Charlotte Mokoena

Executive Vice President for HR, Sasol

Work: Charlotte has worked in both the private and NGO sectors covering the beverage, information and communication technology, education and agricultural industries. She was previously the HR Executive Tongaat Hulett and, before then, was a management executive at Telkom South Africa, where she worked for over 10 years.

Education: BA (Hons), Human Resource Development (University of Johannesburg), Executive Programme in HR, Strategic Human Resource Leadership (Michigan University), Senior Executives Programme, Strategic Business Leadership (International Institute for Management Development)

grandparents and, upon their passing, attended boarding school to complete their schooling.

Matriculating in a then-homeland high school prevented her from gaining entry to Wits University. She trained as a nurse and worked at Baragwanath Hospital in the mid-1980s. This experience gave her direct exposure to the violence and trauma of apartheid, while the system's brutality also directly affected and claimed the lives of her family members.

Her other vocation is teaching. “I believe I was born to teach and develop people,” she says. Mokoena practised as a guidance teacher at a school in Mahikeng for about a year before returning to work for a youth development NGO in Soweto, while working in conflict resolution in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands when violence in the province was rife in the early 1990s.

An intrinsic feature of her life and work is a sense of caring, listening and learning. On travels, she takes time to talk to waiters, taxi drivers, hotel porters and professionals alike, to hear about their daily lives and struggles, view of their country's political and economic situation and a sense of their future in it.

“All my jobs have been a work of service centred on people,” she says starting with her time as a nurse which grounded her work ethic and taught her humility as she cared for patients wholly dependent on others for their well-being and comfort. “Teaching also requires a sense of care as a calling, not just a profession.” She also had a short stint as a consultant helping companies devise social labour plans to assist retrenched workers.

Her corporate career started at the Coca-Cola Company, where she worked as a performance consultant

“The challenge of an HR practitioner is to balance the needs of an organisation with the expectations of employees. Finding that balance is key.”

and then as a manager of learning and education for Southern and East Africa. Her role grew to cover the entire continent as the organisational capability manager for Africa supporting leadership teams throughout the continent.

HR is a unique profession

She joined Telkom in 2002 as group executive for learning before being promoted to chief of human resources. She held two other roles in operations before rounding off her 11-year stint as the managing executive, customer experience. At Telkom, she sought to improve working conditions and competencies of employees and build organisational capabilities that contribute to company performance.

“We focused on customer-facing or frontline employees,” she says, with the aim being to ensure that employee experiences and expectations are taken care of, and align their work and focus with the company's performance targets. “We wanted higher performance to achieve customer and company goals, so we needed to understand barriers to performance and adjust the company value proposition while keeping an eye on costs,” she recalls.

At Tongaat Hulett, she sought to understand the company's operating footprint and therefore its employee social responsibility that spread beyond the communities in which it operated, but also to labour-sending areas. “The challenge was to make all employees at all levels feel cared for. The son of a sugar cane cutter cannot be a sugar cane cutter,” she says.

Her career at Coca-Cola exposed her to knowledge workers, while Telkom exposed her to technical workers and engineers in the consumer goods sector. Tongaat Hulett exposed her to another fast-moving consumer good and agro-processing

business with a full spectrum of skills. She now brings that experience to bear in a highly technical, integrated chemicals and energy business at Sasol and remains guided by the same principles.

“Human resources is a different and unique type of career,” Mokoena says, and describes herself as an “interventionist”, someone “who finds data to develop people management interventions in support of business outcomes”.

The art of leadership

“The challenge of an HR practitioner is to balance the needs of an organisation with the expectations of employees. Finding that balance is key,” she says. “A critical interventionist mindset of an HR practitioner is to determine if you are an HR executive in business or a business person in HR,” says

Mokoena, who exudes a lot of warmth beneath her polished, professional exterior. Because HR as a senior role entails mentoring, she seems to be stern but fair, gentle yet encouraging and sees leadership as more of an art than a science.

One of the ways she measures a leader is by the quality of the leaders they produce. “All of the people I have mentored have gone on to become highly accomplished in their own right, and are either heading up departments and organisations or running their own businesses. That is how I measure the value I add.” What she finds most gratifying is that her mentees go on to reach the top of their game and follow their passion and talents. “Great leaders bring out the best in people,” she says.

She believes organisational longevity to ensure the impact of one's interventions is crucial as a business mentor, senior executive and practitioner. “Stay in a place to learn and intervene and create solutions for one or two things and execute them well. Support and build capable people with a view to building a high-performance organisation. If someone good has to leave, make sure you keep the door open for them to come back. If someone leaves owing to poor performance, follow due process and let them leave with their dignity intact,” she says. “If someone wilfully transgresses company policies, they need to feel the full might of the organisation's sanction, but must not be humiliated in the process. Organisations care for people, so people must care for these organisations.”

“Finally,” she says “be humble. The higher up the organisation you go, the more humility you should have.” 