SA is facing a skills spiral

Bruce Whitfield:
One of South Africa’s foremost business strategists is Tony Manning who joins us on the line now and Tony, you are part of a panel which is going to be discussing the substantial infrastructure challenges the South African is facing at a conference next month. What’s that exactly going to try and tackle?

Tony Manning:
Bruce, I am not sure what the other panel will try and tackle, but what I am going to specifically address is the skills issues and first of all, the need to develop skills, but secondly the difficulty and I think the very naïve way which we are going about it.

Bruce Whitfield:
Elaborate on naïve way which we are going about it.

Tony Manning:
Well very simple idea, there is a notion which is being used around the world today called a leadership pipeline, which talks about how you develop a business leader. And what it says essentially is, a person has to go through a number of passages of development in order to become a competent executive. If you look at other research which tells us that to get to be the boss of an American company, for example, probably takes you until you are around 49.

It is a bit longer in Europe and it is a bit longer in Japan, it is probably 56 or 57 in Japan. What that then adds up to is the fact that it takes at least 20 years to get from graduation to being the boss and we have the sense in this country unfortunately, that anybody can do anything and you can start at the top and work your way up, which is utterly ridiculous.

And what is being missed, not only in executive positions, but for example in engineering skills, is the importance of not explicit knowledge that you would learn if you went and did a degree for example and you could repeat what the text book said. But tacit knowledge when you have built 100 bridges and you have seen what goes wrong and that sort of thing. This stuff comes from experience, it is a hell of a long haul.

Bruce Whitfield:
And there is also the luxury I suppose of developed economies where people have got more job security perhaps, where the opportunities are more prolific. In the South African market so many skills have gone offshore simply because they felt the opportunities are better overseas and certainly, wages, salaries, remuneration internationally has been considerably better than in South Africa for a very long time. So we have lost a lot of those skills and as a result, perhaps mediocrity has been promoted?

Tony Manning:
Well there is no question about that. The emigration has been absolutely enormous and it is not only whites that are emigrating, it is skilled black people as well. So that is a tragic situation.

But I think the real issue is, as I mentioned right at the outset, the naivety of it, we seem to have a kind of amateurish view of what it takes to develop people and the government is pressing universities for example to pump out engineering graduates, which is a terrific idea, but that does not make them engineers.

Bruce Whitfield:
It solves the problem in 20 years time, but not now.

Tony Manning:
Exactly and that is what we have to cope with. So, already we are seeing on all fronts, massive skills shortages and as we get towards 2010, of course the pressure for delivery is going to grow dramatically because people are going to start panicking, they are going to see that things are falling behind and that they need to do stuff quicker. And that is going to increase the demand for skills and put new pressures into the systems. So it is going to be a spiral.

Bruce Whitfield:
But certainly what we see companies do nowadays is hire head hunters and you will have the same head hunter phoning the same person three times in a year and getting them to job hop simply because one head hunter makes bucks out of it and two, the person gets promoted very, very quickly and three they look terribly clever to their friends and family. But ultimately, what we are doing is raping the economy to some degree.

Tony Manning:
Well the problem is that the head hunters are looking at a very limited pool and when they do look overseas and Jipsa and Asgisa sensibly are supposed to encourage us to look overseas and to bring people into the country quite easily, but so far, that has not happened.

There are still many, many obstacles to bring in top talent in. Not least of course is the cost of doing it. It is prohibitive in many cases. But we sit in a very disadvantaged position. So what I think nobody recognises is that when we were talking about becoming a democracy in the late 1980’s, the world was going through a radical transformation and since that time, something like three billion people, which is literally half of the world’s entire population has come into the capitalist economy and these people are our competitors and they are potentially our customers.

So we live in a completely different economic and competitive era. I think most managers of the senior guys certainly are used to and the junior guys are just not getting the coaching and the mentoring if you like that they need to get up to speed quickly enough. So it is a very tough situation that we sit with.

Bruce Whitfield:
And one of the theories is that because managers, people who are actually running many business or many divisions within business, because they are not capable of actually doing the job, they are not capable of not passing down any skills. So you actually are perpetuating the cycle even more as a result.

Tony Manning:
Well I think that is a big problem. I keep on reading articles about executive coaching and what a hot idea it is. But I think one has got to be quite circumspect about the whole thing, the ultimate executive coach is of course, the executive who is in place, who can teach the people around him or her and I think that is what is missing.

So people today in top positions are very pressured, most of the executives that I watch don’t have an awful amount of time to spend on the people around them and are not teachers, are not growing those people, and then try to bring in some outsiders to do the job for them and it is an impossible task, it cannot happen.

So the point is, I think there are many things we could do very practically to resolve these issues and we are not, we have go this naïve attitude that there are lots of skills out there and all you have got to do is whistle and they will come rushing in and fix things, and they won’t.

Bruce Whitfield:
What are your recommendations then? You will no doubt be making recommendations at this conference next month?

Tony Manning:
Well my recommendations are very simple; first of all every organisation needs a very simple and practical toolkit so that you don’t keep on giving people new tools that they don’t know how to use or will never learn to use. And the second thing you need to do is you need to give them accelerated experience, but under the, if you like, watchful eye of an experienced person, you need to immerse them in information so that they really do understand the context in which they are operating and they have got as much kind of raw material as possible to use. And finally, you need to coach them and guide them, but as I say, that is a managerial job, it is not a human resources department job and it is not an outside coach's job and I know those people do probably a lot of work, but I do think that the managers themselves have to take responsibility for this issue.

Bruce Whitfield:
It is the old fashion concept of mentorship, surely?

Tony Manning:
Yes exactly, but the point is, we are turning to outsiders as the mentors. And the workplace, if you think about it, is the richest environment for growing executives and unfortunately we are not using it, we are turning to external sources to try and fix the problem and we should be doing it right inside the company.

But I think there are very practical things we can do, this economy is pumping, it is looking absolutely phenomenal, it is going to do hell of a well between now and 2010 and probably way beyond that. But we do really need to start thinking more sensibly about these people issues.

Bruce Whitfield:
Tony Manning thanks very much indeed one of the country’s top business strategists, talking sense as always.

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