He has worked at a range of international tech and telecoms firms, and in June 2018 he took over as CEO of independent data, voice and IP provider Liquid Telecom South Africa – wide-ranging experience that has helped shape Reshaad Sha’s renowned professional reputation. ‘Some of the places where I have worked tend to label my leadership style as “rebellious”,’ he says. ‘That was and will always remain a compliment for me, primarily because of the results that I have been able to deliver with my style of leadership.’

Results are how business leaders are often ultimately judged. Liquid Telecom, for example, has been named Best African Wholesale Carrier at the annual Global Carrier Awards for the past seven consecutive years. So when he settled into the CEO’s swivel chair, Sha knew he had to deliver – and fast.

One of the first challenges he had to address as Liquid Telecom SA CEO was to oversee the management of the company’s customer experience resulting from an aged network. ‘Our recent network upgrade, and to a large extent active network replacement, enabled us to change our customer experience positively,’ he says.

‘In undertaking the network modernisation, we focused on enabling a future-ready service capability – both from an architecture and capacity perspective. Not only is the network now more resilient and redundant with very low latency but we also have one of the most technologically advanced, reliable networks on the entire African continent, strategically positioning and pushing us light years ahead of our competitors.

‘This enables us to help our existing customers on their digital transformation journey and cater to the demands 4IR is expected to bring to the African continent.’ Sha relishes the challenge. ‘In my many years of working in the telecommunications sector, I have always focused on speed of execution while balancing it with the results that needed to be achieved,’ he says. ‘However, as much as speed is critical in a business, it is the momentum that is more important while executing change management. Due to the numerous moving parts that need to be aligned, momentum is built slowly, but once it has built up, the results come to fruition, ultimately helping to increase the momentum more.’

That momentum is vital to Sha’s other leadership goal of encouraging the people in his teams to pursue their learning objectives. ‘We must find ways to appreciate and enjoy the learning process, and retain and practise it,’ he says. ‘This skill will always prove invaluable in the journey through life, be it business or personal.’

That helps explain Sha’s agile approach to business leadership. ‘A good leader is one who is able to adapt their style of leadership in accordance to the situation at hand, and who has the ability to not stick to a specific conventional approach in problem-solving,’ he says.

Sha’s leadership philosophy has obviously been shaped by the rapid, disruptive changes that have come to characterise the tech industry. ‘We have witnessed the change that businesses have undergone operationally just in the past few years, meaning that even leaders need to change and acclimatise. They can no longer follow the routine-based, traditional, safe and familiar methods of leading in today’s dynamically changing world, where competition is at its peak,’ he says.

‘A good leader must be responsive to both the internal and external environments in which they operate, while ensuring that innovative thinking is embedded in their operating environments.’ Sha is excited about the emerging, enabling technologies that he gets to work with every day at Liquid Telecom. ‘The Information Age that we live in offers us a huge opportunity to change and impact the world that we live in, in a much better way,’ he says.

‘Because of technologies like IoT, AI and robotics, we are able to gather and analyse vast amounts of data rapidly, enabling us to create informed solutions to our problems. Connectivity has allowed for cross-border investment and trade to be much easier and effective. The pervasiveness of connectivity – along with the benefits it brings to communities – is really satisfying to witness and be a part of.’

Rather than being intimidated by the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Sha believes that businesses should approach it through a lens of creativity and innovation — one that, as he puts it, ‘conceptualises what technology makes possible and caters for the new age in which the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres are blurred’.

By looking through that lens, Sha is leading Liquid Telecom SA – which, in turn, is leading an entire industry – into an exciting, empowering future. The overarching mission of the company – to get all of Africa connected and up to speed with the developed world – according to Sha, ‘has enabled us to position ourselves as a custodian of innovation, modernisation and foresight for the betterment of Africa and its people’.

By Mark van Dijk