Female leaders from the public and public sector as well as entrepreneurs attended the Graduate School of Businesses and Leadership Women at Work Breakfast held in Durban. Suitably themed: Dream, Dare, Do: Celebrating the Boldness and Tenacity of Women Leaders, the empowerment event saw speakers challenge participants to reflect on their leadership journey to ascertain if they are empowered as well as how they are empowering themselves and those around them.
The panel consisted of:
- Dr Augusta Dorning – Managing Partner: Extraordinary Hospitals of Africa
- Professor Halima Khunoethe – Head: Office of Standard and Compliance, National Department of Public Administration
- Ms Nirvashni Rajkumar – Senior Financial Advisor: Investec Bank
In an interactive session based on Reflections on Empowerment, Dorning engaged the audience in an exercise where each person rated themselves through a survey on where they were on their empowerment journey. Based on the results, Dorning advised attendees to take stock of where they are on their empowerment journeys.
‘We have just come out of a pandemic and it has had a significant impact on our mental health and our strength. How does the environment external to you affect your empowerment? This is a significant lesson for managers and aspiring leaders because the external environment can be extremely damaging and extremely disempowering,’ she said.
Dorning added that everyone must have an empowerment first aid kit and start with empowering themselves so that they can in turn contribute meaningfully to the empowerment journey of those around them.
Fresh off the 2023 BRICS summit, Khunoethe shared insights on the role she played as the BRICS (WBA-SA) Women in Business Chairperson on the Capacity Development Work Stream and task team leader of the pre-BRICS WBA-SA conferences in relation to Personal Branding and Networking Strategies for Professional Success.
‘As I did the research, I gathered that there is no content or resource book that is actually pencilled on the BRICS WBA-SA. I took it upon myself to find more information from the organisers and as a result, am pencilling a content book that would show the journey of how the WBA-SA formulated by Russia as the founder having to ensure that women are represented equally gaining from economic strives that our country is seeking to achieve. As women, we are no longer talking about the glass ceiling. We actually talking about the concrete ceiling which we need to shatter and we need to really disrupt a lot of contextual elements that don’t resonate with us,’ she said.
Daylilies – Lying Low and Living Well was the topic of Rajkumar’s talk on financial resilience.
‘This is bringing me full circle as I am a graduate of the GSB&L and stand in deep gratitude to the Business School for unearthing this diamond that stands before you today. Be careful about what parts you with your hard-earned Rands and cents, every time the rand depreciates, our Gross Domestic Product goes down which means everything costs more for us. I want to encourage you to invest in yourself as life in South Africa will not get better any time soon. Financial resilience is the key to your future, so make those good financial decisions now,’ she said.
Interim Dean and Head of the Graduate School of Business and Leadership, Professor Colette Muller said the GSB&L is looking forward to events such as these, which bring together academic and staff with students and alumni to engage and network.
Watch the event on UKZN’s College of Law and Management Studies Facebook page here.
Words: Thandiwe Jumo
Photographs: Albert Hirasen