Leading without a title

At the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Centre for Higher Education Development’s (CHED) recent Women’s Day event, three inspiring women shared stories about how they became leaders, long before anyone gave them the title.

According to the Department of Higher Education and Training’s 2024 statistics, women make up more than half (54.9%) of the permanent workforce at South Africa’s public higher education institutions. Yet, they hold far fewer leadership positions. The Aspiring Women Through Leadership Programme (AWLP), run under UCT’s University Capacity Development Programme (UCDP), was built to close that gap through leadership training, mentorship, coaching, networking and professional development shaped around the specific barriers women in academia face.

The programme in its current form is a product of listening. The UCDP office surveyed participants on what the programme needed to do better. Working with the dean of CHED, Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak, and current project lead, Safia Lagerdien, they reshaped it around three pillars: developing authentic leadership from within, building influence and authority, and navigating institutional systems for meaningful change. The reimagined AWLP launched in October 2025. Five programme events later, featuring guest speakers from within and beyond UCT, a capstone session earlier this year brought participants together to tell their leadership stories. Three of those stories were shared again on Women’s Day by Dr Natashia Muna, Dr Hlamulo Makelane and Tania Hendricks.

Dr. Muna: confidence as the “baking powder”

Muna described leadership as something she’d been practising for years before the programme gave her language for it. Coming in, she said, she already held strong values, but lacked confidence, relying on external validation to feel entitled to lead. She offered a metaphor from her own writing, saying, “Confidence can be thought of as the active ingredient, much like baking powder in a cake, all the other delicious and nutritious ingredients may be brought together, but without [it], the cake will not rise.”

By the end of the programme, she said, that confidence had stopped feeling like performance and started feeling like “internal core strength”. She closed with a list of the kind of leader she wants to be: “One who leads with an ethic of care, isn’t threatened by the success of others, can say sorry and gives before taking.”

Hendricks: leadership as seasons

Hendricks, the senior manager of HR Operations and Finance in the School of Economics, chose a plant as her governing metaphor, a leadership journey with its own seasons of growth and hibernation. Leading her siblings as the eldest of four children born in the 1970s, teaching a class of six-year-olds as a young teacher, moving into administrative roles with no formal leadership title, she realised in hindsight was leadership in disguise. “You don’t need to have the title to be a leader,” she said.  “A good leader today means being agile and adaptable, and accepting that the space required of you is not always comfortable, or even natural, but necessary anyway.”

Dr Makelane: poems from a village

Makelane shared three original poems, written through the programme. “Growing too soon” reflected on responsibility inherited in childhood, without ever being formally assigned. “Invisible training” described the skills built through quiet observation. “I learned to listen. I learned to observe. I learned what silence was saying”. She closed the session with an excerpt from “Inherited dreams”, written in honour of the women who raised her: “Today I walk a path prepared by a woman who could not finish walking there, and perhaps that is how their dreams survived. Not lost, not forgotten, but living through me.”

Why it matters

These three stories made a simple but pointed argument: leadership at UCT doesn’t begin with a job title or a management structure – it begins in childhood homes, classrooms and communities.

Details of CHED’s next AWLP cohort will be shared in due course.