Shanaaz Majiet

About Shanaaz Majiet

Shanaaz Majiet is an institutional transformation practitioner, ICF Master Credentialed Coach (MCC), and public sector leadership expert with more than three decades of experience leading change from inside government, corporate, and international systems. She is the architect of the Courage-to-Act Capability Model, a three-layer diagnostic framework that distinguishes between capacity (skills and knowledge), capability (the institutional conditions that allow knowledge to translate into action), and courage (the willingness to act and absorb risk when the system resists). She has applied this model across six years of culture change work at the City of Tshwane, where she initiated and sustained one of South Africa's most ambitious public sector transformation programmes, moving the institution from administrative crisis to emerging maturity. Shanaaz holds an MPhil in Disability Studies from UCT and has completed executive programmes at Harvard Business School (Wits Senior Executive Program) and the Kennedy School of Government. She has served as Superintendent General and Head of Department for the Western Cape Department of Local Government and Housing, Deputy Director General at the national Department of Cooperative Governance, and Chairperson of the Board of Isandla Institute. She is a board member of the Gestalt International Study Center (GISC) in the United States, where she also serves on faculty and trains in two programmes. She has delivered leadership development programmes across five continents, including repeat engagements with the Swedish Gestalt Academy and BTS (a Swedish consultancy working with South African banking, retail, and telecommunications clients). In December 2022, she delivered the inaugural public lecture at the Salzburg Global Center for Education Transformation, the culmination of a 27-year association with the Salzburg Global Seminar that has included seven invitations. She is currently co-authoring three chapters in a practitioner book on local government: one on organisational culture change, one on the compliance paradox in municipal governance, and one on decolonising leadership. Her husband, Shuaib Chalklen, served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Disability from 2011 to 2015. Both have been lifelong disability activists. Shanaaz has been a paraplegic since the age of 17, using a wheelchair for 40 years. She was born in District Six, evicted under the Group Areas Act, and raised in Lavender Hill by working-class community activist parents. Her leadership is grounded not in theory but in the lived experience of navigating power, access, and institutional resistance from a position the system was never designed for.

Key message

Systems change when individuals have the courage to act differently and the stamina to withstand the resistance that change provokes. Policy does not fail in the document where it was written; it fails in the room where someone has to decide. Capacity is almost never the problem; the missing ingredient is the courage and institutional permission to act on knowledge already held. Leadership is presence, not position. Disability inclusion is a question of institutional design, not awareness. The future of leadership lies not in stronger individuals but in stronger collectives.

Speaking topics and expertise

• Institutional transformation and culture change from the inside out.
• The Courage-to-Act Capability Model: why capacity without courage produces non-decision.
• Disability
• power
• and institutional design: how navigating inaccessible systems produces a fundamentally different understanding of leadership.
• The policy-practice gap: why reform fails at the point of judgement
• not at the point of policy.
• Decolonising leadership: from "I lead" to "we lead together." Board effectiveness and ethical governance.
• Executive presence and communication for senior leaders. Diversity
• equity
• inclusion
• and belonging as governance tools
• not compliance exercises.