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Most bosses who need their people to change how they work lead with the change. South African financial services and asset management group Sygnia's founder and CEO, Magda Wierzycka, led by addressing the fear that’s likely to derail the change process, first.

When she told her staff that they needed to strategically shift the company to adopt AI or risk going out of business within 5 years, she led with a simple, straightforward promise: not a single one of them would ever be replaced or displaced by the technology.

Why the promise comes first

Ask people to adopt something they think could replace them, and you rarely get enthusiasm. You get slow-walking, quiet resistance, or your best people updating their CVs. Even if you think it’s obvious, they don’t know, so it pays to actually just tell them straight-up how and where you see this going.

If you take their fear off the table first, the question in the room changes from "will I survive this?" to "how do we make this work?"

Wierzycka has said she sees her staff becoming "hands-on ambassadors" for clients, with technology doing more of the heavy lifting behind them. That gives people a picture of their job after the change, not just a warning that change is coming.

A promise only works if people believe it

Sygnia has the record to back up her promises, though. For its 20th anniversary, the company had a party in its Cape Town office, which fits 120 people, so it limited the invite to staff who have been there 10 years or more. That created a problem: more than 120 of its 450 people qualify, and all but one of its executives have been there over a decade, because people just really love working there.

"The culture is unique," Wierzycka told BizNews. "It is like a family, and I do not say that lightly." She also has a reputation for being demanding to work for, and people stay anyway, which is something that goes a long way if you’re trying to reassure people.

It's still just a promise at the moment, not a result, so Sygnia will still have to live up to it. And we’ll be watching closely.

For you: Whatever the change in your business (AI, a new system or a new way of working), the order matters: remind people what isn't changing, then tell them what is, then show them how they fit into that future.

A US coffee chain called Dutch Bros started as two failed dairy farmers slinging espresso by pushcart along the railways of Oregon in the 1990s. Now that it’s grown to a $7.5 billion (R123bn) coffee empire, the 3rd largest in the States after Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, the company wanted to preserve the honest and down-to-Earth approach that made them so successful.

Their plan? They required every member of senior leadership to know what it is like to pour coffee and run one of their franchises. So, recently, they had CEO Christine Barone report for a two-week bootcamp in the stores.

Six shifts making drinks and running a shop; then a test on recipes, operations and culture that, if she failed, she’d have to keep taking until she got it right.

Here’s the thing, though: the staff training her didn't go easy on her.

Most owners either remember their frontline job from years ago, or not at all. The quickest way to find out what's really slowing your people down is to do their job for a day, and let them tell you where you're getting it wrong.

The question worth sitting with: When did you last spend a full shift doing the job your frontline team does every day?

268,000

is the number of jobs South Africa's formal sector added in the third quarter of 2026, according to Stats SA's latest Labour Force Survey, released on Tuesday. Over the same 3 months, informal businesses lost 98,000 jobs and private households 68,000, so overall unemployment barely moved, ticking up to 33.7%.

Over a year, formal jobs are up 357,000 while informal work is down 485,000. If you run a registered business, you're in the part of the market that's hiring.

Source: Stats SA, Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Q3 2026

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