MERCHANT Finance says organisational culture remains a key barrier to innovation, despite ongoing efforts to transform its operations.
Speaking at a Leadership Fiji event held on Tuesday this week at Greenhouse Co-working in Suva, Merchant Finance chief executive officer Veilawa Rereiwasaliwa said culture posed one of the most significant challenges to implementing innovative leadership.
“The biggest threat to all of this and one of the biggest threats to innovative leadership is culture,” Mr Rereiwasaliwa said. He noted that driving change required deliberate structural adjustments and the recruitment of new talent across all levels of the organisation.
“I couldn’t do this alone. So, I brought in people from the market, starting from the leadership team all the way to the entry-level side.”
He acknowledged that resistance from within organisations often slowed progress. “It’s the people that say, ‘no, we’re not going to do that’.”
Mr Rereiwasaliwa also pointed to challenges encountered in rolling out a women-focused financing initiative that initially failed to reach its intended beneficiaries.
“In the first couple of months, they were actually providing finance to male-owned businesses.”
He said corrective measures were introduced to better target the initiative, and resulted in the doubling of the number of women-owned businesses.”
