Ode to the 3 Male Bosses/Mentors Who Have Played a Pivotal Role in my Career Thus Far...

As we round of Women's Month where we celebrate all things women, the women who raised us, those who taught us, those who shattered glass ceilings, those who mentor us and challenge us and of course celebrate our personal victories. I also want to take time to celebrate 3 amazing males who helped to mould me to be the woman that I am today.

I will start of by sharing about Rob Stangroom, my former boss who taught me a lot of things when I was his PA. He was in financial services and Investor Relations so he taught me how to read Financial results when listed companies release these and all things about Capital Markets and Investor Relations. I started working for him in my early twenties at a phase in my life where I believed I knew it all. I remember once when there was a slight decline in productivity at our company and he sent the staff an email to address this. My best friend and I who both worked for him,decided that we were going to ask to have a meeting with him, we sat him down and told him we that we didn't like the tone of his email. No, we did not lose our jobs, get suspended or get a warning, He probably just thought we were crazy kids and did not take offence but rather he chose to see that as an opportunity for dialogue on how best we could improve on our performance as a team, but I believe the girl dad that he was made him overlook our approach. At the time when we were working from his Guest Wing I received the most horrifying news while at work that my dad and Superman had passed on, it was Rob's amazing wife who held me while I screamed and sobbed uncontrollably. I decided to leave to go and work for friends of mine and then later joined the volunteer staff in the Media department of a mega-church where I excelled because of what I had caught from being under Rob's wings. A few years later I was in a terrible space and a struggling a single mum with no living parents to fall back on, I decided to go back and visit Rob and ask him if I could come back to work and he gave me another chance, literally created a role for me and paid for me to study towards a Social Media Marketing certificate and we began to offer the service to the company's Investor Relations clients. Under his guidance and mentoring I was able to find my niche and passion and it is what has helped me become a successful female Digital Marketing boss.So today I want to give him his flowers while we are both still alive because in a lot of ways he was like a work- dad, and me the smart but sometime too headstrong smart-mouth work-daughter. We then amicably parted ways when I decided to venture into advertising.

When I joined Barker McCormac Ogilvy & Mather I came under the wings of another boss who was a girl dad, while Rob had sons and one daughter, my boss Alex Chishiri has amazing intelligent daughters only and no sons. Over the years he has groomed me and many other women from the organisation for leadership and allowed us to be our best selves. When he saw how passionate I was about Digital Marketing it was Alex who suggested that I should approach the Marketers Association about teaching Digital Marketing. A good mentor is capable of identifying your comfort zone and developing steps and activities within your goals that will force you to become comfortable outside of your zone and that is what my boss Alex has done for me and many other females. I have watched him expand their visibility but also arm them with experiences that will broaden their perspective and therefore enable them to compete even more effectively for big roles in the organisation. I have managed to build a name myself from the exposure he facilitated, and earned the respect of many marketing and advertising professionals and clients through my expertise. Recently I was approached by the Institute of Marketing in Malawi (IMM) for a Digital Marketing Masterclass but this is all a domino- effect because there are some male champions who have played a significant role in building the woman that I am today and I am sure Alex and Rob will tell you that it has not all been pleasant but they never stopped believing in me..

The next male champion in my career is Gillian Rusike the Founder & Executive Secretary of the Marketers Association of Zimbabwe (MAZ) where I am a part-time Digital Marketing Lecturer. Although I do not work directly with him at the moment, I once worked with him on a book project and over the years he became a mentor to me. Gillian has given sound and frank advice at pivotal moments of my career and he is someone I look up to because many people that he has mentored have excelled and are excelling.

Being a career woman or business woman will bring people into your life that support, challenge and inspire you and hopefully give you that support to get you through difficult periods. We all need them throughout our lives. I remain grateful to Rob, Alex and Gillian for believing in me, for giving me chances when I fail and for allowing opportunities for personal growth. The outcome of some of these actions that my male mentors took is they helped me understand that I had a lot more capacity than even I knew. When women have support from their male colleagues it gives you the confidence that you belong at the table and that you have a right to be there.

Some of the key behavioral themes associated with gender inclusive leadership that support women’s career advancement are:

• using their authority to push workplace culture toward gender equality
• thinking of gender inclusiveness as part of effective talent management
• providing gender-aware mentoring and coaching
• practicing other-focused leadership, not self-focused leadership

Through behaviors like these, men can begin to change organizational cultures from the top down. Acknowledging the crucial role that men can play in creating gender equality at work is necessary in order to truly engage the entire workforce in conversations surrounding equality and fairness at work. So who are the men in your organization known as informal champions of women, for the way that their behaviors advance female leaders? #WomensMonth2021 #ChooseToChallenge #MaleChampions