RELEVANT WITH BRENDA MEY - BY ANGELA SHEARER

HEAD – INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS 

“Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love. ”  - Gregory David Roberts

  Brenda says, “I AM me, I AM curious, I AM passionate, I AM driven and I AM adventurous. 

  One of the most important traits that leaders should have is authenticity. Be who you are and you will be the best version of yourself. There is nobody better! Leading a team gets tough on your mind, heart, body and soul and if you are not the most authentic person you can be, you will be putting yourself through an inordinate amount of stress. It simply will not serve you. We need to be fully ourselves and not full of ourselves.”

  When an institution has dampened the general sense of inspiration, Brenda believes that the way to rekindle it is to connect people with their purpose and give them permission to simply be the amazing people that they are. To help them think themselves to be ‘whatever’ they can be. Too often people fall into the system and then lose themselves to the system. This suits organizations because then life and regrettably outcomes, become predictable. 

  “To bring back creative thinking we need to believe it possible and then we need to let live. We must create the environment for it, remove limitations and barriers and let team members test their wings, supporting them when it comes to failure, as it is simply part of the discovery journey. We must stop worrying about HOW and rather create diverse teams who can figure it out. We must not prompt or lead discussions and above all, we must not try to manage creativity. If we do this we just end up with the same old ideas.  When we think we know where great ideas come from, we make our biggest mistake of all because we stop looking for great ideas everywhere.

   When choosing her team, Brenda puts a lot of emphasis on selecting people who have great attitude, passion, desire and purpose. When getting her new team members orientated, she says, “You wrap them up in the culture, you must be a role model for it, you live it. People need to feel it oozing out of the floor boards, the wallpaper and there must be no escaping it because it must be how we be.

  Sharing the vision is vital to any leader’s success and Brenda says, “I absolutely share the vision, but I believe that most leaders feel some guilt around never sharing this enough. I know I certainly feel like people receive messages differently. I believe that we should work to share the message in ways that connect the most effectively with individuals within their specific paradigms. 

  One of the biggest challenges that Brenda believes leaders face today is ambiguity. She says, “There is so much coming at us from so many different directions, it’s a real challenge to work through the ambiguity and continue to be a guiding light when the fog feels particularly thick.”

    A common mistake that Brenda sees other leaders make is thinking they know better. She says, “Sometimes we really don’t have the answers or know better. The reality is that we have simply been entrusted with an organizational purpose and we’ve been given a team to help achieve it. As a leader you are not expected to know everything and you must fight the urge to control everything.  Also, if you are going to be a good leader you can’t focus on political agendas and allegiances ahead of the value of your team. First and foremost, you have a responsibility to your people and an obligation to see your professional purpose through and bring the organization the value that you promise as a leader.” 

  When asked what unspoken rules Brenda expects her own leaders to live up to, she says, “I know unspoken rules exist and that they can have a positive, neutral or negative influence on an organization, but I tend to be a little jaded about these. I think they often reinforce the mentality of  “that’s how it’s always been done.”  I expect leaders to be very clear about the ‘rules’ that they hold dear and I expect leaders to live up to these every day. 

  Social media can be a contentious subject with a lot of leaders opting to avoid the various platforms completely, but Brenda says, “I’m a bit of a hybrid on this. I recently read an article about Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives and I can tell you that I am by far a Digital Immigrant. I participate on several Social Media platforms. Has it transformed my life? Absolutely not. Has it been meaningful in my life? Absolutely yes. Personally, Facebook has reconnected me with my very small, but globally distributed family and we now not only speak more, we see one another more often in person too. I don’t believe we would have done this without the aid of Facebook, I dabble with Instagram for fun, but don’t take it too seriously and I have a strange habit of only tweeting when I’m at a conference. I haven’t worked that behaviour out yet ??, but when I understand it I’ll let you know. LinkedIn, I keep trying to increase my presence, but get taken up with the events of a day and don’t actually get to it. From a business perspective I do believe that social media has made it possible to ‘get closer’ to team members and to drive public business agenda’s, but I can’t admit to it having a fundamental impact on my world.

  Continuous personal and professional growth is important to remaining relevant as a leader. Brenda says, “You remain conscious of ‘only being human’ and that we live to learn, grow and explore.”

  To keep herself relevant she says, “I read, I explore, I watch videos, I pick topics that I believe I have no concept of and I spend endless hours doing research and going down rabbit holes on these topics. I watch, I listen, I test, I try and then I start again, but mostly, when it comes to staying relevant, the answer is to remain conscious of your need to learn and develop. It also depends on what it is you are trying to skill yourself in. I would say that meaningful growth is a combination of reading, studying, questioning, trying, failing, trying again, exploring, doing, failing and doing it again differently. I must confess that I firmly believe that while you can learn and be taught a lot of things, you don’t truly learn until things go wrong and you need to fix it.”

