☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
Opportunities & Insights from Across Our Community
Hi everyone, here’s what we have for you this week:
Community management involves coordinating internal stakeholders as much as it does community members themselves. In this week’s episode of The Everyday Leader, Kelly Ng-Lun from MCB shares how she is going about her new Community Manager role for their PUNCH platform for SMEs.
How can you fast-track high-potential leaders at your company? This month CoffeeChat will host a discussion panel of five Talent and L&D leaders from companies across Africa to dive into this important topic. RSVP here.
Are you a manager working in Africa? Participate in our 12-question survey on how you feel about the leadership development opportunities and resources available to you.
Read on for more details…
Managing others the way you would want to be managed, identifying your values before setting a vision, and the many sides of community management
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.
Panel Discussion: Fast-Tracking High-Potential Leaders
CoffeeChat's panel discussion series hosts Talent and Learning & Development leaders from companies and organizations across Africa. Each panel discusses and shares insights on important topics around leadership development and supporting managers. Our first panel’s topic will be "Fast-Tracking High-Potential Leaders" with a focus on these discussion questions:
In what ways does your organization identify high-potential and under-represented leaders and accelerate their growth?
How can junior and middle managers proactively seek out opportunities and take self-ownership of their leadership development plan?
Our all-star panel will feature leaders from across the continent:
Cecilia Gitahi, Head of Learning & Development at Wasoko
Nelly Mutula, Head of People Ops at Fuzu
Grace Ayibowu, Head of Human Resources at SeamlessHR
Queen Kaze, Global Human Resources Manager at Jibu
Tionelepo Ndhlovu, Learning and Development Manager at World Vision Zambia
Disclaimer: The views and opinions shared by each panelist are their own and not that of their respective companies.
2022 Manager Growth Survey
Earlier this year we experienced a fantastic turnout for our second annual Manager Support Survey. While that survey captured trends from Talent and L&D leaders about their perspectives towards leadership development strategies and realities, we are now gathering views directly from managers themselves.
We’re now excited to launch our inaugural 2022 Manager Growth Survey, a 12-question pulse check of how managers at companies across Africa feel about the leadership development opportunities and resources available to them. If you’re a manager working in Africa, we encourage you to participate!