COCA COLA’S LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME

JERMAINE CRAIG talks to S’bu Mngadi, who had a front-row seat to one of South Africa’s most seminal corporate transformation and leadership stories

When the Coca Cola Company decided to fully reinvest in South Africa in 1997 after divesting in the 1980s due to the country’s political situation, S’bu Mngadi was a central figure in helping drive the company’s multibillion-dollar expansion strategy into Africa, with South Africa as an important continental base for that expansion.

Coca Cola was a global company with little local know-how or experience in its ranks when it returned to South Africa.

In his first role with Coca Cola Southern Africa as vice president and director of communications, public policy and

sustainability in 1996, Mngadi was the only black director and vice president in the company, and the only South African in the company’s senior management.

To find and develop new talent in one of Africa’s newest democracies, Mngadi was tasked with driving a R30-million graduate development programme called Kusile (new dawn), which was rolled out over five years.

“We recruited 30 university graduates each year from all the country’s universities, and put them through a year-long boot camp. They were in a classroom setup, but they also got their hands dirty at the coalface of operating a profitable Coca Cola bottling company, from legal to production to operations, marketing, sales and distribution. After a year, those graduates were absorbed into the Coca Cola system, deployed in the company or with its bottlers, before we took on the next layer of trainees,” Mngadi explains.

The next level of empowerment and leadership development involved the company creating a talent development committee. This was to ensure that for every foreign national or expatriate holding a senior leadership role at the company, there would be two or three mainly black deputies ready to step into those positions in the next year, two or three years.

“Many of those graduates became

Coca Cola warriors in Southern Africa and across the globe. It was our contribution to counter what at the time was brain drain and replace it with brain gain. Our programme was a pioneering transformation and leadership programme, which the likes of Old Mutual and Sanlam replicated over time. Even if we lost some of the graduates we produced to other companies, we took the view that South Africa gained,” says Mngadi, now senior partner at a leading global corporate advisory firm.