In the realm of towering ideas leadership acceleration stands a story or two above the rest. It's a notion capable of advancing not one company or one nation, but the world, and its origins can be traced not to a classroom, laboratory or business bestseller, but a handful of consultants from McKinsey & Company. One of those consultants is McKinsey partner David Fine, who is today described as the core leader of the firm's capability-building practices. However, Fine's contribution to the firm is hardly revealed by his title. Having been among the core group of consultants who opened the firm's Johannesburg office in 1995, Fine is recognized as one of the authors of what the Johannesburg office calls its African Manifesto. More a pledge perhaps than a legal document, the Manifesto embraces the goal of helping talented black South Africans develop as leaders. For its part, the South African government has mandated a timetable for the ascension of black managers to leadership positions as part of a wave of post-apartheid reforms.
"Our sense is that the long-term sustainable economic growth of South Africa and Africa depends enormously on building high-quality leaders," says Fine, who last year had an opportunity to expose the precepts of leadership acceleration on a world stage when he led a panel exploring South Africa's leadership challenge at the World Economic Forum.
In South Africa, conversations between business and government leaders are already taking place to accelerate leadership development, as Fine and his McKInsey colleagues advance their objective and help secure commitments from business institutions to be part of their leadership development curriculum "We look at this as an office that ultimately has to truly shape in some way the social fabric of the continent," says Fine, who believes the grand ambition of McKinsey's South African office has been fueled in-part by the excitement shown by McKinsey consultants from all parts of the world.
– Jack Sweeney
CM: How committed is your office to applying the concepts of leadership acceleration?
Fine: In terms of our Africa practice, we've committed ourselves to cracking the growth code. It's part of what we call our African Manifesto, within our sub-Saharan practice. As we explored the issues in South Africa and Africa, the issue that we continued to come across was leadership capability and capacity. Our sense is that the long-term sustainable economic growth of South Africa and Africa depends enormously on building high-quality leaders.
Just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the challenge, if you look at South Africa specifically, just to meet their transformation aspirations, by 2014 they'd need to develop an additional 60,000 African senior management leaders. That would probably mean that they'd have to cut down the typical leadership journey from university to senior management from about 18 years to seven years.
It gives you a sense of the magnitude of the issue. This is also compounded by the fact that in Africa you have multiple value systems. In South Africa alone, you've got eleven different official languages. The complexity that adds is tremendous. So we see this as a fantastic opportunity to make a contribution to something that would truly allow Africa to emerge in the 21st century.
CM: Are there other parts of the world that are facing leadership challenges of such magnitude?
Fine: Well, there are two other regions, specifically, that we're focusing on in addition to Africa at the moment. The first is Asia and the second is the Middle East. And what we've committed ourselves to doing in Asia is to do a similar exercise, where even though there are very different cultural issues in many of the Asian countries, the scarcity of leadership talent is of great concern because the economies are growing so quickly. The ability for them to grow leaders to meet the challenge is becoming a real constraint.
CM: Can you tell us about how the ideas related to leadership transformation and acceleration came forward within the Firm and how different approaches began to be discussed?
Fine: The issue has essentially emerged through a couple of factors. As McKinsey, we've been doing a lot more work on the topic of leadership and on the topic of understanding how to transform people and change people in terms of how they lead themselves, how they lead their business context or environmental context, and how they lead others. From a capability building perspective within McKinsey, that skill has emerged. Simultaneously, this challenge has become a topic of conversation because as the institution has become more conscious of how to build these skills in others, we've become more conscious of the issue in a broad society. A group of us actually got together last year in Phoenix, Arizona, and began to explore this topic, and through that many of these initiatives have emerged.
The answer to your question in terms of thought leadership is that it's a combination of McKinsey exploring a new dimension of how to build leadership skills and what it takes to do that, plus our emerging consciousness around that issue, coupled with a recognition of the clear constraints that economies and our clients are facing. It's almost as though those events have all come together.
CM: What exactly are leadership candidates likely to experience within the program?
Fine: It's a combination of bringing together in a distinctive way an experience that people truly get excited about. Our very strong belief is that people learn when they're stretched and people learn when they are emotionally committed to achieving their objective.
What we've added to the mix is creating a high-capacity coaching model, because what we've seen certainly in South Africa is that even though people are given a big stretch and they're given accountability, in many cases they're not given the supporting environment, whether that's the coaching and mentoring or the skills development that allows them to be successful. Let me give you an example. If you think about, let's say, an issue like strategic leadership, people can go to the universities and learn the functional capabilities around strategy and industry market knowledge and all of those kinds of things.
But how to develop intuition about what the key issues are, how to cope with ambiguities, how to set an exciting aspiration, how to be resilient, how to be open-minded, how to get to the skill of being able to reflect — if I can describe those as sort of personal capabilities of strategic leadership — those are the things that ultimately get shaped by the specific context you're in and the coaches and mentors who are around you. Similarly for people leadership, the kinds of personal capabilities around fellowship and inspiring people and motivating people are the intangibles, which ultimately in our view define how people engage in leading other people and in leading the business.
CM: Can you describe the different participants and the scope of the program?
Fine: We're finalizing exactly what the scope of what we're going to do will look like. But our hypothesis is that it will be a combination of two parallel programs, one that is focused on the top leadership of institutions that can make a dramatic impact in enabling the economy. For example, in South Africa that could be effective transportation and logistics, or effective and efficient telecommunications and utilities. In other African countries, it will likely be different institutions. So the one level of this is focused on building the leadership core of those institutions.