 On the topic of Servant Leadership, Brenda says, “My primary focus is to help the beautiful human beings that I lead to become the best version of themselves. I encourage self-expression and their emergence from a system that appears to have taken their voice away. I encourage them to put forward their ideas and thoughts, knowing that not only their ideas, but they themselves, have a very own unique value to bring and that is the magic!”

   When asked what colour she would paint herself if she had to choose, Brenda said, “Passionate Purple.” She is a natural hunter who has no regrets and she believes that everything she does, whether right or wrong, teaches her something. She says, “Without the learning, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”

  Although money is something that all of us need to survive, it is not the main driver in Brenda’s life. Even if she won obscene amounts of money she would not stop working, although it might give her the chance to adjust her sails somewhat. She says, “If I won crazy money I’d see my current challenge to a good transition point, but then the parameters of my working would definitely be different. I’d probably choose to put my existing skills to more charitable purposes, but without losing the value I believe I can offer. I believe I have been privileged in my life and I would love to give other people opportunities like the ones I’ve had.  I would need time to work out how I would do this though. Mostly, what is important is that we can look back at what we achieve as humans, and think, ‘yeah that worked without harming man or beast.’

   Cryptocurrency is a hot topic in the world of Tech. Brenda says, “I’m kind of the fence here. I am not anti-crypto currency and I certainly believe it will be part of our future. Have I invested? No. Have I done substantial research? No. Do I have friends that have lost money? Yes. Do I have friends that have made money? Yes. So, I guess my thoughts are divided, but the council to myself is that I would need to do substantially more research to be able to give myself more comfort in what this means for me personally.”

  Car time is different for all of us and Brenda describes her daily drive time like this, “In the morning I scenario plan the day. I build lists of things to do then berate myself for building the lists because I’ll forget them before I can record them. I plan the shopping list and think about how to structure the day for most efficiency. In the evening, I think about all the things I need to do before I go to sleep then I berate myself for not doing all I needed to do the night before because then I wouldn’t have so much to do for the evening… sigh…”

  On a more personal note, Brenda describes herself as an activist nerd during her school days and if she could be any animal she would be an elephant because, well, they are her favourite. If she couldn’t be one, but own one, she would find nothing more appealing than setting off into the sunset with her elephant to a far-off place where she could connect with said elephant and simply be. I hope you, as reader, could hear that theme song playing right there...trumpets and violins.

  The last thing she watched on T.V was something Chinese, in the hotel room on her last trip. She says, “On a more serious note, but not so serious, I super really don’t watch TV at all, except that I record all the MasterChef Australia episodes and then, when I feel like it, I binge watch until it irritates me. I will go back to it a few weeks, or maybe months, later. And don’t let someone dare suggest who the winner is! That is the ultimate sin! And just for the record, I don’t cook at all, so my obsession with MasterChef is stranger than you would imagine.”

  Brenda says that she is an introvert, but she deals with conflict by confronting it. She is inspired by LIFE, says she will sleep when she dies and the one thing that she finds unforgivable is lying.  Her number one pride and joy is her daughter and she celebrates successes and victories with a really good glass of wine; preferably a Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand. She adds, “You would think, with my passion for travel, that I would have at least done a New Zealand wine tour, but I haven’t. How odd is this?”

 One of the most difficult things that Brenda ever did, aside from having to put beloved pets to sleep, is her back-water swim to the shoreline in the mouth of the Umkomaas river with high seas. She says, “I did this as part of my Dive master training and I can tell you that there were moments in this swim that I was ready to give up. It was super tough. Hard on my heart, soul, body and mind. 

  Brenda says that the one person who had the biggest impact on her as a leader is without a shadow of a doubt, Mark Basnett. She describes him as, “The grumpiest, grizzliest, most amazing man alive. While I would never have admitted this at the time, absolutely not, Mark and I would argue endlessly. Sometimes we wouldn’t speak for days, even though we should have.  Mark would challenge me to do more, think more, be more, explore more, learn more and more and more and more. When I believed I was right, he would push and challenge me. When I felt I knew better, he would challenge me with a whole new way of thinking. When I was more than certain I knew better, he would push me more and more to explore different perspectives, avenues, concepts and mostly, when I thought there was nothing left in the tank, he showed me there was so much more than I could imagine. Mark has taught me so much about myself and about technology, more than I would ever have believed I needed to know. Now I know, but mostly I know that I don’t know, and that I’ll never know, and that I need to seek more and more and more and more… and did I mention that Mark’s arm can be twisted to share a good gin too? 

  The best book that Brenda read this year so far is the sequel to Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts called The Mountain Shadow. As the author says, “Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are.”