APPRENTICESHIP FOR THE ORANGE ECONOMY
An Ode to My Career Mentors
Paying Fealty to Those Who Have Helped Me Advance on My Journey
“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”
— Winston Churchill
In my first proper job after university, working as a funds transfer trainee in a bank branch in Lagos, Nigeria, I was fortunate to have a strong dependable mentor in my supervisor at the time.
Uche was a wonderful lady who covered up the multitude of mistakes I made as an eager beaver; mistakes that could have resulted in the early abortion of my nascent career.
In the pressure cooker of a bank branch, serving one of the busiest open markets in West Africa — Alaba Electronics Market — it is pretty easy to add an extra zero when transferring customer funds, or mistype an account number debiting the wrong account.
A month later, my department manager, who had been on vacation, returned.
In Moshood, I gained a champion who empowered me in incredible ways, allowing me execute transactions that a noob would not have been allowed near. His leadership infused me with great confidence and helped accelerate my growth in my role.
About 6 months on, Moshood, earning his due rewards, got transferred to another branch, in an upscale part of town, serving high net worth clients.
His replacement as department manager turned out to be something out of Nightmare on Elm Street. Alfred (not his real name) was a micro-manager, distrustful of his colleagues, a downright wet blanket.
To make matters worse, Uche was replaced by Agatha (not her real name). She was Alfred’s siamese sister, peas in a pod. And equally as lazy.
With them in charge, morale dropped, confidence fled and operations lost flow — transaction processing speeds slowed, mistakes increased, queues lengthened in the banking hall, customers got more agitated and easily ticked off, stress levels grew.
I can’t even begin to imagine how my life would have eventually turned out had I remained there.
Fortunately for me, I was already in another job interview process. That turned out successful and I could barely count down the clock to my annual leave. The very day I started it, I traveled to HQ and submitted my resignation — I didn’t even serve my notice period under that awful environment.
My new role was as a user support geoscientist at Mobil Producing Nigeria, an ExxonMobil affiliate. And my team lead, a wonderful Oklahomian transplanted Texan, Tena, could not have been anymore an antidote to the work situation I had just left.
Barely 7 months into the new role, I won an award as the Most Outstanding Geoscientist in the company — an award that normally took years to achieve.
Tena took over deputation for our department manager whenever he wasn’t around. And leading up to Christmas in the year that I started, Tena was going to be out at the same time as our manager. Rather than transfer that temporary role to other more senior team members in the department, Tena said to me,
“You’re now in charge for the next 2 weeks!”
Just like that.
And during those 2 weeks, I inherited one of her ongoing high-value projects — retrofitting one of our training rooms into a 3-D visualization facility for multi-disciplinary petroleum exploration studies.
For context, this was a project valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I was 24 and still on probation!
When she returned and I made to hand it back to her, she asked, “Are you enjoying it?”. When I answered in the affirmative, she said, “Then you can keep it”.
That’s how in 7 months I achieved such an acceleration in my career.
A year later, I was off on expatriate assignment as a member of ExxonMobil’s global Petrel migration team based in Houston, Texas.
Before I left, my Nigerian managers handed me off to an older colleague who was many years into his expatriate assignment. Tim took me under his wings — practically adopted me. I had dinners with him and his wife, spent many hours discussing with him.
Many years later when I lost my dad, I even began to see him as a replacement dad.
Why do more senior colleagues in the workplace sometimes take such interest to empower and mentor much junior colleagues? What is in it for them?
One of the deficiencies I sense in workplaces of today is that new employees often aren’t fortunate to get the sort of mentoring that I received in my early career. They may get on-boarded alright, become plugged into a great team of peers, but that mentor-mentee relationship appears to have become a rare commodity.
Perhaps this is a natural consequence of the uncertain tenures in today’s workplaces. All those fine ladies and gentlemen that I mentioned above, that mentored me, were all long-time employees in stable, solid middle-class jobs. Did that play a factor in their deciding to mentor me, as just a natural course of their jobs?
I have recently taken on a senior leadership role at my current employer — Enel X. With that role comes an expanded team, with early-stage career colleagues and more on the way. Smart cookies and all, it’s unlikely that they know how to establish and navigate a career down today’s ‘treacherous’ work environments.
To help these young people grow in confidence, unlock even more of their potentials and create additional value to our business, I consider it essential, and part of my role, to pay forward the mentorships I received and to help guide these young uns along the fast-moving currents of today’s ever-changing, incredibly complex work environments.
This article is a ‘working out loud’ piece, a reflection on my career journey thus far, and a commitment to shine a light along the path for those coming along the way after me.
“We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.”
— Whoopi Goldberg
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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