Unlike the accountants, engineers or marketers you usually find leading information technology (IT) companies, Mardia van der Walt-Korsten's ascendancy has been off the back of a career in HR. Little wonder then that she understands human beings and drives a people-centered leadership approach. This doesn't mean that her approach is the tired “we put people first” diatribe you hear in most IT companies which relentlessly pursue profits and to which human resources are the fodder to deliver shareholder value. With amaster's degree in clinical psychology, Van der Walt-Korsten has a keen understanding of the human psyche and is a firm believer that effective leaders are people who are whole, integrated and happy, and that self actualised humans deliver the best to themselves and the work place, creating an environment where the collective can realise its potential.
Van der Walt-Korsten has pioneered work environments throughout her career. She helped develop the HR function for M-Net and Multichoice and was key in creating a learning centre at M-Net, developing an M-Net/Multichoice nursery school. In 1998, Van der Walt-Korsten joined T-Systems where she helped build the company and was instrumental in implementing key transformation processes, with a specific emphasis on the integration of new employees. In 2007 van der Walt-Korsten was appointed as the CEO for T-Systems in SA, the first woman to ever hold this position.
Under her leadership T-Systems has been turned around after winning a R1.8 billion deal with Old Mutual, making the company one the biggest players in South Africa's outsourcing market. Her success has been recognised by her peers - she won the 2008 BWA Businesswoman of the Year Award and is short listed for the CSSA / ITWeb IT Personality of the Year. Mandy de Waal caught up with her to discuss her unique leadership style and the issues facing leaders in business today.
What are the issues that women face in business?
Research was done 30 years ago which showed the difficulties women face, which included a lack of female role models in senior management positions particularly in engineering and IT. Now this has changed tremendously. There is a lot of encouragement to get women to take part in technical careers, but what remains difficult is the whole work/life balance issue and how women balance their lives if they choose to have a life and family outside of work. In the IT environment, up to a technical expert level, there is a lot of support and flexible options, but if you are in a managerial track it is not that easy. You have to have meetings over a difficult period of time when kids need to be fetched and carried. But the IT environment could lend itself as an ideal place for women to find their feet because of the nature of the work; a lot of the work can be done without being physically present.
Are women well represented in leadership in the technology industry, or is leadership still largely male?
Women are not as well represented as they should be. The BWA did a census with Nedbank and the number of women represented at board level is shocking. There is a leakage of the oil pipe - as women become more senior, you lose them out of the system. Not out of working life but they find other ways of working because a lot of companies don't do enough to make the corporate world flexible enough.
What leadership lessons have you learned?
The key lesson for me has been personal. It was a huge shock when I was appointed because I don't have a technical background. T-Systems is German and I was the first woman to be appointed. I find that European men are quite stereotypical in their thinking. But more difficult than the gender issue was that I didn't have a technical background, so I had to determine what value I would bring. I would not be the IT guru. For me it was simple things, and the first lesson was to know what I don't know, to ensure that I practice without ego so I could bring in the best people around me. Closely aligned to this was the ability to pick a world class team and then motivate, and to create and share a vision, then create movement towards achieving that vision.
What are the most important skills to have when managing people?
We said we wanted to create an IT company with a soul and it sounded very strange to people. When you unpack what soul means in terms of quality then it is the answer to this question. It is about creating an approachable environment. This doesn't mean you have to give up power. You don't give up any control, but you respect human dignity, you listen and you share and guide without making people feel like fools. You bring humanity to the workplace. Then we are bringing a moral leadership and we are talking more about what drives morality. This starts with respecting individuals where people feel that they are more than a widget. People want to feel they are human in the context of a business.
Do people bring their woundedness into the workplace?
My view is that if you are not whole, your leadership style will take on your pathology.
Mardia van der Walt-Korsten, CEO, T-Systems SA
I totally believe that people bring their woundedness to the workplace. I have a psychologist that comes out to my exco meetings on a regular basis and offers feedback, not on the overt but on the underlying stuff. My view is that if you are not whole, your leadership style will take on your pathology. Very often you can't deal with these pathologies directly, but if you create the environment a lot of people issues come to the place and it can become a place for healing. However, I introduced the psychologist very carefully. I packaged it under development, which it is of course, because how do leaders in the organisation learn? The stuff that leaders have to learn about can't be learned on a three-day course, it all comes back to wholeness and how they engage with other individuals. In the beginning I brought psychologists in with bigger groups, and now the team is totally open to it. We are getting to a point where it is working well. We are open and it is brutal, but we have taken away politics which can be a killer. If you don't deal with relationships and power plays at this level, it trickles right through the organisation and it becomes a split or a means for creating silos within the business.
Do women lead differently to men?
I do think so, but it is a very individual and a personality driven thing. There are characteristics which come through our upbringing and through the way in which society works. Women can be more open and inclusive and not use the ego, but I have seen women role model differently and who are very ego-based. It is difficult to generalise.
Are women uncomfortable with the word power?
I don't think that women have embraced power because for women there are negative connotations with this word.
Are women redefining power? If so how?
The time we are in, the era, is making more space for the redefinition of power. Think of what has happened in the last few weeks in the world and what it says about ruthlessness, greed and power. The world is looking at what business is doing and this will force a new definition. Do we want to be totally profit-driven or do we want to be soul-driven or heart-driven or do it in a different way? The economic fallout will lead to a complete new thinking of leadership and the way we view power.
* Mandy de Waal is a columnist and writer. A former broadcast journalist, de Waal writes for Brainstorm, ITWeb, MoneyWeb and is the Editor of MoneywebLife. She writes about technology, convergent media, corporate rot and whatever else takes her fancy. Read the riffs on her blog.
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