AFRICAN SPEAKER BUREAU · CURATED FOR ABSA
What a New Structure Cannot Announce
For leadership teams shaping a new organisation before its habits, culture and ways of working are set.
**A structure can be announced. The behaviour that makes it work is set by what leaders do next.** There is a short window in any major organisational change. It opens when the new structure becomes visible, and closes once people have worked out for themselves how things are done now. During that period, culture is being formed in ordinary decisions: - who is heard, - how difficult conversations are handled, - which behaviour is rewarded, - how people affected by the change are treated, - and whether leaders behave differently from the organisation they inherited. Leadership teams can shape that period deliberately. In an organisation the size of Absa, one way is to run several parallel Speak So You Are Heard cohorts across countries, functions and leadership levels, all working on the same live organisational questions from different positions inside the business. Participants develop clarity and authority under pressure while learning how colleagues elsewhere in the organisation see the same change. They build working relationships across organisational boundaries, challenge assumptions and bring forward intelligence that leadership may otherwise never hear together. The result is more than stronger communicators. Absa builds a network of people who understand the change from different angles, know how to reach one another and can turn what they see into thinking leadership can use while decisions are still open.
About this collection
The structure answers reporting lines. Behaviour is learned in the months that follow. Absa is not entering this transition without support around it. The bank already has substantial leadership development, employee listening, succession processes, culture work and a strategy that has been thought through carefully. The open question sits between those systems: how a newly formed leadership structure actually begins to work across people, functions and markets. - A strategy becomes useful when a manager can interpret it for the people making decisions below them, rather than forwarding the language from above. - Culture becomes visible when somebody can disagree with a more senior person and still be heard. - A talent system becomes credible when capable people understand how decisions about their future are made, especially during a period when roles are changing. Those moments rarely belong to one function. Strategy, Human Capital and Communications can each do their part well and the organisation can still lose something between them. That matters now because the new PPB leadership structure is still taking shape. Early decisions are being watched closely. People are learning what carries weight, how disagreement is handled, which behaviours are rewarded, how leaders affected by the changes are treated, and what the new leadership expects from those who remain. The move towards a pan-African model adds another layer. Reporting lines can cross borders immediately. Shared ways of working take longer. A decision that makes perfect sense at group level can land very differently in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Accra or Lusaka, and some of the intelligence needed to improve it already sits with people closest to those markets. The voices on this page have dealt with different parts of that problem from inside organisations themselves. Each carries one question worth putting to a leadership team while the answers are still being formed.
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