For Casper true leadership entails giving employees guidance to do their jobs properly while affording them freedom in their roles. “Be a leader rather than a manager. Once you have assessed your people’s ability to execute their roles, you need to trust them to execute the strategy.”
There are numerous functions under Casper’s supervision at Old Mutual including company secretarial, investor relations, taxation, actuarial services, and the legal department. “I have neither the time nor the ability to perform all these functions and hence I need to ensure that I am comfortable with the person who is leading each team,” he says.
“I am no legal expert for example, so my role is to ensure that I have the right person in charge of that division. I have been told that I am a very goal-oriented person who can be intimidating. At the same time, I think I am approachable . . . I think you need to have the appropriate balance to implement strategies whilst demonstrating that you care for people and their development.”
Casper has won numerous Partner Awards whilst at Deloitte and was a finalist for the South African CFO of the year in 2015. Given that his father was not a businessman, he has had to rely on certain mentors who took a personal interest in his career. These included certain seniors at Deloitte namely Philip Wessels, his first manager, then COO Richard Dunn and then CEO Vassi Naidoo.
As a way of paying it forward, Casper always has about seven mentees at any given point who he makes time for. Some of them have gone on to hold quite senior positions, including his successor at Liberty Yuresh Maharaj and Smangaliso Mkhabela, founder of The Shard, a boutique actuarial and analytical consultancy.
According to Casper another vital role of a good leader is to set strategies and ensure they are implemented. “Strategy is all about execution. You can have a good strategy but if you cannot execute it then it becomes meaningless. The strategy must also be inspirational; people need to be moved by the strategy to give it their all. It should also be customer focused because if you don’t have a customer, you do not have a business.”
Any strategy also needs to have a long-term view and progress must be measured at appropriate intervals. Furthermore, you must consider current trends in your industry. “For instance, in our business, convergence has led to many different platform businesses becoming our competitors. Amazon may have started selling books online but before you know it, they have developed a platform to sell insurance. So, our competitors are not necessarily people in financial services. You need to anticipate such trends to develop a strategy that is bullet proof.”
Another aspect of Casper’s strategy playbook is information gathering. According to him research is critical to ensure that decisions are made from a point of knowledge.
This article is an extract from the Masters of Money book by KC Rottok Chesaina (JONATHAN BALL PUBLISHERS)
