South Africa does not need louder leaders. It needs more present ones. Leadership is not failing. It is being called to evolve. And that evolution begins with a shift that is both simple and demanding, to lead not only with competence, but also with humanity.
The media is replete with reports of leadership crises. On the contrary, South Africa does not have a leadership crisis. It has a humanity crisis in leadership. This is not a dramatic claim. It is a lived reality, visible in the silence before truth is spoken, in the quiet withdrawal of capable people, and in the widening gap between organisational performance and human experience.
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At its core, this is a crisis of dignity. A crisis of Ubuntu. We have not forgotten how to lead, but we have forgotten how to be with people.
As Professor Phinda Mzwakhe Madi reflects in the foreword to The People Circle, as a nation we have become adept at designing systems that perform, while neglecting the humanity those systems are meant to serve. And so, the question is not simply where we went wrong, but what we abandoned along the way. And, what happened to Ubuntu and dignity? Hold the thought.
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The Moment That Reveals the Truth
This reminds me of a moment, not long ago, in a leadership conversation I was facilitating. The medium-sized boardroom was quietly full. A cross-section of mid-level managers and a few senior leaders, mostly in their 30s and 40s, seated shoulder to shoulder around a polished table, laptops open but attention heavy in the air. There was a stillness that suggested both experience and unspoken tension.
A senior executive paused mid-sentence and said: “I’m doing everything right… but something still feels wrong.”
Around the room, there was a quiet recognition. On paper, everything was working. Targets were being met. Governance structures were intact. Strategy was clear. And yet, beneath that success, there was an absence that no metric could quite explain.
That absence has a name: a humanity crisis in leadership. We are not lacking direction but are losing connection. It is time for renewal.
What We Learn Early — and Forget Later
There is a story I have carried with me from childhood. In a village nestled between rolling hills and a winding river, I would hear the elders speaking of the river as a teacher. During the rainy season, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the river swelled beyond its usual path, broke its banks, uprooted trees, and redrew the land in ways both disruptive and necessary.
The villagers did not rush to contain it but gathered to watch how it, for two, carried both destruction and renewal in the same current. Alas, my younger self just didn’t get it.
So, one day I asked an elder in the family: “Why doesn’t the river fear the stones?” He smiled and, all the while watching the current, then told me that the river wouldn’t waste its strength trying to remove what it couldn’t. “It flows around what resists it, and in time, it shapes even the hardest stone. Its courage is not in force. It is in persistence.”
That was decades ago but not much else has changed: rivers, like they did in my childhood and before that, continue to play their timeless role as a teacher: persistence and direction.
When Performance Replaces Presence
There is no shortage of strategy, across both public and private institutions. In one organisation, a detailed five-year plan is unveiled with clarity and confidence, yet teams leave the room unsure of how their daily work connects to it.
In another, dashboards are updated in real time, targets meticulously tracked, but conversations in the corridors reveal fatigue, rather than focus.
Plans are developed. Targets are set. Performance is measured with increasing precision. Governance frameworks are refined. And yet, something essential is eroding.
We operate in a global village, and leadership has become increasingly defined by output, speed, and control; a contract many leaders inherit without consciously signing. In this contract, humanity becomes secondary, often invisible.
Our leaders are operating in a country shaped by inequality, institutional fragility, and complex social realities. These cannot be resolved through authority alone. They require leaders who can hold tension without rushing to resolution, who can listen before they respond, and who can acknowledge uncertainty without losing direction.
There’s a quiet but insistent demand that employees meet targets while navigating grief, financial strain, and social uncertainty. Leaders carry the emotional weight of their teams, while maintaining composure upward. Conversations that require courage are replaced by those that preserve image.
The result is not resilience. It is quiet exhaustion.
Over time, that exhaustion becomes disengagement. Disengagement becomes attrition. And beneath it all, trust begins to erode, slowly, but decisively. This picture plays out across industries and sectors in South Africa and in many other parts of the continent and the world.
