Truth to Power: My Three Years Inside Eskom

by André de Ruyter

Looking back, I realise there is a lesson to be learnt from all the events leading up to my appointment. By treating people with decency and respect, and not expecting anything in return, one can build up a well of goodwill that might turn out to be very valuable one day.

Having a higher purpose is crucial to motivating me to achieve and deliver.

If I’m unable to derive meaning from what I’m doing, I quickly lose interest.

Maintenance is not a sexy discipline, but like brushing your teeth, it will catch up with you if you neglect it for long enough. It’s a lesson Sasol learnt the hard way during a cost-cutting exercise known as Project Rand. All businesses were instructed to save 10 per cent of their cost, without specifying where the savings had to come from. The easy way out was to save money on maintenance, and in the case of the infamous Boiler 9 at Secunda, it took Sasol eight years to recover from one year of deferred maintenance. Multiply this experience across Eskom’s eighty units, and you have a maintenance nightmare. Catching up would be a labour of Sisyphean proportions.

I’m not a fan of the ‘Big Man’ style of leadership which demands total loyalty from followers and loves yes-men. I don’t like screaming and shouting at employees and treating them like dirt. Instead, I believe in servant leadership. But servant leadership doesn’t mean soft leadership. I don’t shy away from making tough personnel decisions

and holding people accountable for their performance. Although these decisions can be hard on one person, the damage caused by their non-performance often affects many more people downstream. In sparing the individual, society suffers.

Despite being an introvert, I seldom suffer from stage fright. What gave my confidence a further boost was the knowledge that I was not there to sell them a pipe dream, to tell them a story or to deceive them. I was there to share some inconvenient truths. If they didn’t like it, then that was too bad.

Coercion cannot be dressed up as leadership. A leader makes you feel that you have voluntarily signed up to join a worthwhile mission. The threat of the whip only works in a slave society. In modern business, particularly when your colleagues are highly qualified and experienced, co-option and inclusive consultation deliver far better results. Making people feel valued and recognised for their expertise and experience is an incredibly powerful motivational tool.

Leadership requires a constant fight against the entropy of decay and disorder.

There is a telling story about John F. Kennedy’s visit to the NASA space centre to meet the team preparing for the Apollo missions. When Kennedy spotted a janitor with a broom over his shoulder, he walked over. Ever the consummate politician, he said, ‘Hi, I’m Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?’ (even though the broom was a pretty dead giveaway). ‘Well, Mr President,’ the janitor replied, ‘I’m helping to put a man on the moon.’ It’s a story that shows the value of giving employees a sense of ownership in the larger endeavour, of giving them purpose.

Duarte also indicated that the ANC was going to put out a statement saying they were fed up with loadshedding and that we needed to figure out what is going on. Why, they wanted to know, do we even have loadshedding? I wanted to say, ‘Guys, you were in control for twenty-eight years and now you want to wake up and ask what is going on. We’ve had loadshedding for the past twelve years.’ The lack of self-awareness from the ANC was astonishing. It was as though they didn’t realise that they were the government that put in place the policies that led to loadshedding. It was as if all these bad things that were happening were somehow the result of other people’s actions.