some of these very same residents/stakeholders at local public meetings who seriously propose invoking the same draconian actions on anyone who dares to hold/make a different opinion or to make a comment that they might not like. A trifle hypocritical maybe?

This writer believes that Greater Lonehill has enormous potential to achieve so much more than it has so far... if that's being critical, well so be it. I happen to hold a different opinion... ;-)

Regards
Trevor Nel - 011 705-2790
Lonehill Resident