Chapter Three: Roll Your Sleeves Up
To be Updated .....
If you see this you will notice that your presence in every chapter is important. We will remove all the names and company names for your protection. For building up we will keep them for now to get sense of direction. MORE VOICE NOTES PLEASE MORE VOICE NOTES
The day we are afraid to talk with our own people is the day we make the greatest mistake. — Janine Hills
I had been through the scenarios twice before any of them shifted in their chairs. A safety incident. A strike. A community protest at the gates. Eight directors, the Johannesburg skyline behind them through floor-to-ceiling glass, and for each scenario the same question from me. Who speaks. How. To whom. When.
The answers were thin. Thinner than they should have been from people running an operation that size.
I pushed further.
I said, how do you handle a strike.
Quiet.
I said, how do you handle a second Marikana.
The quiet changed texture. It was not the quiet of people thinking. It was the quiet of people who had decided, somewhere along the way, not to think about that particular thing.
I looked around the table and I asked the question that needed asking.
Are you afraid of your own people.
Nobody answered. But every person in that room shifted slightly in their chair, and that shift told me everything I needed to know about the distance between where they were sitting and where their people were.
I have sat with enough employees on the ground, enough union representatives, enough people who will never see the inside of a boardroom, to know what the distance produces. Not in theory. In their own words, in different industries, different cities, different languages, the same thing surfaces every time.
They say the bosses used to come down.
Not announced. Not managed. The boss who showed up on the floor, who sat, who had a braai, who knew names without being briefed on them first. That stopped. Nobody decided to stop it. It simply stopped, somewhere between the growth and the governance frameworks and the diary that filled with other things. And the people on the floor noticed before anyone in the boardroom did.
What they noticed was not the absence of the boss. What they noticed was what filled the space where the boss used to be.
Not for a managed walkabout with a photographer. Not for a town hall with prepared remarks and a moderator filtering the questions. They mean the real thing. The boss who came and sat. Who had a braai with them. Who knew their names and asked about their families and did not need a communications team to tell him what to say because he already knew these people because he had never stopped knowing them.
That stopped. Somewhere between the growth and the glass buildings and the governance frameworks and the legal sign-offs, it stopped. And the leaders who used to walk the floor now sit in meetings about meetings while the distance between them and their people quietly becomes something else.
Not distance anymore. Distrust.
And into that distrust, everything you were afraid of rushes in to fill the space.
This came before I had the language for it. Years before I was walking into boardrooms and asking the hard questions, I was sitting across from Michael Yudon at First National Bank. He was the kind of leader who filled a room without performing for it. In my first month he called me in and told me something I have never forgotten.
He said, I do not want you to start the turnaround yet. I do not want you to start the big changes. First I want you to go and see the branches. See the people. Understand the very makeup of this organisation before we touch a single thing.
I was young enough to think that was a delay. I was wrong. What Michael understood, and what I only fully understood years later, was that you cannot change what you do not know. And you cannot know an organisation from the fourteenth floor. You know it from the floor. From the branches. From the people whose names are not in the board pack but whose hands do the actual work.
That instruction is the foundation of everything I do when I walk into a new engagement. Before the strategy. Before the key messages. Before anything. I go and I look. I sit with people. I listen to what they say and I pay even closer attention to what they do not say. Because the distance between those two things is always where the crisis lives.
Marikana. Not the politics of it. Not the inquiry findings or the legal analysis or the competing narratives about who bears the greater responsibility.
Watch the documentary. I say this to every leader I work with who tells me that engagement is a soft skill. Watch it and count the mistakes. Not from one side. From every side. The mining company. The unions. The government. The presidency. Every single one of them making the same fundamental error, over and over, in real time, on camera, for the country to see.
They stopped talking to the people in front of them and started managing the situation instead.
There is a moment in that story, and it is not a single moment, it is dozens of moments accumulating over days, where a direct conversation between a leader and the men sitting on that koppie could have changed what happened next. Not solved everything. Not resolved years of legitimate grievance in an afternoon. But changed what happened next.
That conversation never happened. The distance was too large. The fear of direct engagement was too deeply institutional. Nobody rolled their sleeves up. Nobody sat down in the dust and said, I am here, tell me what you need, and I will tell you the truth about what I can give you.
Thirty four people died on the sixteenth of August 2012.
I am not saying one honest conversation prevents a massacre. I am saying the distance that made that conversation impossible was built over years, one avoided engagement at a time, by leaders who were afraid of their own people and called it something else.
She was one of the best I had worked with. Senior executive at a large organisation. Sharp, articulate, someone the market genuinely needed to hear from. Her thinking was clear. Her conviction was real. When she spoke in a room of peers, people leaned in.
But she could not speak publicly without it going through her communications team first. Then legal. Then the regional office. Then the international parent. Each layer sent it back with notes. Legal wanted certain words removed. The regional office wanted the tone softened. The international parent wanted to review the timing. By the time it came back to her it no longer sounded like her. She would read it and say nothing. That silence was its own answer.
By the time the approval came back the moment had passed, the journalist had filed a different story, and the silence had said something she never intended.
I sat with her one afternoon. She had just come out of a call with the international parent. They had sent back her latest statement with seventeen tracked changes. She put the document on the table between us and did not look at it.
She said, I just want to say what I think.
I said, then say it.
She said, I cannot. They will not allow it.
I looked at her for a moment. Then I said, who built the reputation that made them want to manage you so carefully in the first place.
She did not answer immediately. But I could see the thing landing.
The protection had become the cage. The communications infrastructure built to amplify her voice had grown so elaborate it had silenced her instead. And while she sat behind six layers of approval, the space where her voice should have been was filling up with other people's versions of what she stood for.
