South Africa Report

The 2019 Worldcom Confidence Index is an invaluable benchmark for the confidence levels of business leaders.  In our second annual Confidence Index, we commissioned Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI), a research company that uses artificial intelligence (AI), to create a fully representative understanding of what audiences are saying. We captured and analysed the online contributions, in nine languages, of 58,374 CEOs and CMOs globally. This enabled us to identify which topics are highest on the leadership agenda, and how confident or concerned leaders are about the topic.

Since we published our first Confidence Index, world events such as: the US/China trade war, Brexit, Amazon forest fires, the Hong Kong crisis, the increasing pace of global warming and the resurgence of diseases such as Measles, have continued to create a more uncertain world. Our second Confidence Index shows exactly how confident or concerned business leaders are about dealing with these challenges.

This year’s findings have uncovered a 21% decline in confidence globally since 2018.

The top six findings for South Africa are:

#1 South African leaders rank as ‘concerned’. Their CI score is the fifth lowest of the 15 countries analysed

#2 Influencers climb to #1 audience for leaders’ attention and leaders are confident about connecting with them

#3 Employee-related topics dominate leaders’ agenda

• Upskilling and reskilling is the most discussed topic and has the highest CI score
• Employee-related topics take five out of top six topics
• Employees have the second highest CI score of all audiences

#4 South African leaders are moderately confident about their corporate image and brand reputation

#5 The media matters and South African leaders are confident about its impact

#6 Leaders in South Africa are moderately confident about customer satisfaction.

 The Global report for the Worldcom Confidence Index 2019 can be seen here. You can view the full South Africa report here or see the deck below. To have the best viewing experience please use full screen mode.