The best way to improve the lot of workers in the workplace, and beyond, is through better leadership.
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Professor Marieta du Plessis
Every year on Workers’ Day, South Africa pauses to honour the dignity of labour. We march, we commemorate, we make speeches about rights hard-won and still contested. And then, on May 2, we return to workplaces that, for too many people, quietly drain the life out of them as workers who carry the weight of organisations on their backs while their voices go unheard at the tables where decisions are made.
This is not only an economic problem. It is a leadership problem.
Our research, drawn from fourteen empirical studies spanning more than a thousand South African workers and leaders, has led us to a concept of the Leadership Vitality Spectrum. At one end sits what I describe as vampiric leadership - the kind that extracts energy, silences voice, and leaves workers depleted long before the end of the working day. At the other end is life-giving leadership: environments in which care, dignity, respect, and compassion are not occasional gestures but the unconditional standard by which leaders hold themselves accountable.
Most South African workplaces sit uncomfortably in the middle of this spectrum: not openly toxic but not genuinely enabling either. Leaders are technically competent but emotionally absent. Organisations speak the language of people-centredness while quietly normalising overwork, surveillance, and the slow erosion of the very things that make work meaningful. What gets protected and promoted in these spaces is output, rarely the humanity of the people producing it.
The cost is not only personal. Research consistently links life-draining leadership to disengagement, absenteeism and the haemorrhaging of talent that South Africa can ill afford. A workforce that is psychologically depleted cannot drive economic recovery, social cohesion or the kind of ethical organisational culture that a post-apartheid society urgently needs.
South Africa carries a particular burden into every Workers’ Day. We are a country still negotiating the psychological aftermath of apartheid-era labour relations built on hierarchy, exclusion, and the systematic denial of dignity. Decades later, those patterns persist in new forms: in the micro-aggressions of daily management, in the casualisation of the workforce, in the silence that surrounds workplace bullying and in the overwork culture that masquerades as ambition.
Responsible leadership requires that we reckon honestly with these systemic inheritances. Every leadership decision carries ripple effects on individuals, families, communities, the long-term sustainability of the organisations and society within which those decisions are made. A leader who normalises a sixty-hour working week does not only harm the individual employee. They entrench a culture that erodes health, fractures families and narrows the imagination of what work can be.
What workers need is leaders who actively and genuinely engage them, not through performance reviews and suggestion boxes, but through the daily practice of listening, co-creating, and pursuing a benevolent organisational future together. Collaboration is not a management technique. It is a moral commitment to the people whose labour makes every strategic objective possible.
Leadership involves taking accountability for the people you lead.
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One of the most persistent myths in South African organisational life is that leadership is primarily about competence. About knowing the right frameworks, deploying the right strategies and achieving measurable targets. Competence matters. But research consistently shows that the most damaging leaders are often technically capable. What they lack is inner development: the self-awareness, ethical reflection, emotional regulation and courageous integrity that responsible leadership demands.
Courageous integrity means adhering to a clear set of ethical principles regardless of personal consequences, even when it is costly, unpopular, or when the institutional pressures push in the opposite direction. It means taking full accountability not only for one’s own decisions, but for the conduct and wellbeing of that one lead. This is not a soft aspiration. It is the bedrock of trustworthy leadership, and trust, once lost in organisations, is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild.
A leader who has not interrogated their own fears, biases and blind spots cannot create conditions for others to flourish. The unconditional commitment to becoming the best possible leader - whatever it takes - is inseparable from the commitment to enabling and empowering others to become the best versions of who they can be. These are not separate goals. They are the same goal, pursued from the inside out.
The Ubuntu principle, “I am because we are”, offers South Africa a profound indigenous resource for this reimagining. Ubuntu-centred leadership is relational, communal, and oriented towards collective flourishing. It does not ask “How do I advance?” but “How do we thrive?” In a country of South Africa’s complexity, this is not naive idealism. It is strategic wisdom.
Responsible leadership is ultimately a question of legacy. What kind of workplaces are we building? What kind of society do our organisational cultures reproduce? What do we leave behind for the generations of workers who will follow us?
At the Centre for Responsible Leadership Studies, we speak of crafting inspiring and shared dreams, visions of what is collectively possible that transcend individual self-interest and orient leaders towards a common good worth striving for.
South Africa has no shortage of policy frameworks on decent work, employment equity and workplace rights. What we need now is a deeper cultural shift: from compliance to genuine care, from managing people to enabling them, from leadership as extraction to leadership as flourishing. This shift will not come from legislation alone. It must come from leaders who choose, deliberately and daily, to lead responsibly.
The workers of this country deserve environments where they are seen, valued, and enabled to grow. They deserve leaders who understand that a flourishing workforce is not a cost to be managed, it is the very source of organisational vitality, social cohesion, and national renewal.