Exploring the professional and personal faces of leadership
In our blog series "Leadership Stories", we delve in to the professional and personal faces of leadership, and embrace the inspirational power of storytelling.
Join us for our second interview in this series as Nevashnee Naicker, Head of Corporate Communications at Anglo American shares her insights on balancing business imperatives with employee wellbeing.
Professional
What have been the greatest challenges as a leader for you?
We live in such an incredibly complex and dynamic, ever-changing, always-on world. You have to be at the top of your game at all times, especially working in communications. However, this can put a lot of pressure on your people, so a big challenge for me is to balance the health and wellbeing of my team, whilst looking after the business imperative. This means taking the time to get in touch with the needs and interests of each team member, and step in when things are not ok. I believe it is really important to make space for that dialogue.
What do you believe will be the most effective leadership style in coming years and why?
What is the key to encouraging diversity of thought when building teams?
In the case of building diversity of thought within existing teams, I believe it’s about creating a culture in which people feel free to question decisions and strategic direction. Being allowed to ask, ‘what if?’ or ‘how did you get there?’ or ‘how could we do this differently’? or ‘what do you think about this?’ automatically stimulates diversity in thinking. This is important because as leaders we can’t know everything and we might be blindly married to a perspective or path, and actually someone in the team might have a complete gem as to why that might not work, or they might be the one to notice that you’ve not considered an important stakeholder.
Personal
Is there a moment that you feel changed the course of your career?
Can you tell us about something that happened at work that made you feel included or excluded?
I’ll tell you about an incident very early on in my career that made me feel excluded. So picture this, I was young, insecure and in an industry I didn’t understand. I had to support an all-male team that was very much an ‘all-boys club’, and there was no acknowledgement that I was different or new. A lot of the conversation wasn’t professional, and included a lot of rude, misogynistic banter. I don’t think they were being deliberate, but I don’t think they were aware of how it would make me feel. I never said anything about it, but that experience stuck with me, and I decided at the moment to always make a very deliberate effort to include people, especially new people joining the team. I believe inclusion is about fundamental human respect.
What advice would you give your younger self?
A last piece of advice from Nevashnee on finding your voice and speaking truth to power: