Leading at a Distance with Jess Posner Odede, CEO, Girl Effect

What you need to know: I had the pleasure of catching up live with Girl Effect CEO, Jess Posner Odede, who is based in Nairobi, Kenya. 

Girl Effect uses the power of media and technology to unlock the power and potential of girls.

When a girl unlocks her power to think, feel and act differently, her behavior changes, and that inspires other girls to change too.

When Jess started as CEO in 2019, she put the company on a journey to move away from a centralized HQ model to a hub approach, striving towards becoming a globally networked organization. What seemed at the time to be a bold distributed organizational approach requiring extensive virtual leadership has now set the organization up for success and continued evolution in today’s environment. For Girl Effect, working in a virtual environment is and has been a regular part of the organization’s operations.

On an important editorial note, I co-led the search to recruit Jess to this world-changing organization and I now serve as a member of its incredible board of directors. Check out https://www.girleffect.org/ and https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/girl-effect/.

Why shift Girl Effect to a globally networked org?

• Access to the best talent where they work. Jess’ guiding principle is to hire the best people in the world closer to the places the organization works, which will in turn bring Girl Effect closer to the places it supports girls. The organization has shifted from making decisions in a London boardroom towards local offices, closer to the places impacting girls. This access to a nimble, lean and diverse team allows them to strive towards and achieve more innovative and exciting goals.
• Media and stories travel. Millennials approach the world as globalized and integrated, but the way the world has been set up to work has not quite caught up with the way millennials think and process. People are more globally-inspired – for example, people in India consume content that someone in Nigeria created. It wasn’t like this 10 years ago.

 Impact of virtual work environment:

• Heightened visibility. Increased need for information sharing and communication around what people are doing. Being in the same office doesn’t mean you are on the same page.
• Collaborative leadership approach. As CEO, Jess’ role is, and has more importantly become, one of empowerment for her leaders and shepherding key priorities. This creates more onus on individuals and teams to deliver, which also in turn, requires much more clarity and definition around what each team member contributes. In a creative leadership approach, Jess had each team member write a “user manual” – How do you work? Not work? What makes you discouraged? So she has been able to tailor her management and leadership approach to each member of her team.
• Challenging boundaries. As the Girl Effect organization crosses all time zones, the expansion of work into nights and weekends has become all too easy to slide into and setting boundaries can be challenging. They realized early on that setting working hours wasn’t going to work, especially for working parents where nights and weekends are often some of the only times they CAN work. To address this, Jess has made the priority to set the new expectation that each team member will communicate how and when they work best and where they draw the lines.

 Acceleration of digital innovation with girls (aka customers):

• Reaching girls at scale. There has always been a universal commonality between girls and the experiences and challenges they face growing up and entering womanhood. Girl Effect’s digital tools and content act as a safe space to explore that connection and commonality. This global pandemic has only served to highlight that connection more. 
• Alternatives to fundamental issues. Levels of fear and anxiety among girls are high even without a global pandemic, but now there is a new layer of uncertainty. They have seen an increase in teen pregnancy and gender-based violence, and there is a huge risk that once a girl is out of school, she never goes back. Girl Effect is striving to be the solution to help with these urgent needs - digital tools have an element of anonymity and privacy that the girls don’t get through other mediums. For example, if a girl were to go to an in-person health clinic, her aunt could be there or someone could recognize her and talk about her visit. Concerns over Covid exposure and disrupted services has pushed girls further from clinics, but made the roll out of other solutions such as access to self-care methods and direct delivery of contraception more urgent and of key importance to Girl Effect leveraging their digital solutions.
• Leading with impact. The most critical lesson for Jess coming out of this year is that it’s not just about how you lead a virtual team or organization, but it’s about taking the organization to your consumers and rethinking the delivery to dramatically increase the impact.

Thank you to Jess and her team for their important work. If you’re learning about Girl Effect for the first time, I encourage you to check out the videos on "Hear Her Voice: COVID-19 Stories, Girls' Lives Under Lockdown" https://voices.girleffect.org/.

 Finally, here are Girl Effect’s core principles (in their own words):

•  We serve girls by listening to girls - TEGA, our network of tech enabled girl ambassadors, interview girls in their communities giving us unique insights into girls lives, in close to real time, even during this pandemic.
• We deliver measurable impact - Working with girls and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, we invest in the health of the next generation, building knowledge and trust in vaccinations and encouraging girls to actively protect their health.
• We are driven by innovation - Focused on designing girl-centered tech, we create world-class content and products that millions of girls use and love - in ways that enable them to change their lives.