We must have the courage to sack the incompetents

The exercise of greater ingenuity and a genuine demonstration of care are required for our country to turn a corner in the management of its challenges. From the three main news items of the week, the bad news came at us like a thudding, steady current.

Matric results that show a consistent decline in mathematics and science spell doom for the fourth industrial revolution. A national budget that, unsurprisingly, shows we will miss our 2030 National Development Plan targets by a wide margin means our aim of inclusive economic growth is becoming increasingly elusive. And Statistics SA’s release of the Labour Force Survey confirmed what we already knew: more South Africans are unemployed than at any time in our history.

The unemployment figures are a grim reminder that in the nations of the world, economics trumps all. It’s the stuff to make you want to pull out your hair (if you still have any), or reach in despair for that proverbial intoxicating glass.

But wait.

The Sunday Times published a story last week with the headline: “Troubled Prasa sacks four executives”. It’s normally not done, especially when you consider the reasons. The board chair, Leonard Ramatlakane, said the board released them for “performance” reasons.

The executives claim their contracts had no probation clauses and they were victims of a “clandestine kind of operation”. And we can’t put this past Prasa or most state-owned enterprises or, the hell, the government and the crooked business people fleecing it. It’s the nature of things.

On the surface, though, this seems an obvious case of transactional board leadership style poorly implemented. A dispute about the very existence of a probation clause in contracts raises eyebrows. It is either there or not. In addition, for the limited duration of employment of these executives, the employer/board ought to have engaged with the executives and reminded them, as companies do with interns and contract employees, that their performances would be evaluated regularly with feedback.

The employment will end if the employer is not happy with their performance. This is normal, you’d think. Those in leadership who do not perform must be held accountable and, where they fall short, be released. Right? Well, wrong.

We never fire people. This is why that comedian Hlaudi Motsoeneng lasted so long and was even promoted at the SABC. There may be many Hlaudis in other SOEs, the government and corporate SA. They may have matric and degrees, but are no less Hlaudis in their approach and inability to conceptualise solutions.

South Africans must normalise firing leaders for underperformance. By leaders, I don’t limit myself to politicians; they mislead most of the time. This country has the potential to be great if we get rid of people who hold back our companies and institutions.

Take eNCA this week. The TV station has the potential to be great if not for the obvious racism that its management can’t, or won’t, see. The details of the station’s racism are common cause, elsewhere.

Forget the racism in the media, people generally lead differently. Some are about rallying people behind a vision, others prefer to “go with your gut”, while some are about projecting a façade of confidence “because confidence always wins”. The management approach of a former CEO of Thinx, Miki Agrawal, is “hire slow, fire fast”. It’s apt for various sectors of our economy. Agrawal doesn’t want to spend her time “policing people and their work ethic, positive attitude and focused execution”.

If we possess a genuine desire to do good for our country, we will invest in making sure the right people are in the right positions and receive support. In this way, we will minimise, if not eliminate, incidents like Prasa’s R3.5bn payment to Auswell Mashaba of Swifambo Rail Leasing to deliver those controversial tall trains.

Organisational ambidexterity is what managers, in the government but mostly in private firms, are called on to have. Rapid advancements in technology continually threaten the survival of companies and, thus, the health of many nations’ economies. Those who lead don’t often have the time to fight fires before innovating their way into the future. Those who resolve challenges, on the one hand, while creatively finding ways to remain relevant, are the tsars of the future.

They’re what governments of today require.

The budget tabled this week doesn’t bring us closer to creating jobs promised during elections. It gives us more of the same. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect that Stats SA will give us different unemployment figures. Our economy was in a bad shape even before the onset of the global health pandemic. If finance minister Tito Mboweni has no new ideas, the ANC must find someone younger (there are many) and more innovative to help.

Further, in a world where the competitive advantage of nations is seen in their abilities to leapfrog their economies from third to first through nimble, innovative management of industries, SA must get with the programme or risk becoming a case study of how nations fail.

The manner in which the four executives were fired at Prasa was clumsy, and the process seemed unfair. We may never fully know why Prasa released the four. If they did underperform, good riddance. But if they were victims of the oh-so-familiar shenanigans in these SOEs, they need to fight this injustice all the way to the Constitutional Court.

As a country, though, we must normalise firing people who don’t perform, especially in state companies. We must do this consistently. The boards must account, as ministers should do too.

We must normalise firing people who don’t perform, especially in state companies