☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
Opportunities & Insights from Across Our Community
Here’s what we have for you this week:
Last year, CoffeeChat partnered with Shortlist to connect career coaches in the region with job seekers struggling during the lockdown. We’ve created a short 1-minute case study clip. Here is a summary below:
Shortlist works across East Africa and India to help growing enterprises hire based on skills and potential. Their platform screens candidates using predictive chat-based interviews and online competency-based assessments. Shortlist was seeking to connect its job seekers and clients to a network of career coaches and mentors to support them during the uncertainty surrounding layoffs in 2020.
CoffeeChat curated relevant career coaches from East Africa available to provide pro-bono career coaching sessions, via a co-branded portal shared with the Shortlist community. Over 6 months, 50 one-on-one coaching sessions and 150 group coaching sessions were conducted. Shortlist’s Director of Strategy & Partnerships shares: “It's been amazing to hear from participants on how interactive and practical the coaches get. The group sessions are also conducted in a manner that puts participants at ease and encourages peer learning.”
If you’re also interested in finding a way for your organization to partner with CoffeeChat, please get in touch.
Interested in the story behind CoffeeChat? Listen to a conversation with Chris Suzdak that was released last week about his experience launching the start-up and why coaching will play an important role in growing successful businesses in Africa. Here is a short excerpt:
“The African Management Institute has done a study and they say there are an estimated 15 million managers working at professional organizations across Africa…at NGOs, businesses, and governments....and my best guess is that less than 10% of those 15 million have regular access to their own coach.
I think that’s a shame because I’ve seen the impact that it can have on a manager. Managing people is very hard, and that applies wherever you are in the world. And when things go wrong when you’re a manager, it has a big effect on your team’s morale, productivity, and even their creativity.
Looking at my own experience, when I didn’t do a good job of aligning my full team around the same goals, they ultimately were less productive. When I didn’t listen carefully to my different team members, they stopped sharing innovative ideas. And when I didn’t inspire people enough around the vision, people would leave to go to other companies.
Managers have a big role to play in organizations. Not just the top CEO or director, but middle managers also affect teams because most people leave their jobs not because of the company or the mission, but because of their direct manager.
So if we can get more - double or triple the current figure of managers in Africa that have access to a coach that can provide that safe space to speak with someone on a regular basis so that they minimize the number of rookie mistakes that they might make or think through how they can better support their team - I think that would allow companies and even governments to be even more competitive on the global stage, and have happier teams and communities.”
Coach Arnold will host a group career coaching session this Wednesday. He shares:
Only 15% of the world’s full-time professionals are enthusiastic about their work as per a Gallup research. Like most of us, we treat our careers and job search as an iterative process with every subsequent job, we sought a little more of what we liked in my previous role, and little less of what we didn’t like. With the Ikigai framework, Arnold guides you to a simple and elegant solution for assessing where you are in your career/ job search and determining what pivots to make based on a more long term outlook.
Please share with anyone who you think could benefit from attending.