The Everyday Leader podcast features inspiring individuals building and leading teams across Africa. Listen to episodes on your preferred podcast platform here.
About our Guest
This episode’s conversation is with Kelly Ng-Lun from Mauritius. Kelly’s professional experience spans marketing, consulting, brand and product management. She holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University. After nearly 10 years in Canada, she returned to her home country, Mauritius where helped launch a small business in the hospitality industry before then joining the African Leadership University as a faculty member. While at ALU, she taught Entrepreneurial Leadership and created the E-Lab program for the Bachelor of Entrepreneurial Leadership degree in Rwanda. She believes in unlocking social good through entrepreneurship and is currently doing so as the Community Manager for PUNCH, a new initiative by Business Banking at the MCB Ltd.
Everyday Leadership in Action
Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Kelly:
Manage others the way you would want to be managed: Kelly grew up with entrepreneurial parents that served as great role models and so when it came time for her first opportunity to lead a team, she felt prepared. She found herself needing to oversee a group of MBA ambassadors to represent her business school. She felt supported by her manager at the time and approached the team formation and management from a perspective of treating everyone like she would want to be treated. This involved empowering team members to succeed and bringing everyone together in a tight-knit group.
Leaders must identify their values before setting a vision: Most people don’t get a chance to spend over a year focused on how to develop entrepreneurial leaders. So when Kelly had the chance to do just that, she jumped at the opportunity by joining the faculty at the African Leadership University, where she spent most of her time there designing and running their E-Lab. She shared that one of her key take-aways was that it’s important that leaders first identify their core set of values and the challenges they care most about. This then allows them to more intentionally develop missions that will align with their long-term interests and guide them throughout their journey.
Community management involves coordinating internal stakeholders as much as it does community members themselves: In her current role as Community Manager for the PUNCH platform at MCB Ltd, she has spent some of her early months working closely with the Product team in making sure the platform features resonate with the intended users. She will also continue to spend time mobilizing and raising awareness for their relatively new platform amongst other departments across the financial institution to ensure all of the right internal resources will be leveraged to benefit the community of SMEs their platform is designed to support.
The Everyday Leader is a podcast featuring conversations with leaders from across Africa’s companies, organizations, and governments about their experience managing teams and projects throughout their careers.
Know of an “everyday leader” in your company or network? Nominate them here.
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