By Reshni Singh

As the demand for leadership within South Africa's Global Business Services (GBS) sector intensifies, the industry faces a critical turning point - it is vital that it begins to cultivate its own pipeline of talent, rather than relying on short-term fixes like talent poaching.

This, after all, merely drives up costs and limits sector growth.

Thus, it is imperative that the local GBS industry focuses on organically developing the next wave of leaders.

This entails collaborating with industry operators and trainers, and providing those individuals identified as potential leaders with upskilling, reskilling, and future skilling opportunities for evolving roles in the industry.

Potential future GBS leaders should be able to skillfully balance talent, process, technology and results management.

This is especially important, as the sector is transforming its business model from transactional to more advanced and strategically critical engagements.

There can be little doubt that in this fast-evolving world, leaders aren’t adequately prepared for the future. They have to deal with a wide range of influences, from generational shifts in the workforce, to the evolving nature of the work itself, to talent management, and on to issues like poor governance - all of which contribute to the leadership gap. Therefore, improving the skillset of middle management, team leaders and senior managers is critical for the further development of the sector.

It is important to understand that leaders of current and future organisations will have to manage a workforce that is becoming increasingly more complex and diverse - which means this workforce has a lot of different needs and will also have diverse styles of working.

They will, furthermore, need to not only manage their stakeholders internally, but also be focused on the management of external stakeholders across the ecosystem. Therefore, leaders will need the ability to seek value for all stakeholders - and by all, we mean shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, and partners.

This means that they need to be trained to look at the bigger picture - leaders need to be able to envision the ripple effects of any action on all these stakeholders, and act strategically and proactively to engage them as partners in a common journey.

Leaders of the future will also need to have enhanced abilities to understand people. Essentially, this means they must adopt a ‘people-first’ perspective, which means looking beyond the face value of an employee's behaviour, and instead investigating the psychology behind the behaviour.

So, what does a future leader need to learn?

They must be able to fully appreciate the many moving parts which makes up the GBS and BPO sector and gain a broad-based knowledge of the current CX industry, as well as the future directions for both the industry and organisation.

In fact, Mteto Nyati, the executive chairman of BSG and Eskom chairman, who provided a vision for South Africa's future highlighting the wave of opportunity that awaits the country at the recent BPESA conference 2024 echoed this sentiment stating that:

“Effective leadership will drive change and as a country, we should consciously be growing our own ‘timber’, building the ethical, smart leaders of tomorrow that can shape our country of the future.”

These future leaders need to understand and experience the different roles of the employees in the organisation, as it is important that they develop an understanding of the business from differing perspectives.

Another way to cultivate the right skills in future leaders is to challenge them with projects that will reveal their capabilities and capacities, not to mention developing foundational digital competence and critical thinking skills and creativity when faced with unfamiliar and difficult tasks.

Lastly, guidance and support on a professional level is also critical, which means mentoring these individuals, and assuring them there is someone they can turn to for advice.

As we move forward, it is clear that industry leaders must remain agile, adaptable, and forward-thinking. The pace of change will continue to accelerate, and staying ahead of the curve will be paramount – especially as one of the country’s priority sectors contributing soundly to GDP and economic growth.

Therefore, providing them with the necessary skills is only the first step - organisations need to encourage an attitude of continuous learning among future leaders, to ensure they stay ahead of the curve, and are able to position themselves and their organisations for sustained success.

Reshni Singh is the CEO at BPESA.

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