The Leadership We Reward — and the Leadership We Need
We continue to reward leaders who appear certain, composed, and in control. But our context demands something fundamentally different.
Our leaders are operating in a country shaped by inequality, institutional fragility, and complex social realities. These cannot be resolved through authority alone. They require leaders who can hold tension without rushing to resolution, who can listen before they respond, and who can acknowledge uncertainty without losing direction.
Who you are becoming will always speak louder than what you are performing.
This is not a rejection of performance. It is a redefinition of it. As Professor Madi reminds us, leadership is not performance, it is formation. It is the work of becoming someone worthy of trust.
The Dignity Deficit
It is thus worth mentioning that one of the most under-acknowledged challenges in South African workplaces today is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of dignity.
Dignity is not abstract. It is experienced in everyday moments:
- Whether people feel safe to speak.
- Whether their contributions are recognised.
- Whether decisions consider their human impact.
When dignity is absent, people do not leave immediately. They withdraw. They comply instead of contributing. They perform instead of engaging. They remain in the system, but no longer fully present within it. No organisation can sustain performance on the back of disengaged humanity indefinitely.
A Story We Don’t Tell Enough
There is a story we do not tell often enough. A young girl, bright and capable, learns early to silence herself in spaces where speaking feels unsafe. She grows into a professional who knows the answer but hesitates. Into a leader who performs competence, but questions her worth.
Not because she lacks ability. Because, over time, dignity was negotiated away in small, invisible moments. This is how systems reproduce silence.
Not through policy, but through experience. And unless leadership intervenes at the level of dignity, the cycle continues.
The question is no longer whether organisations can afford to centre humanity in leadership, it is whether they can afford not to. Without trust, strategy fails; without dignity, performance declines; without humanity, leadership loses its legitimacy.
Ubuntu: Not Philosophy, but Method
We often speak of Ubuntu in ceremonial language, in opening remarks, in values statements, in symbolic gestures. But Ubuntu is not decoration. It is methodology.
“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” — a person is a person through other people. This is not a soft idea. It is a structural one. It challenges leadership models built on hierarchy and individualism and replaces them with an ethic of relational accountability.
As Professor Madi reminds us, Ubuntu does not weaken leadership; it deepens it by rooting authority in relationship, dignity, and shared humanity.
The failure is not that we lack frameworks, it is that we borrow frameworks that were never designed for our context and then attempt to retrofit humanity into them.
The Silence We Mistake for Alignment
Over the years, in my line of work, I have come to recognise a type of silence, in many organisations, that is often mistaken for alignment. It is not agreement, but it is self-preservation. It shows up in meetings where people choose not to speak, in decisions that go unchallenged, and in cultures where dissent is quietly discouraged.
This silence does more than suppress voice. It limits innovation, weakens decision-making, and allows dysfunction to persist unexamined.
Breaking that silence requires more than policy. It requires leaders who are willing to create spaces where truth can be spoken without fear, and to remain present when it is.
Leadership Beyond Metrics
If leadership is to remain effective, it must move beyond performance as its primary measure. This does not mean abandoning results. It means recognising a deeper truth:
Results are sustained through people. And people cannot thrive where dignity is absent.
Leadership must therefore expand to include:
- The intentional creation of psychologically safe environments.
- The capacity to engage people as whole human beings.
- The discipline to hold accountability without stripping away respect.
This is more demanding than what is considered traditional leadership models. But it is also more sustainable.
A Necessary Evolution
The question is no longer whether organisations can afford to centre humanity in leadership, it is whether they can afford not to. Without trust, strategy fails; without dignity, performance declines; without humanity, leadership loses its legitimacy.
South Africa does not need louder leaders. It needs more present ones. Leadership is not failing. It is being called to evolve. And that evolution begins with a shift that is both simple and demanding, to lead not only with competence, but also with humanity.
Nqobile Pamela Xaba is a human capital entrepreneur, professional business coach, and leadership consultant. She is the author of the forthcoming book The People Circle: A Human-Centred Approach to Leadership in a Complex World.
