The 100 Lionesses Future of Work Playbook provides fascinating personal hacks and peer-to-peer insights to help women enterprises to kickstart their own future of work transformation journeys. It features 24 leading African women entrepreneurs who share their personal playbooks, hacks and experiences in preparing their businesses for the future of work in five key dimensions: Strategy; Leadership and Vision; Technology and Systems; People and Teams; and New Ways of Working. Importantly, it also provides a practical roadmap for Africa’s women entrepreneurs to follow, concluding with 9 key learnings to help businesses get future of work ready.

Speaking about the importance of business planning for The Future of Work for women entrepreneurs in Africa, Esther Marieme Dassanou, Manager, Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA), African Development Bank Group, says:

“Gone are the days of full brick and mortar businesses, or only face-to-face interaction with customers. Moving forward the businesses getting ahead are the ones with a strong digital presence, involved in e-commerce, and having redesigned their systems to accommodate remote work. Looking at the glass half-full, this new work model provides great opportunities for women entrepreneurs as it allows them access to a much wider market, as well as increased productivity in some instances.”

Esther adds, “As women entrepreneurs pivot and adapt to the new ways of doing business, it will be important to carry along financial institutions who are also having to change the way they carry out their business. The inputs for better financial support and financial service customization can only come from open and more frequent dialogue between women entrepreneurs and financial Institutions. The African Development Bank through its Affirmative Finance Action for Women in Africa (AFAWA) Initiative is dedicated to closing the $42 billion financing gap for women SMEs on the continent. For this it works closely with commercial banks, meso and microfinance institutions, equity funds and guarantee providers to develop holistic programs which include financial and non-financial services for women entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. It is time to make our financial institutions part of our growth and pivoting process.”

Our Lionesses of Africa Portuguese-speaking community of women entrepreneurs has now grown to over 40,000, and they are part of our 1.5 million strong community of women business builders across the African continent and the Diaspora. They play an increasingly important role as they contribute to economic growth and job creation in their countries. This new Lionesses of Africa Portuguese portal aims to support their growth by showcasing their stories, inspiring them through engaging and relevant content, and connecting them to one another and to new markets for shared growth and collaborative business opportunities. This new portal is also all about giving voice to these women entrepreneurs in Portuguese speaking Africa. We have an incredible team of contributor writers, all women entrepreneurs, who bring their personal insights and a wealth of experience to share.

Speaking about the launch, Lionesses of Africa founder and ceo, Melanie Hawken, said:

“The Lionesses of Africa Portuguese portal reflects our mission at Lionesses of Africa to help women entrepreneurs to build gateways to new markets and opportunities globally, and to make them more visible to potential customers, investors and funders. By doing so, they become better equipped to grow sustainable, impact driven businesses that contribute to the economic prosperity of the African continent.”

We would love to receive your feedback on our new Portuguese portal. Let us know what you think. Also, we want you to be part of our Lionesses of Africa movement and help us to share, inspire and connect the women entrepreneurs from Portuguese speaking Africa to the rest of the world. As we always say, we go ‘Further, Together’. So please share the link to our new portal with your networks, and speak to us about how you can get more involved in our social impact innovation work at Lionesses of Africa. Send us an email to pt@lionessesofafrica.com

by Lori Milner

Think about a personal goal you would like to achieve – it could be getting fitter, eating healthier, reading, starting a course or a new hobby. The typical pattern is you begin on a Monday, you manage to keep it up for about two weeks and then fall back into old ways. You probably have attributed this pattern to a lack of willpower. The good news is that the solution to keep the promises you make to yourself has nothing to do with motivation.

Environment design is the secret to achieving your goals because it is the ultimate enabler. As Dr Marshall Goldsmith says: “If we don’t create and control our environment, our environment creates and control us”.

There are three kinds of environments you need to take charge of to make progress on your goals:

#1 Your physical environment.

Designing your physical environment involves setting up triggers to remind you of your goals. Let’s say you want to be healthier and exercise more. Firstly, what do you need to remove from the current environment?

If you want to stop eating so many biscuits during the day, then remove them entirely from your house. Replace the bowl of biscuits in your kitchen with a bowl of fruit. Make sure you have a big bottle of water and healthy snacks on your desk, so you are not grinding through your lunch break and reaching for the first greasy snack in the late afternoon.

If you want to stop drinking wine during the workweek, put it in another fridge or a place in your house that you don’t see until the weekend. Use the strategy of inconvenience to deter you from breaking out a bottle in those habitual moments.

If you want to manage the environment of distraction, close your Outlook, social media channels and remove anything that can fight for your attention when you’re working. If you don’t actively manage the environment of distraction, you become a self-interrupter allowing every ping, bing and alert to pull you away from the task in front of you.

