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South African boardrooms are being asked to make bigger calls, faster, with less certainty than they are used to. Artificial intelligence is reshaping operating models, while geopolitical tension is rewriting supply routes that once looked dependable. That mix is changing what companies want from leaders, and how they plan for the next one.
It is against that backdrop that Heidrick & Struggles has appointed Thabiso Legoete as managing partner of its Johannesburg office. Legoete succeeds Allen Shardelow, who led the business for 15 years and will stay on in a senior client-facing role.
Shardelow’s tenure spanned a bruising stretch for corporates and advisory firms alike. He is credited internally with steering the office through the disruption of the Covid-19 period and then the uneven recovery that followed, maintaining continuity for clients and staff.
Legoete says the next chapter will look different. Decisions about talent, structure and succession are now intertwined, he argues, because technology-led change and external shocks are arriving at the same time. The old habit of treating leadership, org design and performance as separate projects is harder to defend when strategy can be overturned in a quarter.
Under Legoete, the Johannesburg office plans to broaden its advisory work alongside executive search. The firm says its local offering will place greater emphasis on succession planning, leadership assessment and development, organisational design and culture transformation, with more deliberate use of its global research and tools.
Executive search remains central to the business, Legoete says, but clients are increasingly looking for a deeper partnership that goes beyond the appointment itself. The pitch is that boards want help pressure-testing candidates, building bench strength, and shaping leadership teams that can cope with rapid shifts in risk and opportunity.
Legoete brings more than 25 years’ experience across financial services, management consulting and executive search. He has advised chairs and chief executives across sub-Saharan Africa on board effectiveness and senior leadership succession, and previously led the local office of a global organisational consulting firm. Earlier, he held senior roles at Absa Group across strategy, operations, human resources and transformation. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand and INSEAD.
The firm is also using the appointment to underline how quickly the leadership brief is evolving. AI is forcing companies to rethink how work gets done, which roles matter, and what skills sit in the centre of the enterprise. At the same time, geopolitical shifts are disrupting supply chains, raising questions about resilience, redundancy and cost.
In Legoete’s view, agility is moving from buzzword to baseline. Leaders who can reconfigure teams and resources quickly, and make decisions with incomplete information, will be the ones who succeed. A heavy reliance on experience alone can become a constraint when the playbook is changing.
That focus is sharpening interest in succession planning. Boards are looking harder at the gap between the leaders they have and the leaders they will need, particularly in technology-adjacent roles and in functions tied to risk, procurement and operations.
Heidrick & Struggles is also tracking how leadership models are shifting globally as work patterns change. The firm has expanded its on-demand talent offering internationally, placing interim leaders and senior executives for defined periods. It says the trend is not yet a priority in South Africa, but it is likely to influence how companies think about scarce skills over time.
Transformation remains a central part of the local message. Heidrick & Struggles says it is a Level 1 B-BBEE contributor, with 78 per cent of its South African executive placements in 2024 filled by black candidates. Women accounted for 52 per cent of appointments.
Legoete describes his own leadership approach in practical terms: create room for people to stretch, test ideas and take considered risks, while ensuring setbacks are treated as learning rather than failure. That mindset, he says, is what companies will need as standing still becomes the riskiest move of all.
