By Maria Mothibeli, Head of Operations at Southern Power Maintenance
South African companies spend a great deal of time thinking about leadership pipelines, succession and the people they need to take the business forward. Yet some of that leadership may already be inside the organisation, in women carrying significant responsibility but not always recognised as part of that pipeline.
They manage teams, deal with clients, resolve problems between departments and keep work moving when something important has been missed. The question is whether organisations recognise that experience early enough and give it room to influence bigger decisions.
Women do this work across organisations, in operations, finance, procurement, safety, human resources, logistics, planning, project coordination and client service. These roles often give them a close view of how decisions are made and what happens once those decisions have to be carried out. They see where work slows down, where departments aren’t aligned, and where what’s been promised doesn’t match what the organisation is ready to deliver.
Working in operations has made this particularly visible to me. A project can have a clear technical scope and still run into trouble because access hasn’t been confirmed, equipment is unavailable, or a deadline was agreed without checking whether the business can meet it. The person who notices this is not simply tracking tasks. She understands the conditions that affect delivery and knows when something that looks small is likely to become a bigger problem.
Someone close to the work may know that a deadline is unrealistic because another department has not been consulted. She may know that a client has been promised something the organisation is not yet ready to deliver. She may also know that a problem being treated as new has happened several times before. Yet the people who see these things are often brought in to sort out the consequences, rather than included early enough to help prevent them.
This is where organisations can miss leadership that is already in front of them. A woman may be the person colleagues call when a project is stuck because she knows who needs to be involved and what still needs to be resolved. Over time, she builds a detailed understanding of how the organisation works, not only in her own area but across different parts of the business. That experience can be easy to overlook when leadership potential is still associated mainly with senior titles and conventional career paths.
There is also a point at which responsibility and authority need to meet. Women cannot repeatedly be expected to take ownership of difficult outcomes while having little influence over the decisions that produced them. If someone is trusted to solve important problems, manage difficult relationships and carry the consequences when things go wrong, the organisation should ask whether she has enough authority to shape those decisions in the first place.
Organisations need to pay closer attention to this when they think about succession and leadership development. Specialist expertise still matters, but it should not be the only thing organisations consider when identifying leadership potential. They should look at who people already rely on when work becomes difficult, who understands enough of the business to know when a decision will not work in practice, who can bring different departments into the same conversation, and who can see the difference between what has been promised and what can actually be delivered.
The value of women in leadership is not only about increasing the number of women in senior positions. It is also about recognising the experience and judgement women have already built inside organisations and allowing that knowledge to influence bigger decisions. Leadership does not begin when a title is awarded. In many cases, the evidence is already there.
Maria Mothibeli, Head of Operations at Southern Power Maintenance
