Biography

Sifisile Mndebele, the Founder and CEO of Black Ripple Consulting, is a qualified attorney with more than ten years of experience in the legal space. Before becoming an in-house corporate legal advisor, she completed her articles at a leading law firm and continued her legal career at one of South Africa’s top law firms.

Her career as a legal advisor commenced at a leading developer, producer, and supplier of commercial mining explosives, part of a JSE-listed organisation. This company, based in South Africa, has a presence in Southern Africa, numerous countries in Africa, Australia, and select international regions in South-East Asia, South America, and Europe. While there, she was promoted to Senior Legal Manager, advising on and negotiating numerous contracts for the organisation. Over time, her role expanded to include compliance and ethics. She was part of a team that designed and rolled out a compliance and ethics programme for the entire group of companies. In her subsequent roles within the same company, Sifisile became the Acting Global Legal, Compliance, and Ethics Manager and later moved to Senior Group Compliance Manager. These roles exposed her to young interns and junior employees entering the workspace and reporting to her. In her role, she mentored young people acclimatising to the corporate space, and on weekends, she also ran youth development programmes.

Her experience as an entrant in the workplace and as a manager has taught her that onboarding an employee must go beyond familiarising that employee with the company’s intranet. An employee needs to understand their role in an organisation and, importantly, how they may work within the organisation, satisfy the needs of the company and therefore avoid the anxiety and stress of thinking that they are not meeting the needs of the company.

Sifisile loves to empower young people to find synergies in their environments and with the people they work with to bring out the best in themselves and discover how to find joy in their work. For them to impart the knowledge and experience they gain from interacting with those they encounter.