EP Perspective June 2017

EMERGING LEADER: FAISEL CHOUDHRY
‘Employees will be less
committed to organisations
in the future’ – is this true?
Faisel Choudhry MVO, is a rare man and potential future leader
to observe. He is still relatively young with a long road still ahead of
him, but this is a man who believes in learning and being open minded
to change. He has an impressive platform to build his career further
from, having already worked within organisations such as The Bank of
England and The Royal Household. He was appointed as a Member
of the Royal Victorian Order (MVO) in the 2015 Birthday Honours
Research from the 2020 Agenda indicates this
may happen, so do businesses need to re-assess
their approach to managing people and teams?
list, and has played active roles within both the Territorial Army (T.A.)
and within the Muslim community.
Faisel’s MBA Dissertation is entitled “Understanding the impact
of leadership and the role of emotional intelligence on organisational
commitment”. The objective was to understand the link between
leadership, emotional intelligence and the role these factors play in an
employee’s commitment to an organisation.
In Hospitality emotional intelligence is an important skill and
yet is not often written about in comparison to other key leadership
attributes such as vision, strategy and commercial acumen. It is for
this reason and the questions that the study poses, that has real value.
Faisel’s dissertation struck a chord as it does focus on a subject area
that EP has been writing much about in recent times – the importance
of Human Capital within a business and whether enough is really
done to develop this asset to maximise its potential. Faisel opens his
work with the comment:
“Increasingly organisations are competing in a global economy,
where competitive advantage through factors such as technology,
patent and product is temporary due to the increased pace of change
and competitiveness. Therefore, organisations need to look inwards,
to determine how they can make better use of the human capital
within their organisations, as increasingly more are reliant upon this
as means of competitive advantage than ever before”
It is the right starting point as there are no few research projects
stating that the percentage of people working on a freelance basis
within the next five years will stand at anything between 40–50%.
One has to wonder how organisations can expect to remain
competitive when it will become harder and harder to communicate,
engage with teams and bring them together to work with increased
commitment to the benefit of the organisation – and this has to be
the heart of the strategy. Regardless of Brexit, Britain needs to be
competitive on the world stage and this can only happen with great
teams working as one on behalf of their business. Surely a freelance
culture threatens to undermine this competitiveness?
One of the most common questions across boards throughout the
country is why are there not more young leaders breaking through and
replacing the baby boom generation?
EP has been debating this point in recent issues and there is a belief
that almost a generation has been lost through the 2000s with the
advances in digitalisation and with increased profitable businesses
until the crash of 2009. We arguably lost almost ten years of leaders
through reductions in training budgets and increases in processes,
technology and the management of risk. The result was that the
Faisel’s dissertation struck a chord
as it does focus on a subject area
that EP has been writing much about
in recent times – the importance
of Human Capital within a business
and whether enough is really done
to develop this asset to maximise
its potential. >
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