Manage your WhatsApp by muting the chats that are not critical to your daily work. You need to decide when and how often you are prepared to be interrupted.

What do you need to add to your environment?

If you want to start walking, leave your exercise gear and shoes next to your bed. How about introducing ‘exercise snacks’ in your day and leaving a skipping rope next to your laptop? Or a yoga mat in the middle of the living room so you can fit in a few poses before your next meeting?

If you want to read more, can you leave a book on your bed or have a book with you next to your laptop? If a meeting cancels last minute, you have your book right there to remind you that you can fit in a good twenty minutes of reading time.

Without the physical trigger of the book, you will most likely check your inbox or your social media feeds. Consistency compounds, you will be amazed at how much progress you can make with fifteen minutes of focused attention.

Managing your environment is not just about the big goals but the simple ones like remembering to take your vitamins. If I don’t have them displayed out, I don’t remember to take them. I manage the environment by having them next to my toothbrush to ensure I don’t forget about them.

Think about something you want to start or stop – how can you manage your physical environment to make it easier for you?

#2 Your digital environment.

According to research, on average, Americans check their phones 344 times per day. (That’s once every 4 minutes!) How do you compare against this frightening statistic? To ensure you succeed in your goals, you need to manage your digital environment.

 Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractable, provides five simple steps to take control of your smartphone:

Remove: If you are addicted to online shopping or social media, it’s time to manage the environment by deleting the app altogether. If you are trying to progress your health goals, perhaps delete UberEATS if you tend to order junk food out of habit?

In both examples, you remove any temptation that willpower is not strong enough to fight, and you reclaim your days!

Replace: Shift where and when you use potentially distracting apps, like social media and YouTube, to your desk instead of on your phone.

This hack is especially powerful if your default is to scroll the socials on your phone any chance you get. Imagine how much more fulfilled you will feel if you defaulted to reading a book or doing something for your self-care instead?

Rearrange: If you look down to check the time and you see new messages in your inbox or social feeds, it’s human nature to want to check them immediately. Manage your phone’s environment by moving any apps that may trigger mindless checking from your phone’s home screen.

Reclaim: Change the notification settings for each app. Be very selective regarding which apps can send you to sound and sight cues. Remember, you have to decide when and how often you are prepared to be interrupted.

 Reduce: the number of times you check your phone by replacing any frequent behaviours you currently perform on your phone with another medium (e.g. carry a small notebook and pen to jot down short notes rather than opening an app). Get a wristwatch, so you don’t have to look at your phone for the time.

#3 Your emotional environment.

Managing your emotional environment begins with taking charge of your thoughts, beliefs and the story you tell yourself. This process is easy to control because it’s all about you; no one else is required; it’s good old personal growth.

The hard part is managing your emotional environment when other people are involved. Let’s leave the work environment out of this and only focus on your personal life. Here are some things to consider:

In the series Harry Potter, there are creatures called Dementors that literally pull the happiness out of you if it comes into contact with you. We all have a dementor in our life (sometimes more than one).

It’s that person that when you finish a conversation, you feel drained because they are negative and always complaining, criticising and seeing the glass as half empty. You cannot necessarily cut this person out of your life, but you can manage the environment around how long and how often you engage with them.

Even if it’s your mom or mother in law, you can cut the conversation down from thirty minutes to ten minutes. When they begin the rant of negativity, you can change the topic. It’s important to remember that they will not change, nor can you change them, but you can protect your boundaries by limiting the time you engage with them and avoiding the topics that will trigger you.

If you start the week feeling depleted, is it because you spent the weekend running from one social engagement to the next? If you agreed to go out of guilt or fear, it should have probably been a polite no.

When you got to the arrangement, you spent the entire time feeling resentful that this was your downtime and listed at least ten other things you would prefer to be doing. The way to manage your emotional environment is don’t put yourself in that situation in the first place.

Of course, you need to attend to specific commitments and responsibilities, but I am talking about the optional ones. If you can practice putting your recovery time first, you will feel better, more energized and ultimately more content.

Putting it all together.

Don’t leave your goals up to motivation and willpower; start to live by design and not default.

How can you manage your physical, digital and emotional environment to set you up for success?

When you take control of your environment, you become the architect of your world rather than the victim of it.

Here’s to design thinking,

Warm wishes,

Lori 

by Anja van Beek

 As we enter year three of the pandemic and confront global difficulties that force us to live in a state of uncertainty, empathy in the workplace is now taking on a new level of significance and necessity.

 

For team members to excel, be challenged, and feel like they have a purpose in their job, leaders must foster an environment and culture that allows them to bring their best self to the table. Leaders must constantly remember that the way you lead, the things you do and say, affect how others feel on the inside.

EQ (Emotional Intelligence) becomes crucial. 

• What do you say when a co-worker has missed a deadline three times in a row in the past week?

