CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
6.3 Key findings
The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of leadership development initiatives on the acceleration of black talent in JSE-listed companies. The key findings of this study will be discussed with respect to the study’s objectives and the themes that emerged from the analysis of the interview data.
• Objective 1: To explore the challenges to advancing black talent in JSE- listed companies
The study set out to identify the challenges that are faced by companies when it comes to the acceleration of black talent to top management or executive levels in JSE-listed companies. Challenges raised by the participants include the fact that the breaking of the glass ceiling to executive levels has less to do with technical competencies. The composition of these leadership development candidates should be largely black and women. The promotion of those selected candidates would bring legitimacy to the leadership development initiatives that companies will be rolling out.
There are respondents who felt very strong that the corporate experiences sometimes do not seem to be inclusive and accommodate how different people have been socialised and raised. One of the respondents emphasised that black professionals themselves need to gain confidence and “occupy the space”, rather than wait to be
127 invited to participate. Corporate South Africa, especially JSE-listed companies, are fast-paced, and there is no patience for people who are still raising their hands and waiting for their turn to participate.
Stanley (2016) stated that according to Thomas and Gabarro (1999), the challenges facing the advancement of black talent are the prevalence of prejudice; issues of comfort and risk; and the difficulty of identifying high-potential minorities. There are two sorts of prejudice: individual and systemic. The former is held by individuals about a group other than their own, while the latter, systemic prejudice, is a set of industrialised assumptions and practices that have a kind of invincible-hand effect in systemically advantaging members of more powerful groups over members of less dominant groups.
It is said that systematically appraisers give higher performance ratings to members of their own racial groups and view members of their own racial groups as more promotable. High-performing members of other racial groups remain comparatively invincible in the selection process. As a result, one can predict that minority managers are in general more likely to spend significantly longer than the company average in the same job or hierarchical level (Buford, 2016).
• Objective 2: To analyse the impact of leadership development initiatives on accelerating black talent in JSE-listed companies
Conversion of non-executives to executive directors has also been highlighted by one of the respondents as being highly impactful. There is already positive outcomes from this initiative, as it was perfectly executed in different JSE-listed companies. One of the black talent that benefited from this initiative is now the CEO of a Top 40 JSE- listed company while the other is currently the deputy CEO of a mid-sized JSE-listed company in insurance industry. Familiarity with the company strategy, operating model and people seems to have given those black candidates a massive advantage (Mthunzi, 2018).
128 The key learning point of this from a leadership development perspective is that leaders need to understand that their decisions have wide and far-reaching ramifications for people they will never know. To this end, Sheppard et al. (2013) suggested that quality contemporary leadership development initiatives should also incorporate topics such as climate change, environmental sustainability, cross-cultural leadership, leading remote teams and diversity management. Others have also argued that good quality leadership programmes in modern organisations include a strong focus on corporate social responsibility and community engagement, so that leaders are oriented to their connectedness with a society which is wider than merely their own organisation (McCullum et al., 2013; Sanchex-Hernandez and Gallardo-Vazques, 2013; Bartsch, 2012).
• Objective 3: To investigate to what extent there is institutionalised bias in the acceleration of black talent in JSE-listed companies
All the participants in this study admitted that institutionalised bias is prevalent in their companies. This bias against black professionals and women is also taken as the way things are – it is almost a second nature. One participant said she now feels defeated and is no longer willing to fight bias.
The significance of the rewards is an important determination for changing the attitude of staff towards performance management. If a reward is perceived to be significant, then the impact on motivation will positively influence the effort towards goal achievement (Shields, 2008).
Managers in organisations must be held accountable and responsible for eliminating inequalities. Research on the impact of diversity interventions in organisations has found evidence that setting managerial responsibility and accountability within well- defined structures for change had a stronger effect than diversity training (Kalev, Kelly and Dobbin, 2006). In other words, organisational leaders have to be held accountable for implementing systemic changes in organisational and human resource management practices. In fact, empirical studies on the relationship between valuing diversity and organisation performance have reported that organisations that are
129 racially diverse and also follow a proactive diversity-management strategy have the greatest impact on performance (Cunningham, 2009).