Ownership Now Has to Travel Further

About this collection

**The structure can change faster than the habits that made the old structure work.** FirstRand has never had a shortage of intelligent people. Nor, from the outside, does it appear to have a shortage of leadership programmes. The more specific question is what happens when the work changes shape around capable people. A federated structure teaches somebody to know their business deeply, own the outcome and act. A more integrated group still needs that ownership. It also asks the person to extend it past the boundary they control. The credit specialist needs enough understanding of business, technology, geopolitics and customer behaviour to notice when something outside credit has changed the assumptions underneath the decision. The technically exceptional person promoted into leadership finds that solving the problem and leading people through it are not the same capability. The manager receiving a strategic change can understand perfectly why it is happening and still not know how to explain it to twenty people who will ask questions the announcement did not answer. And artificial intelligence adds a further change. Analytical capability does not disappear. It becomes widely available. That raises the value of judgement, context, synthesis, curiosity and the willingness to decide while capable people still disagree. These are not four separate leadership programmes. They are human consequences of one operating-model transition. The speakers on this page each take one part of it. Speak So You Are Heard is where those parts get practised on a real FirstRand question rather than discussed.