Institutions cannot reach their full potential if they are run by a culture of fear, writes Joel Mzayidume.

On 20 February 2020, Bloomberg Businessweek featured the story "A Management 'culture of fear' derailed a South African icon".

The story was about Sasol, the company that pioneered commercialisation of the process to turn coal to liquid fuels. Sasol's culture of command and control is behind the problems at their facility in Lake Charles, whose cost of construction ballooned from an estimated R57 billion to R212 billion.

An independent review of the facility found that "excess deference" to managers led to problems being ignored until they went out of control. Oxford University's Professor Bent Flyvberg tells us that complex mega-projects such as Sasol's Lake Charles project are characterised by an over estimation of the benefits and an underestimation of the costs.

Sasol promptly fired its co-CEOs and some of its senior executives. This was despite their attempts to transform the organisational culture. Whether the new CEO will succeed in this effort remains to be seen.

On 9 July 2020, News24 featured the story Fear and loathing at UCT as university Ombud calls VC Mamokgethi Phakeng a 'bully'.

Professor Phakeng was recruited despite her "leadership and personality shortcomings". Subsequent team building exercises "revealed leadership traits that are problematic and certainly not conducive to an academic institution", including:

·        Authoritarian leadership style that is about throwing around the weight of the office;

·        Mistrust that is intended to exact a culture of pandering for endearment from those in power;

·        Mindless insecurity: an endless fear of attempts to be undermined, unseated from VC role or sabotaged;

·        Continuous burden to prove worthiness for role;

·        Abrasive behaviour;

·        Poor interpersonal skills and an inability to build a cohesive team; and

·        Non-collegial culture 

Importantly, the Council acknowledged that their inaction would be seen as "endorsing a conduct that is capable of cascading down to other levels of management with uncontrollably destabilising consequences for the institution".

Both stories are about fear that seems to have taken root at the two African icons in the technological and educational fields, respectively, and demonstrate the role of the people put in leadership positions in setting the cultural tone in institutions.

Many institutions primarily consider academic and career credentials in individuals for promotions into leadership roles. In many instances, these attributes have little or nothing to do with the ability of such individuals to bring out the best in the people they're meant to lead, which is the primary reason for the very existence of institutions.

The collective IQ of the groups they lead becomes less than their individual IQs put together. Liz Wiseman calls them "diminishers", the exact opposite of the people you need in knowledge-based organisations. Such managers, who are often erroneously referred to as "leaders", would be ideal in Frederick Taylor's, Henry Ford's, or Charlie Chaplin's factory.

Culture of fear 

Institutions characterised by a culture of fear cannot realise its true potential as the talents of their members remain latent and are not realised. In these, individuals are overpaid and under-utilised.

Organisational performance suffers as the institution employs more people. The silo mentality is reinforced among workers whose sole focus is delivering on what is expected from them and nothing more. Such an institution has no chance of reaching its potential in a world characterised by complexity, where competitive entities are those that collaborate across all boundaries in order to overcome ill-defined, interdependent and evolving challenges.  

Managers who are attached to leading by fear harbour their own insecurities. This does not help for the creative conflict necessary for building innovative solutions to today's organisational challenges.

Social capital, defined by Margaret Heffernan as "the trust, knowledge, reciprocity and shared norms that create quality of life and make a group resilient", also disintegrates in a fear-based organisation. Team-based approaches to solving interdependent work thus fizzles out. Transaction-based leadership, which requires order and structure, takes centre-stage and organisational performance suffers since work increasingly demands dynamic teamwork to resolve evolving tasks.

Institutions need true leaders instead of the insecure people they select for top positions.

Lion, king of the jungle 

The late Dr Myles Munroe reminds us of the lion, which is neither the smartest, strongest, nor heaviest, but is king of the jungle. True leaders are not threatened by the smarts of the people they lead.

Rather, they're driven by purpose in their relations with the teams they lead. By bringing out the best in others, they may well be working themselves out of their jobs. In the way they lead, they influence the attitudes, the morals, and the behaviour of their followers.

Institutions led by true leaders outperform their peers as they are able to leverage the full talent of their employees towards the pursuit of their vision, mission and objectives.

It was apparently Alexander the Great who said "an army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep".

- Joel Mzayidume writes in his personal capacity