From someone recently elected president, I expected some airs. But Jimmy Manyi, the new Black Management Forum (BMF), president lacks them.
I am taken aback that he, instead of a personal assistant, comes to the reception to welcome us and usher us to his office. He says something self-effacing. I say something else he finds funny. He bursts into a booming laughter. He may be president, but he is a regular guy — like so many born and bred in Meadowlands, Soweto (in his case, 42 years ago).
Then we talk BMF. It is no laughing matter.
Black managers are accused of not being worthy of investing in because of their propensity to job hop. Even Reserve Bank Governor Tito Mboweni pronounced that he was happy with Afrikaners and suggested he would not be going out of his way to attract these highly mobile individuals, black managers.
The lure of the empowerment deal gives some black managers a pleasant dilemma.
In Manyi’s case, he was also chairperson of the Commission for Employment Equity, so the scope for discussion is truly wide.
With so much to talk about and so little time, I suggest that he pick an issue that is closest to his heart. “The BMF is what is closest to my heart,” he says as he clutches the left side of his mauve shirt and silk tie.
The self-effacing speech comes again. “I honestly believe that there are many people better than me in the BMF. The BMF is awash with talent. Any person elected as BMF president must never think that they are the best thing to have happened to mankind. I just happen to be the one they chose to express what the members want delivered.”
These deliverables come down to making the BMF the custodian of the virtues of employment equity and skills development.
Manyi says the BMF uses the biblical analogy of a sower whose seeds fell along the roadside and were eaten by birds, fell into rocky ground and were scorched by the sun and withered, fell on to thorns and were choked, while a few seeds fell on good soil and produced a crop, to explain the perceived job hopping by black managers.
“It is the same with workplaces. The media like focusing on why black professionals leave, but if you did your own investigations, you would find that there were push factors.”
In some instances, blacks arrive at companies and feel unwelcome from the first day. Where they do feel welcome, as soon as they start making progress, they find “booby traps every-where” – their budgets and authority are cut, but their expected outcomes are the same and sometimes greater. All these, says Manyi, do not make as much headline news as reports of yet another talented black manager leaving an organisation he/she had joined amid much fanfare.
“I know people who have retired as trainees,” he says. “The question we should be asking is: Why do so many organisations have such poor retention policies?”
But black managers are not seeds, surely they know on which ground they are being sown? And have the wherewithal to decide what to do with their lives?
“Where there are no push factors, the question should be what did they achieved in the time they spent with the organisation.
“My mentor, Lot Ndlovu, used to say that you have to stay at least three years in an organisation to make an impact. I don’t agree with that. It is not the length of time that you stay, but the impact you make during your stay.
“All these things show why corporations need to transform; and the transformation should be driven from the office of the CEO. In those cases, the success or failure of the CEO and consequently their bonus should be linked to how they fare in transformation stakes.
“It’s got to have consequences for the CEO. Nothing is going to happen unless there are consequences, like affecting a good 40% of the CEO’s bonus,” he says.
But with transformation still meaning different things to different people and with even well-meaning whites feeling threatened by what the term means, what is to be done to get everyone’s buy-in?
“I agree that the engagement is not enough. Perhaps one of the things that the BMF needs to do is broaden its audience base. But some things are sacrosanct. The sooner some people embrace that reality [of the need for transformation] the better. It is not a bad dream that is going to go away.”