Simultaneously, on top of this, we believe that a second stream, which we call the leadership master class program, will also exist, and it will take the future leaders of businesses and of government departments and potentially of countries and take them on a journey which builds their skills but in a way that is also linked to enabling and unblocking the key barriers to economic growth within the country.
For example, somebody whom we think has enormous potential to be a future leader would participate in that program and part of what they would contribute back to society would in some way unblock or address a key macroeconomics or business issue or government policy issue as part of their application. We think that the masterclass model builds skill and also creates exciting coaching capacity for the corporates. And the corporates programme is required in order to transform themselves in order to enable the economy.
CM: And as far as the maturity of the creation of this goes, how would you characterize it?
Fine: I would characterize it in the following way: We have clarity on what the program looks like and we have a large amount of the programme content. We have an emerging group of committed board members, including, for example, Reuel Khoza, chairman of what's called the NEPAD Business Foundation, which is essentially entrusted with the topic of leadership development for the Africa Union. We have had quite advanced conversations with a couple of institutions in terms of beginning and piloting the concept. That's in the South African sense. In the Asian sense we're actually further along, because the Asian leadership effort is more of a McKinsey-led effort. We're working there specifically with clients. It's not a country-focused effort; it's more of an institution- and client-building effort.
But I also want to be clear. From McKinsey's perspective in South Africa and Africa, this is something that we want to contribute, and therefore we don't want to be the owners of this future institution. We want to create and enable this institution.
CM: Given the time commitment for someone like yourself and other McKinsey consultants, and the fact that there is not likely to be an immediate impact on your own business, could we assume that the Firm views this effort as something of a higher calling?
Fine: Well, let me say that we believe that our role in Africa is much greater than contributing to McKinsey's global practice in the sense of a geography that has a lot of commercial potential. We look at this as an office that ultimately has to truly shape in some way the social fabric of the continent. In fact, I know that there is a shared view within the Firm that this contribution is something that is very exciting. Picking up on that, when we talk about this topic, the people within our office and within the Firm get extremely excited. And so this also helps to keep our own people excited and committed, and a reasonable chunk of people within our office are contributing over weekends or after hours to help move this effort forward.
CM: What can you tell us about the origins of the program in both Africa and Asia?
Fine: Within Asia, clients have come to McKinsey and said, "Please help us to deal with these specific issues." Here in South Africa, as a leadership team, we sat down and we asked, "What is it that we want to contribute? What do we want to stand for?" And one of the things that came up very clearly was that we wanted to be an office in and of Africa. We wanted to make a substantial contribution to the social and economic growth of the continent. It was essentially through that framework that this effort was completely tied to that objective. It was never really shaped in the context of servicing a client need. It was shaped in the context of servicing a broader need on the continent.
CM: Twenty years from now, if we were to speak to a business or government leader who had years earlier revolved through this leadership acceleration program, what would he or she tell us about the experience?
Fine: I'm hoping that what you would expect to hear them say is, "I went on a journey that was a pivotal moment in my life. It changed the way in which I thought about myself, about how I related to other people and how I could make a meaningful impact at work and on the broader community. I learned from great leaders who shared their immense wisdom with me, people like Bill Clinton and Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela. I learned as much about what makes leaders successful as about what makes leaders fail, and I have built a network of peers that I'm proud to be part of. We have had an impact not only on what we've done within our own institutions but also on the social fabric and success of the African continent."
CM: How are the leadership candidates likely to be exposed to the caliber of leaders you have mentioned?
Fine: Let me state my aspirations for this program in the following way: When we talk to experienced leaders about what we're trying to do, there is a lot of excitement. My belief is that the people I've mentioned would be truly excited about imparting their leadership wisdom to the next generation of leaders. I truly believe that what shapes people's values about leadership is conversation and dialogue with great leaders, who can talk about great leadership moments and challenging leadership moments. I would expect that the journey we're going to create, at least for the masterclass journey, will have faculty of that kind of caliber. Even if it means sending people overseas for a period of time to shadow certain leaders, whether they're CEOs or McKinsey clients, for some of these future leaders to see for themselves what it means to lead. Now, that's in the vision stage. But it's certainly something, in my view, that I think we can get high caliber people to contribute to.
CM: Can you share with us what would be a milestone for this effort over the next 12 months?
Fine: The key milestone for me is that I want one of these institutions committed as a pilot in the next three months. I would want either a large utility, a large telecom, or a large transportation logistics company committed. That, for me, is the milestone. If you ask me further out, 12 months out, well, I certainly expect to have completed the first class or a couple of classes through that pilot.
CM: As someone who grew up in South Africa and built their consulting career there, can you share some thoughts on that unique experience and what South Africa can reveal to the rest of the world?
Fine: What comes to mind and what I can never forget is the elections in 1994, when this society went through a truly transformational experience. While on the day before the election there were bombs going off in South Africa, on the day of the election there was trust, mutual respect, care, and support within an entire nation. What that has given me is a belief that societies really can truly transform. A belief that it takes leaders like Mandela, with humility and authenticity and a variety of values, to create that sort of trust on a truly national scale. And that is something very few people in the world besides people who were there inside South Africa on that day in 1994 can truly imagine — the true transformation of a society.
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