☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
☕ CoffeeChat Weekly
Opportunities & Insights from Across Our Community
Hi everyone, here’s what we have for you this week:
Ownership and trust go hand in hand. In this week’s episode of The Everyday Leader, Krishna Ramesh from Botswana shares his experience embracing the organizational culture at IDinsight that instills in its leaders that they can take on as much ownership and leadership as they are willing and able.
How do you navigate networking on LinkedIn as an introvert? CoffeeChat founder Chris Suzdak will speak on LinkedIn Live later today with Akua Nyame-Mensah about his experience using the platform as an introvert and solopreneur.
Read on for more details…
Balancing the benefits and blindspots of international experience, embracing a culture of ownership, and staying connected to the team and mission while working remotely
Here are a few highlights from the conversation with Krishna:
Leverage your international experience but be mindful of the blindspots it creates: Krishna, from Botswana, had opportunity to study abroad at Cambridge and Yale during his university years. Upon returning to the region, he started his first professional role at IDinsight, where he spent time across several country offices and collaborated with staff at varying levels and nationalities. He felt empowered by his time abroad in the UK and US and was able to pull from his past interactions with others from around the world to more easily relate and collaborate with his range of teammates. He also noticed that his time abroad had created blindspots, such as not having built up more experience locally during his university years as some of his colleagues had, which required humility to acknowledge and navigate. He also had to learn quickly that communicating decisions must be done carefully across different cultural contexts and personality types.
Ownership and trust go hand in hand: The organizational culture at IDinsight instills in its leaders that they can take on as much ownership and leadership as they are willing and able. Leaders embrace other more junior leaders who are ambitious, rather than seeing them as a threat, because it means they will have strong leaders under them and allow themselves to step up further. This requires a strong sense of trust at every level. Krishna’s first role was very hands-on and he saw firsthand the importance and reality of the details of collecting data, before then earning promotions that put him at higher levels. By having done the work himself, he knew how to assess new leaders and develop trust in them taking over ownership of certain responsibilities.
Staying connected to your team and mission in remote setting is crucial: Building professional relationships in remote work setting can be challenging and requires being even more intentional and proactive about making time for activities such as conducting onboarding sessions so that you can learn about new team members’ journeys and get to know them more on a person level. Because Krishna has not been able to frequently visit many of the country offices that his work touches, he also has maintained regular touch points through calls. Since he also doesn’t get as many opportunities to visit partners on the ground, he has leaned into partnerships through more discussions about their work in external settings so that can stay connected with the impact that IDinsight is helping support.
LinkedIn for Introverts
CoffeeChat founder Chris Suzdak will speak on LinkedIn Live later today (at 6:00pm Kenya time) with Akua Nyame-Mensah about his experience using the platform as an introvert and solopreneur. Chris will share how he used LinkedIn as the primary platform for launching CoffeeChat, finding the best coaches, and engaging with companies interested in strengthening their leadership talent pipelines.