I said to my management team: “we are not going to put banners proclaiming ‘soul’ on the walls”. As a management team, we were going to connect with people in a real way.
playing a partnership role with the rest of the organisation. Year-on-year revenue had been falling and in 2004 Mardia took on the role of Head of Sales.
team that steered T-Systems to become the first Black Empowered Multinational ICT Company in South Africa. ‘A six-point approach to transformation was developed and aligned to the ICT charter. This included equity ownership (African Renaissance Holdings and Awari Investment Holdings with a 30% shareholding), employment equity, skills development, preferential procurement, enterprise development and corporate social investment’.
as Acting CEO. Very clearly Mardia stated: ‘I can’t do “acting”. I decided I was going to do the job as if it was mine. I went in to full-on strategic planning with my team. We had a massive turnaround strategy planned. This was very difficult. We were majority owned by German shareholders that didn’t really know if they wanted to be in Africa and the company wasn’t performing well. It appeared to be a nuisance factor; it was far to manage. Nevertheless we soon started to stabilise the business. We started to make changes and we started to sign deals. In 2006 I was formally appointed to the role of Managing Director and at
In 2005 Mardia was appointed Mardia was part of the
that stage we started focussing on building an ICT company with soul’.
Changing any organisation’s culture can be an arduous task. ‘Firstly, we just started by living it. I said to my management team: “we are not going to put banners proclaiming ‘soul’ on the walls”. As a management team, we were going to connect with people in a real way. That is the only way people feel there is a difference – in me connecting with you. I could say it a thousand times; I could print it in vision statements but it would only be by really living it that people truly experienced the connection. It is an operator meeting me in the lift actually being able to tell me something about IT’.
‘Other guidelines for my management team were that I wanted them to be present, to translate this connecting with people from a leadership perspective. I expected a leader specifically to have the hope that we would overcome the challenges and that we would resolve our customers’ problems. I expected a leader to give this hope not just to the team around them, but to everyone in the organisation, with a spirit of compassion and empathy. Do we get it right all the time? Absolutely not! I think people underestimate how many times and for how
long one has to reiterate the change for it to become part of the culture. But our focus and our direction were absolutely clear – it was to instil a bigger purpose in somebody’s life than just to say “we repair computers”.
awarded both the Nedbank Businesswoman of the Year Award, as well as the IT Web ICT Personality of the Year Award. In 2009 she received the SITA ICT Legend Award for her contribution to ICT Development. Mardia ascribed some of her organisational culture-changing success to women being generally more intuitive. ‘I don’t claim that it is only women who have this ability. I work with many men who are very astute about people.
advantage of intuitively being able to have more connected discussions. I see it during negotiations where people are caught off guard with this approach that is not so boxed, not so left brained. In our business you need to be able to communicate the detail, but I find, when dealing with CEOs, a key part of selling into that organisation is at a very human level.’
industry for women to be involved in. There are
‘I think this is a brilliant I feel that women have an In 2008 Mardia was
August 2011 | Management Today 41
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