That is not protection. That is the slow erasure of a leader.
I know a chairman. I am going to meet him tomorrow, in fact. His CEO is a chartered accountant. Good man. Serious man. When I talk about sitting with the employees, about letting people understand the vision, about creating the kind of direct engagement that closes the distance between leadership and the people being led, I can see it on his face before he says a word.
He says, I hear you. But I need to show the board a return. I cannot put employee engagement on a balance sheet.
I do not argue with him on that ground. I never do. I move to where he lives.
I say, tell me what it costs you when a rumour starts and you spend six months managing the fallout. Tell me what a strike costs. Tell me what happens to your numbers when your people do not understand the direction you are going and start filling the silence with their own interpretation.
He goes quiet. The good kind of quiet. The kind where something is arriving.
I say, one honest conversation. One. That is the cheapest crisis management tool you will ever have access to and you are not using it.
Then I wait.
Because this is what the work actually looks like. Not a speech. Not a dramatic intervention. Sitting across from a man who has been taught his whole career that numbers are real and feelings are not, and waiting for the moment when he understands that the feelings of six thousand employees are a number too. They show up on the balance sheet. They just do it through a different set of line items.
We turn the dial slowly. One conversation. One letter that sounds like a human being wrote it instead of a committee approved it. One moment where the CEO takes his jacket off and sits at the same level as the people asking the hard questions.
It does not transform overnight. But it moves. And when it moves, something happens in that organisation that no press release has ever produced. People start to believe that the person at the top actually knows they exist.
A board member said something to me on Friday that I keep turning over.
She said, Janine, the reason we called you in is because we know you. We know you and we can trust you. Given what we are about to go through, it is so hard to bring someone in that we do not know and do not trust.
That trust was not built on Friday. It was built across years. Every time I showed up and said what needed to be said even when it landed badly. Every boardroom where staying was harder than leaving. Every moment the truth was inconvenient and I said it anyway.
They might not always like me. There is a big difference between liking someone and trusting them. Some of those board members heard my name and thought, oh God, not Janine. She is tough. But they know I will tell them the truth. And when you are about to go through something that will test everything your organisation is made of, the person you want in the room is not the one who makes you comfortable. It is the one who makes you ready.
That is what forty years of showing up looks like.
So here is what I say to every leader who tells me they do not know how to close the distance.
Roll your sleeves up. Take your tie off. Take your jacket off. Go to where your people are. Not where you are comfortable. Where they are. In this country that means something specific and something ancient. It means sitting like a kraal. Putting a fire on. Making the space warm enough and honest enough that the hard questions can come out without anyone being afraid of them.
When the questions come, and they will come, they always come, do not reach for the approved statement. Listen. Actually listen. Not to manage. To understand.
Through that listening will come the understanding. Through the understanding will come the trust. And through the trust will come the only thing that actually protects a leader when the real crisis arrives.
Not a strategy. Not a press release. Not a crisis communications plan that took three months to write and sits in a drawer.
A room full of people who believe that the person at the top will tell them the truth.
That is what you are building every time you go down to the floor. Every time you have the conversation you would rather avoid. Every time you choose the hard truth over the comfortable silence.
You are building the thing that holds when everything else is burning.
The Reflections
Courage to do what is right is not a single act. It is what you do every ordinary day before the crisis arrives.
The directors in that fourteenth floor boardroom were not cowards. The executive locked behind six layers of approval was not weak. The chartered accountant who calls direct engagement touchy-feely is not wrong that numbers matter. Every one of them arrived at their fear through a system that taught them to manage risk by creating distance.
But distance is not safety. Distance is the risk. It is the gap that rumours fill, that unions fill, that social media fills, that crises fill. Every leader who has ever been blindsided by something their own people saw coming has been betrayed by distance they built themselves, one avoided conversation at a time.
I saw what distance does in 1984 in Port Elizabeth. I was young. Bodies pulled from burning cars. The Eastern Cape was not a gentle place to grow up in. What I understood then, even without the language for it, was that the violence did not start on the day it became visible. It started in the years of silence before it. In the accumulated weight of people who had stopped being heard.
That does not leave you.
South Africa does not have a leadership shortage. It has a courage shortage. We have brilliant people in positions of real power who are afraid of the very people they were appointed to serve. And into that fear, into that silence, into that distance, everything comes that we were trying to prevent.
Roll your sleeves up before the fire starts.
Because once it starts, you will be rolling them up anyway. The only question is whether you are doing it to build something or to put something out.
Janine to add the relevant quote, leader, or moment that first showed her what courageous presence actually costs — whether from a specific client whose silence destroyed something real, from her own experience of choosing the hard truth over the comfortable answer, or from a mentor who modelled this for her before she understood what she was watching. we can also add laws and policies
. Marikana. Did you ever work directly with any organisation that was affected by the Marikana strike, before or after the sixteenth of August 2012. If you did, tell me that story. If you did not, tell me the first time you used Marikana as an example in a room full of leaders and what happened when you said it.
. The female executive. Tell me about the specific moment you realised she had lost her own voice. Was there a specific statement she was trying to make that kept getting sent back. What was it about. What did the final version look like compared to what she originally wanted to say.
. The chairman and the CEO. Tell me about a specific leader you turned around on the question of direct employee engagement. Not the general pattern. One specific person. What did they say when they finally understood it. What were their exact words if you remember them.
. Port Elizabeth, 1984. You mention bodies pulled from burning cars. What specifically did you see or experience that year that has never left you. Not the general picture of that time. One specific thing. One moment. Where were you and what did you witness.
Take your time with these. Voice note them if that is easier. These answers go directly into the book.
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