This article explores the need to change the bureaucratic leadership structure which has bedeviled state-owned enterprises for many decades and how they compete in the 21st-century business environment where there are uncertainty and chaos. The SOEs suppose provide employment, meet social and political needs, and operate in the sectors of the economy that are of strategic importance to the state. Therefore, SOEs are critical to economic development in emerging economies. The pace of change confronting organizations today has added complexity to the organizational landscape and now calls for more flexible and adaptive leadership. Adaptive leaders can work more effectively in the unstable global business environment and are also able to adopt a proactive approach in order to keep abreast of the increasing stakeholder pressures in the enterprises. However, inadequate applicability of traditional leadership models has indicated the need to develop new leadership models to solve the complex organizational challenges. Hence complexity leadership approach seeks to combine these dynamics to the bureaucratic hierarchies in order to explain the way informal organizational dynamics function correctly and also to describe how these valuable adaptive functions can be promoted to better the operations of SOEs in Ghana.