Managers must learn their place

When is the boss not the boss? When they need their employees more than their employees need them. The days of blind obedience, when employers were empowered and employees knew their place, are largely gone, says Morris Mthombeni, dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science (Gibs).

“In the modern knowledge economy, increasingly it’s the employee who is empowered,” he says. Managers need their staff’s contribution, rather than the other way round. Young people, particularly, expect a more equitable work-life balance. Older employees, their attitudes changed by two years of working from home because of Covid, also have new expectations.

“The challenge is to produce leaders who understand their own context and employee voice empowerment,” says Mthombeni.

He hopes he fits the profile. After nearly two years as Gibs interim dean, he finally got the job full-time in April. He had been in charge since July 2020, after former dean Nicola Kleyn left to work in the Netherlands.

Mthombeni, who has been at Gibs since 2014, says his five-year contract won’t change the way he runs the school. Despite the “interim” title, he says he was allowed to manage as he saw fit.

The only difference is that “I now have a longer-term horizon to achieve what I want”.

That includes reskilling leaders to deal with an increasingly disruptive environment. The concept of Vuca — the acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (also shorthand for “Help! I don’t know what’s going on!”) — is a popular reference point.

Mthombeni says many people talked about Vuca but did little to address it “until Covid brought it violently into our consciousness”. Now there’s no escaping it.

He says: “Disruption will occur at an increasing pace. We need to accelerate the skills and capabilities of managers and reframe their knowledge.” Despite the growing reliance on technology, managers must not lose sight of the importance of employees. “As leaders, we have to work out how to become a talent magnet rather than a talent repellent.”

Mthombeni says Gibs’s campus, in Illovo, Joburg, is once again open to students and hosting up to 90% of academic programmes. “The place is buzzing, if not quite as frantically as before Covid.”

The other good news, he says, is that the school has achieved its long-sought-after BEE level 1 status.

Unfortunately, there’s some bad news as well. Gibs has prided itself in recent years on always being placed highly in the annual international executive education rankings of the London Financial Times (FT).

This year, it’s absent. The problem, says Mthombeni, is that the school’s executive education corporate clients did not respond to FT questionnaires on their relationship with Gibs. No feedback meant no ranking.

“I’m very frustrated,” he says. “It’s a wake-up call. We need to engage a lot more with our clients next time.”