SA needs a strong laxative, what Stanford University organisational behaviour professor Roderick Kramer referred to as a “great intimidator”. That’s because everything about this country is constipated — chronically so. It has been for years.
A great intimidator, an abrasive and bullying type, can help revive the economy, raising the growth rate. However, just as gentle, self-effacing types can be bad for an organisation in dire need of a shake-up, great intimidators have their ugly side. The trick is therefore to match the leadership of a great intimidator with the circumstances that demand their abrasiveness — the laxative that gets things moving again.
Kramer referred to the positive side of great intimidators as the “subtle dimension of effective leadership”, which comes in handy in organisations or industries that are rigid, unruly, stagnant or drifting. He decried the enchantment with social intelligence and soft power, which has resulted in the kinds of skills leaders need to bring about transformation “in cases of tremendous resistance or inertia” being overlooked.
And SA has been a great drifter. It is sobering to compare SA’s unemployment rate of more than 34% to the US’s in 1934, the height of the Great Depression. Then, US unemployment was at 22%, but that was against a backdrop of a 28% decline in GDP compared with where it had been at the start of the decade. US trade with the rest of the world had also fallen 29%.
“The great intimidators see a possible path through the thicket, and they’re impatient to clear it. They chafe at impediments, even those that are human. They don’t suffer from doubt or timidity. They’ve got a disdain for constraints imposed by others,” Kramer wrote in a February 2006 article for the Harvard Business Review.
He described how the modus operandi of great intimidators ran counter to what are now the most deeply entrenched preconceptions about what it means to be a good leader. These preconceptions include leading quietly and with great empathy and humility. By contrast, great intimidators are “rough, loud, and in your face”.
SA is struggling to reverse its socioeconomic decline, partly because it invested its hopes in Cyril Ramaphosa, a leader who wanders around the bathtub before making a decision. He’s also married to consensus — that is getting everyone’s agreement before a decision can be taken. These traits have value under certain circumstances, especially in good times when a nation has the luxury to debate policy options endlessly.
Exercising sovereignty
But SA’s circumstances are different, calling for an abrasive leader. The country has fiscal, sociopolitical trust and public policy implementation deficits. They are interrelated. Failure to address the third will make it difficult to deal with the first two.
Yet, improving the government’s ability to implement public policies is more difficult because all three layers of government — national, provincial and municipal — are paralysed by inertia. Then there is the penchant of civil servants and political office-bearers to steal public resources. To deal with inertia and corruption, as well as to unclog policy implementation, calls for a different leadership style.
SA’s failure to reverse its economic decline threatens its ability to make decisions that are in its interests without being pressured by external forces — exercising its sovereignty. A case in point is the mad rush under way whereby SA must pass amendments to the Financial Intelligence Centre Act to satisfy the requirements of the Financial Action Task Force. The task force is one of the many international public organisations whose decisions or actions set the tone for sovereign states.
Tightening up the monitoring and prevention of money laundering and financing of terrorism is in the best interests of SA citizens — individuals and corporates. The government should do it in the ordinary course of its business, not because of pressure from what the late US political scientist Robert Dahl referred to as the international political and bureaucratic elites.
Another example is fiscal policy, which Dahl described as essential to the ability of democratic governments to provide adequately for the wellbeing of their citizens, particularly in the face of economic recession and high unemployment. Here too a government that fails to manage its finances well surrenders its sovereignty to the dictates of the financial markets, the ratings agencies and the IMF.
As Kramer argued, before we shoot down a great intimidator in favour of a gentle, consensus building, humble, self-effacing leader, it’s worth considering what we would gain. A great intimidator may create disharmony, but he or she can also be the great laxative SA so desperately needs.
• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
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