By Fadzai Hundu, Vice President of People & Culture, African Leadership University
For years, the continent’s economic conversation has centred on a familiar statistic: a rapidly expanding workforce and too few formal jobs. The African Development Bank estimates that roughly 12 million young people enter the labour market each year while only about 3 million wage jobs are created. By 2050, Africa will add another 740 million people of working age.
The conclusion often drawn from this is a skills crisis. But step inside many African organisations and a different reality appears. The capability is there. The drive is there. The willingness to work is not in question.
What fails is conversion.
Too often, organisations depend on exceptional individuals to compensate for ordinary systems. High performers carry teams, founders carry companies, and managers improve daily operations. For a while, this looks like resilience. Eventually, it becomes a ceiling.
Across growing African companies, three factors consistently determine whether organisations scale or stall: leadership capability, the design of everyday work, and diversity.
Three Critical Factors That Shape High-Performance Organisations in Africa
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Building a High Performance Organisation Starts with Leadership Capability
When performance dips, organisations often respond by adding strategy, targets, incentives, or headcount. In practice, performance issues usually originate much closer to the ground.
High performers are frequently promoted into management without preparation. Expectations remain implied instead of defined. Feedback becomes irregular or softened. Decision-making slows because authority is unclear and approvals move up the hierarchy.
This dynamic is not unique to Africa, but it is certainly amplified on the continent by rapid growth, cross border complexity, and uneven infrastructure. Gallup’s research reinforces this reality. Globally, only 27% of managers are engaged at work, down from 30% the previous year. That disengagement matters because managers shape the daily experience of work. When managers are underprepared, teams feel the effects immediately, and inconsistency becomes the norm.
Organisations that perform well take a different approach. They treat leadership as a practised discipline rather than a personality trait, investing in clarity of outcomes, coaching capability, shared accountability, and well defined decision rights grounded in transparent principles and effective policies.
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Designing Employee Experience to Enable High Performance
Employee experience is often discussed as engagement or satisfaction. In high-performing environments, it functions as performance infrastructure.
People move faster when they understand what they own, how success is measured, and how decisions flow. When growth pathways are visible and credible, effort compounds rather than dissipates.
When these conditions are absent, however, organisations pay a hidden tax. Work is duplicated, decisions stall, burnout becomes normalised, and high performers disengage or leave, often without signalling why.
Designing employee experiences well does not mean making work comfortable or easy. It means making performance sustainable. It is the difference between sprinting and running a marathon, with the long view in mind.
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Inclusion Beyond Tokenism
In pan African organisations, diversity is unavoidable, though it may look different from what is commonly meant by diversity in the Global North. Inclusion, however, is a choice.
Too often, inclusion is treated as a reputational exercise rather than an operational need. Tokenism may give you a seat at the table, but you will have no real voice. You may be present and possibly visible, but you will have no real influence or power. The cost of this failure rarely appears in dashboards or reports, but it shows up clearly in missed risks, unending gossip mills, narrow decision making, and disengaged teams.
Inclusion that drives performance is deliberately built into systems. You can create spaces where honesty and constructive feedback are the norm, while maintaining high standards. You challenge ideas because of the way of working, not because of awkward encounters. When people trust that their perspective matters, and that growth is fair, decision quality improves.
In this sense, inclusion is not a moral add on. It is a performance strategy.
The Leadership Choice That Will Shape Africa’s Growth
Africa’s growth presents leaders with a familiar tension between what we can do and what we should do. We can scale quickly, adopt new technologies, and expand across borders, but without thoughtful design, growth becomes fragile.
The organisations that succeed will be those willing to invest in the unglamorous work of building leadership capability, reducing friction in the employee journey, and embedding inclusion into decision-making.
The ALU Difference
At the African Leadership University, we have built our learning model around this reality. Across our undergraduate programmes and our School of Business postgraduate offerings, including our hybrid Executive MBA, leaders learn while remaining in the flow of work.
Our belief is straightforward: talent flourishes when organisations are designed intentionally, and performance improves when leadership is developed alongside execution rather than apart from it. Leadership is practised deliberately, and growth is measured in outcomes rather than intention.
What we observe consistently mirrors what organisations experience in practice. Performance scales when leadership capability is built intentionally, employee experience enables execution, and inclusion moves beyond tokenism into system design. Our focus on real-world readiness is reflected in outcomes such as students securing more than 4,000 internships across 400 organisations.
Africa does not lack talent. It needs environments designed for performance. The leaders and institutions that understand this will shape the continent’s next chapter of growth. The question is not whether we have the people. It is whether we are building the systems they deserve.