• What should you do if the team feels unmotivated because you decided to go back to the office full-time?

• Or when they are waiting for someone else to act rather than taking responsibility for improving a client’s situation.

• On the other hand, do you acknowledge the team’s modest gains and not just focus on the big stuff?

One of my favourite quotes is Viktor Frankl’s words “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This is sometimes easier said than done. 

Here’s 6 tips when reacting to a heated argument:

Reframe your thinking

We often jump to a conclusion and easily take things personally. Reframe your thinking by considering what other possible reasons may be for the person to act the way they are behaving. A level of self-awareness is also hugely beneficial. For example: ‘What is my role in this scenario? How have my behaviour impacted the other person’s view – without being aware of it?’

Take a pause

Never underestimate the impact of taking a few deep breaths to slow down your heartbeat and be able to evaluate what is happening and what will be the best way to respond to this situation.

Remain curious

Ask questions to truly understand the other person’s perspective.  Help me understand why do you want to achieve XYZ? What is the real issue for you? If you choose X what are you saying no to?   

Be aware of the 4 F’s

When you are triggered, you are in fight, flight, freeze or fawn state. A chemical reaction results in our neocortex (thriving, problem-solving part of the brain) to not functioning optimally. Instead of allowing an unconscious habit to drive your reaction, reactivate the neocortex and be mindful in choosing how you want to respond. 

To reactivate your neocortex, ask yourself a question (such as: What is the real issue for me? What might support a different explanation? What if this was someone else behaving in this way? What is my behaviour communicating? ) to notice what is really going on in the moment? 

Name the emotion

It is helpful to be able to name the emotion you are experiencing and consider what is the emotion trying to tell you. Instead of being angry, perhaps you are disappointed with how your idea wasn’t taken despite you being verbally told that your idea was the best idea?

Tactfully share what you are experiencing

Remember, an experience is made up of four elements – what am I observing, thinking, feeling and wanting.  When sharing your experience, a good start is to start with the “I”. For example, when the project’s team leader did not schedule sufficient time on the agenda: “I noticed that this is the third time that we didn’t have sufficient time allocated to the brainstorming topic. I feel disappointed that my idea wasn’t heard after the request to make the research a priority. How can we ensure we have sufficient time allocated to this agenda-point moving forward?”

by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department

“What is more important – the journey or the destination?”

To which there is only one answer – “The Company”.

Steve Jobs famously encouraged people to pick up the phone and call people from whom they wanted help (you can see his interview here). He says that he never found anyone who did not want to help him when he asked. Indeed we are often encouraging this, simply asking what is the worst that could happen? Pointing out that if you don’t ask it is an automatic “No!”, but if you do ask, the worst is that they say “No!” and they might say “Yes!” and from our experience and certainly it seems from Steve Job’s experience, this is very rare. For those who are thinking that no one would have turned down Steve Jobs (fair point), his story starts as a 12 year old when he called up the owner of Hewlett-Packard, a Mr Bill Hewlett at his home, to ask him to help him build a ‘frequency counter’. Mr Hewlett said yes and sent over all the necessary bits and pieces, following which he offered a job on a production line to the young Steve.

Likewise when Nick Park was starting out (Nick for those that don’t know spends hours and hours manipulating little pieces of plasticine to make the incredible Wallace and Gromit films – one animator working on one puppet does about 3 seconds of film per 8 hour day, as he said in his lovely Desert Island Disk interview here – now that’s dedication!), he called Harbutts Plasticine and asked if he gave them a credit on his film, could they give him some Plasticine for free? They told him he can have as much as he could carry. In true Wallace and Gromit fashion, Nick turned up with a van and loaded up about half a tonne! However 6 Oscar nominations later, 4 of those being wins, Harbutts probably got their money’s worth!

…Still, they could have said no.

So what happens when these requests and subsequent offers of help turn more serious and move towards a partnership? Although as our very patient Editor knows, we could write for days on the pros and cons of partnerships, what really matters and certainly what all highly successful partnerships have in common was that they moved away from the term ‘partnership’ and embraced ‘partnering’, and so this is where we shall concentrate our efforts.

We recently listened to an excellent podcast by Simon Sinek with Jean Oelwang (here). According to her LinkedIn profile, Jean Oelwang is the ‘founding CEO and President of Virgin Unite…Over the last 15 years, she has worked with partners to lead the incubation and start-up of several global initiatives, including: The Elders, The B Team, The Carbon War Room (successfully merged with the Rocky Mountain Institute), Ocean Unite, The Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, 100% Human at Work, The Virgin Unite Constellation and The Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship. She also played a key partner role in the incubation of many others such as The Audacious Project and The New Now’, so there is absolutely no doubt she not only knows what she is talking about, but that she has worked with some of the very best across the globe, including the greatest partnerships.

The saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”, is certainly one that all Lionesses are familiar with, but as she writes in her fascinating book, “Partnering: Forge the Deep Connections That Make Great Things Happen” (here), “the only way to go both fast and far, is together.” All the great partnerships such as “Ben and Jerry, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Desmond and Leah Tutu, and the lesser-known scientists behind the movement to ban ozone-depleting CFCs [Mario Molina and F. Sherry Rowland in case you were wondering]” have this in common – they go truly together, partnering and through this find great fulfillment in their lives.

She mentions as an example the two CFC scientists who thought innocently that when they announced their discovery of the Ozone Hole, the whole world would wake up and take their work seriously, instead they just woke the $8billion CFC Industry Bear that overnight started to attack them personally, and for the next 10 years! The only way they survived that and why we today are just starting to close the Ozone Hole is purely because of them, their friendship, and their partnering that gave them the strength to get up each morning.

A partnership can be very binary – “You do the accounting because you are good at numbers and I will do the selling because I am great with people” kinda thing, two individuals pushed together – which in turn can be pulled apart. Partnering is far more three dimensional where different characters are celebrated because this truly brings strength. They are, to use her phrase, ‘hyper-connected’ and involved at so many levels. In the podcast these talk for example about the ability, because of the ‘partnering’ relationship, to lean on one another. If one was down (yeah, we know it happens!), the other takes the weight and drives them both forward during that time and visa versa.

To move away from a partnership being purely transactional, to how together they can make a difference to the world – together, that is the key…

According to Jean, there are six degrees of connection that one has to work on to create a real ‘partnering relationship.

These are:

1. Elevating your life purpose by cultivating meaningful partnerships.

2. Going all-in with your relationship (having each other’s back).

3. Creating a ‘moral ecosystem’.

4. Cultivating magnetic moments through rituals, traditions, or daily practices to deepen your relationship. Have some fun!

5. Turn conflict into a learning opportunity by celebrating friction.

6. Collective connections, such as ‘relational scaffolding’ – valuing the relationships that you build rather than focusing on transactions.

For us the two most interesting are the ‘celebrating friction’ and the creation of a ‘moral ecosystem’.

So how do we ‘celebrate friction’. For many great partnering relationships, when they disagree it is not personal, it is not an attack, instead it is seen as an opportunity to learn something new. Jean said that one way to do this was to come to every conversation not just with an open mind, but with the thought, “what if the other person is right…[also] always go in thinking there is a third way.” These two thoughts avoid you being locked into your position, or even locked into just two opposing positions, from which there is no movement.

As far as building a moral ecosystem, according to Jean there are 6 central ‘virtues’ required and indeed as we read through this book we realized that much of these could apply to great leadership, now known as ‘leadering’!

Enduring trust, which along with doing what you say, has communication at its core. “Airbnb’s management talk…about “elephants, dead fish, and vomit.” “Elephants are the big things in the room that nobody is talking about, dead fish are the things that happened a few years ago that people can’t get over, and vomit is that sometimes people just need to get something off their mind and you need someone to just sit there and listen,””.

Unshakable mutual respect, this is not because you are so similar in thought with your partner, often one can be from completely different backgrounds and political thought (especially these days with such horrific polarisation in the political world), yet your unshakable mutual respect leads you to listen and then absorb what the other has said. You may still not agree, but at least your own views have been challenged. As Jean says “what kills respect and trust is judgement” and we have all seen it, that moment when someone rolls their eyes. Bang! That’s it – respect and trust is thrown out of the window. Simon talks about being in a conversation, but not listening, instead waiting for your turn to speak. Jean said that one she interviewed tightened that by saying that “If you don’t listen to someone that means that they do not exist.” Ouch! But very true if you think about it.

United belief, this “shared confidence in each other, as well as a faith that together you can make the impossible possible”.

Shared humility, we are not all seeing, all knowing omnipotent beings, we are human, that means that we do not know everything, but my goodness we want to learn. We must remain curious.

Nurturing generosity, as it costs us nothing to share the glory with others. Indeed moving back to ‘leadering’, it is truly a mark of a great leader to give praise to others, whilst taking the blame themselves for misfortune, errors and mistakes, this works in ‘partnering’ too.

Compassionate empathy, not just feeling others’ pain or feelings, but understanding why. Again, no judgement.

Throughout all of this work by Jean we began to see that great partnerships are no accident Indeed, ask any long time happily married couple, there is a great deal in what they have experienced, especially that within the ‘moral ecosystem’, that Jean also noticed in the great ‘partnering’ relationships. The longevity and success doesn’t happen by accident, it has to be worked upon, always fed, it is always fair and always respectful, but then the power – Girl! You can change the world!

Stay safe.