Thursday, October 06, 2005
Perception and Affirmative Action
Its amazing how we perceive people that we think are successful.
Successful in whatever way...At work they may have climbed the corporate ladder. Creatively they may have achieved great success. But each of us STILL have our burdens - our difficulties and hills to climb.
Someone said to me today - its not the gradient of the hill that you have to climb, but the size of the stone in your shoe!
People in my organisation, who I think are successful have been talking about how affirmative action has affected them. How they are limited in terms of advancement in this organisation. How they still have targets and work to put out, and say they are being dictated to about who must be put into strategic positions and roles.
They would not have chosen these people and are now stuck with them, and expected to "make it work". A few things bothered me about this. One of which is that automatically, AA candidates are seen to be of "inferior" quality prior to their skills being assessed. Secondly, in one instance a non AA candidate is being groomed into a vacant Management position - why could the same opportunity not be offered to a suitable AA candidate in that team. It seems that we still have a long way to go in terms of gaining equality of opportunities in South Africa!
(this is me climbing off my little soapbox after giving my 2 cents!)
