South Africa has a mentorship problem. Not a shortage of people willing to give advice, but a shortage of people willing to genuinely invest, to open their world, share their network and back someone who does not yet have the access to back themselves.

That distinction matters more than we tend to acknowledge.

Advice is cheap. What changes the trajectory of a career, or a life, is something far more specific: a person with influence who decides to use it on your behalf. Who puts you in the room, positions you as capable before you have fully proved it, and holds the standard high enough that you grow into it. Most people who reach positions of real leadership will, if they are honest, be able to name the one or two individuals who made that possible. Not institutions. Not programmes. People.

The question worth asking, particularly among those who have made it, is how deliberately and how often they are playing that role for someone else.

In my work as a coach, I see a consistent pattern. Talented people stall. Not because they lack intelligence or work ethic, but because they have no map for the environments they are trying to enter. They carry qualifications without the confidence to deploy them. They arrive in rooms they have technically earned and still feel as though they do not quite belong there.

That gap is rarely about competence. It is almost always about exposure, access and whether anyone has ever genuinely bet on them.

Formal education does not close that gap. A postgraduate degree will give you knowledge. It will not give you executive presence, the instinct to read a room or the composure that comes from being in high-stakes situations alongside someone who models how to handle them. Those things are transferred person to person, through sustained and intentional relationship. There is no shortcut, and no curriculum that replicates it.

I know this from the work I do, and I know it from my own experience.

I grew up in Soweto, moved between underfunded township schools and eventually into better-resourced ones, where I understood quickly how much ground I had to make up. I repeated grades. My confidence suffered. What I lacked was not ability. It was the exposure that teaches you, almost subconsciously, how to carry yourself in environments you have never seen modelled. I accumulated qualifications, entered the working world and still walked into boardrooms feeling as though I was performing a version of confidence rather than owning it.

What changed that was not a course or a credential. It was one person, early in my career, who decided to open their world to me, shared their network, placed me in front of rooms I had not yet earned on paper and held me to a standard I had to grow to meet. That relationship changed the material facts of my life in ways I am still building on.

I share that story not to sentimentalise it, but because it illustrates something that is replicable. What that person did was not extraordinary in terms of effort or resource. It was intentional. And intention, in this context, is the thing in shortest supply.

This is the misconception that holds many leaders back: that mentorship, particularly across the lines of race, class and professional network that define so much of South African working life, is an act of generosity, admirable but optional. It is neither optional nor merely generous.

When you bring a capable person into your world, you expand your own reach. You build trust across networks that would otherwise remain closed to you. You develop people who will, in time, create access for others. The return is real and it compounds, across your organisation, your industry and, in aggregate, across an economy that cannot afford to keep leaving ability on the table.

The opportunity most leaders are searching for is rarely more than one or two relationships away. But those relationships require a willingness to move beyond the familiar, the networks you already know, the environments where you are comfortable, the people who already look and sound like you.

In the leadership and networking spaces I facilitate, I return often to a simple idea: when familiarity increases across difference, trust follows. And when trust is established, real collaboration becomes possible. That is not idealism. It is how functioning ecosystems are built.

South Africa does not need more conversation about transformation. It needs more people practising it, one deliberate relationship at a time.

Somewhere in this country, right now, there is someone with drive, ability and hunger who is stalling because no one with influence has decided to back them. The cost of that, multiplied across thousands of people and decades, is not abstract. It shows up in businesses that never scale, in leaders who never emerge, in potential that simply goes elsewhere or goes nowhere.

This kind of investment works. The harder question is whether you are doing it and doing it with enough intention to actually matter.

Author Bio:

Sakhile Mkwanazi is a coach at Grow Coaching, specialising in customer service, business growth and entrepreneurship. An Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellow, he holds a Masters in Entrepreneurship from Wits Business School and has coached businesses across technology, energy, retail and hospitality. Before joining Grow, he managed a business development portfolio of R50 million in the construction industry.