TRANSFORMATION
KHAYA SITHOLE: Joint CEO model sends wrong message
In January 2016, Sim Tshabalala faced perhaps his biggest PR crisis as the joint CEO of Standard Bank. The bank’s economist, Chris Hart, engaged in a series of regrettable tweets, including an observation that apartheid victims were becoming "more entitled and more hateful towards minorities". I then wrote an open letter to Tshabalala, expressing my horror at the tweets. I specifically highlighted that for a bank with a black CEO there was something fundamentally broken that needed to be confronted if senior employees such as Hart had such a twisted understanding of SA’s social dynamics. And the responsibility for tackling such a problem lay with just one of the two CEOs — Tshabalala. Within an hour, he called me for a discussion about transformation. At that stage, Tshabalala held a role as joint CEO alongside Ben Kruger. Joint CEOs are not common in corporate SA, largely due to the cost of CEO salaries and the issue of possible conflicts. When Tshabalala accepted the role, a commo...
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