At the end of October 2025, an important advancement in corporate reporting in South Africa was released. The Institute of Directors in South Africa (IoDSA) and the King Committee of South Africa released this iteration, known as King V, which is a significant move forward, as the landscape has shifted in the past nine years since the previous disclosure framework. In this article, we take a closer look at the issue of intent in corporate governance reporting, and we turn our attention to the key issue of legitimacy and why you should care about it.

Governance Frameworks and the Issue of Intent

At a broad level, governance frameworks aim to instil, protect and advance certain intentions within corporations and their social environments. By reporting against such frameworks, a business has the opportunity to lay claim to good intent and evidence it by certain behaviours and investments. This is a strong echo of Legitimate Leadership’s concept of intent: we teach that your intent as a leader is proven and perceived through your actions. The people you serve will believe you have their best interests at heart if they see how you actually care about them and invest in their growth. Something very similar holds true at an organisational level.

Organisational value statements are usually a strong expression of what the organisation intends, and with a solid intent in hand, the necessary practices and appropriate priorities become clearer. The IoDSA one-pager on King V neatly names some baseline intents that corporate leaders must adopt (namely: setting & steering direction; policy and planning; oversight and monitoring; and accountability). Directors must value these things and recognise their responsibility to deliver them. However, these are the start of the journey, and don’t fully express what the business actually achieves as an outcome. And so directors must also look forward to what actually gets achieved by that intent.

Seeing Legitimacy as an Outcome

Organisations and leaders of teams ought to pursue some definite outcomes (King V lists: ethical culture; performance and value creation; conformance and prudent control; and legitimacy). For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the fourth outcome in the new governance framework, namely legitimacy.

In the King V framework, legitimacy is defined at a corporate level as “the social licence to operate that the organisation has acquired, in addition to its formal right or licence to operate, through transparently demonstrating its trustworthiness and responsible corporate citizenship.” Notice that legitimacy is not the formal right or licence, but a social licence that is acquired on top. It is not something that can be engineered. However, as we’ll show below, you do still have significant agency in developing it. It is a key outcome to attain.

Why Legitimacy Matters

Truly, legitimacy is not acquired by virtue of any licence, position, board, or formal authority. Legitimacy, in both corporate and leadership contexts, is an earned qualification, bestowed upon you informally by those around you, especially those you serve. Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. And if you hold it, you hold a fluid power, a trust that is built and maintained through displaying right intent and appropriate practices. To operate without pursuing and acquiring legitimacy will constrain the longevity, the impact, and the excellence to which an organisation might aspire.

The same holds true for your role as a manager, in which you have certain stewardship and domains of responsibility. To manage excellently and have an impact that can be called leadership, you must attain legitimacy in the eyes of those you lead. This is core to what Legitimate Leadership’s leadership programmes deliver: helping people grow themselves into the sort of leader that others would willingly follow. In this is true power.

Now, the other outcomes of corporate governance and leadership do not fall away when we highlight legitimacy. Instead, we find that it is through legitimacy that directors, executives, and managers can be effective in establishing the various processes, standards, and accountability structures that move the whole organisation forward. Growing a genuine care for your direct reports and being committed to their growth is not divorced from other organisational outcomes, but is deeply enmeshed with your pursuits of ethics, values, and performance.

The emphasis on legitimacy as a governance outcome in King V is a real positive for South Africa, because it clarifies and soberly underscores the other outcomes that organisations must also pursue. By paying attention to legitimacy, organisations defend themselves from being misconstrued by customers and employees as simply a means to an end. Legitimacy is centrally important because other outcomes cannot be sustained without addressing the issue of social licence.

Conclusion

An investment in legitimacy is not a marketing matter of controlling public perception. It is a matter of a true and fundamental shift within the organisation, in which you earn trust, increase impact, elevate performance, cultivate accountability, and build strong people. And this necessarily flows outside of the organisation.

As we look to 2026, we at Legitimate Leadership are excited about the prospect of increasing our impact on South African businesses. We have increased the number of open introduction programmes being hosted in Johannesburg and online, in addition to our application modules and corporate interventions with new and existing clients. Whether you run a small team of leaders or employees, or you are responsible for larger governance outcomes in your organisation, we invite you to come and see how a “care and growth” model works in practical, day-to-day leadership.