Major fan girl/woman moment, last week when I met the incredibly inspiring Ekpehdeme 'Pamay' Bassey to interview her for The Elephant in the Room podcast 💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽 I have been stalking her for a while now on LinkedIn, after reading her book 'My 52 Weeks of Worship'. The book really resonated with me - it helped me move forward at a difficult time. 

In this episode we speak about her background; her career choices; using learning as a superpower; kindness; laughter; the weight of emotional burden

We also spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 Her dual roles at Kraft Heinz - that of a Chief Learning Officer and Chief Diversity Officer; the synergy between the two roles and how she has prepared for success

👉🏾 The role of L&D in a post-pandemic world, how has it evolved to meet the changing needs of managers and leaders from a skills perspective but also from an accessibility point of view

👉🏾 The changing role of leaders during the pandemic. And the key attributes leaders need to navigate successfully through the pandemic and beyond

👉🏾 'Learn like an Owner' and 365 days of Learning. 

👉🏾 The relevance and importance of IQ, EQ and CQ

👉🏾 Her passion for comedy and improv and how it helps her at work

👉🏾 'My 52 Weeks of Worship' project. And its relevance in today's world

Thank you Pamay Bassey for your generosity and time. 

If you want to know more subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google or your favourite podcast platform

Memorable passages from the podcast:

👉🏾 Fantastic and thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here. 

👉🏾 It's so great because that's a question I get often, but for me it was not the weirdest path that you might imagine. And so symbolic systems is a discipline it's interdisciplinary, and it draws from computer science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics and logic. And I chose AI as my specialty, because I was really fascinated by artificial intelligence, but the whole major was focused on understanding how people learn, how people process information. How people make symbolic representations of information. And so learning was part of that whole kind of conversation and when I was done, I really thought I was going to stay kind of in Silicon Valley and work on some of the products around creating intelligent computing. But I found a program at Northwestern that was run by AI researchers, but it was in partnership with the consultancy Accenture. And they said, now that we know how people learn and how people process information, let's try to create engaging and interactive and interesting learning environments in a corporate setting. And so that was the first kind of combination of like my interest in learning and corporate, kind of my first corporate job and I mean, that was the beginning of my path into learning and development and that's been the through line in my career since then.

👉🏾 I am very, very blessed. One of our first corporate leadership principles is work as a team. So I'm blessed to have a great team. The senior leaders from the top of the organisation on down are focused on supporting the creation of a continuous culture, a learning culture. And one of our values is we demand diversity. So again, from our CEO on down, really having the support across the organisation too, so that we all do the work together, I say amplify the work that we do to create an inclusive and a diverse workplace. But the connection to me is really kind of neat, I think because when you talk about diversity and inclusion, diversity is more about representation.

👉🏾 It's a fact, we live in a diverse world. There are people from different walks of life that are at this moment coexisting. So it's a fact that you know, that we're living. Whereas inclusion is about learning, it's a choice. How can I make sure that everybody has a seat at the table? How can I make sure that I'm asking people to share their experiences and their voices? How can I as a leader practice being inclusive in 

every meeting as I'm making decisions, as I'm making hiring decisions, as I'm making decisions about the business and so the diversity and the learning piece, I think fit really well together because I think that the journey is the learning journey.

Learn something about someone who's not like you ask questions, be curious, and then make sure you're bringing those different perspectives to the table throughout is kind of the way that we move.

👉🏾 It's all of those things, frankly. I mean, I think once we all in various parts of the world going into quarantine at different times there was a focus on how do we keep people engaged? How do we make sure they have the information that they need? But they're still learning and growing and developing and delivering. We are lucky at Kraft Heinz because we have what we call Ownerversity, which is our corporate university. And certainly even before the pandemic, creating a vibrant kind of digital space where people could come and learn and find materials to help them grow and develop.

👉🏾 And so in some ways, when you say, what is the role of L and D? It continues to be making sure we're providing access to learning experiences, training, learning materials that help you to learn and grow as a human and also in your current role and in your career. And so that was something that luckily we already embraced before the pandemic, but certainly depending on what your experience was, you were in quarantine, you had more time to learn or you needed to make sure that you stayed connected. And so a lot of our programs, for example, that might have been face-to-face, we fly people for some of our high potential programs or nomination based programs. We were having to transform those into virtual programs and one of the things that I love is in each of those programs, imagine I'll give you an example, we have a program called the 'Leadership Masters', where we have senior leaders who are coming in to learn from each other and develop their leadership skills. Every program, whenever we had breakouts any part of the program, where we required like two, three small groups to get together and speak, it was an opportunity to connect in a way that we weren't able to do because we weren't in the office.

👉🏾 And so we invited speakers, we have a speaker series and 'learn like an owner' speaker series. 'Learn like an owner' is our initiative, kind of our learning culture initiative, bringing in thought leaders and business leaders to come and speak to the entire organisation, which is much easier to do when you are in a digital space than if you're trying to fly someone in and then you're juggling you know, time zones, et cetera.

👉🏾 So it was interesting to see how the impact of our learning initiatives changed and grew when we had to work virtually, but at the end of the day, we're in a time still of such great uncertainty and I'm a believer that learning can be a superpower when you don't know what to do, you ask yourself, what do I need to learn in order to get through this?

👉🏾 How can I learn my way through this? And then if you embrace the fact that you can be a powerful learner, even when you don't actually know what to do next. Gather the information make the next right best decision and then tackle the next decision. So learning and helping people to embrace that learning superpower is I think the responsibility of learning and development L & D today.

👉🏾 I am someone who tries to lead by example. Certainly, I know that sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't, but in the case of, and I'll take you back to 2018, which is when I joined Kraft Heinz as a Chief Learning Officer, this is back when my position had not yet been expanded to and diversity. And I said, well, how can I have an impact on this organisation? First, how can I step into a role that frankly was new and big to me? I wanted it to be successful and I wanted to show the organisation that I could contribute.

👉🏾 But also coming into a situation where perhaps I saw an opportunity to enliven the learning culture. I said well, if I'm going to do that, I should start learning myself. And so I made a commitment to learn something new every day for a year, I called it 'My 365 days of Learning' and I shared it out. We have an internal app, which we call the ketchapp, cause of course we are Kraft Heinz. And every day I would read an article I would share, this is what I learned next day, this is how long it took. Most importantly, because a lot of times people say I don't have time for learning, I say but this article took me 15 minutes. This snippet took me five minutes, sometimes, of course, I went to conferences which were a day long, but literally day by day from February 2019 to February 2020, and I had two hashtags learn like an owner, which is a nod to one of our company values, we own it, own your own learning and development. 

👉🏾 To your point, when you see a challenge, ask yourself, what can I do to learn what I need to get through this challenge and make time for learning and that's where the modelling came in, is you know what? We all have packed schedules I do as well, but I'm going to just make time every day 15 minutes, 10 minutes an hour, whatever it is. And so by modelling that I hoped I could accomplish two things, one is to find out what was in our corporate university, because I was brand new to the company and I wanted to make sure if I was telling people to go there, that I knew there was great stuff there. And so that was confirmed and actually, I was very grateful about that. And the second was just to show, this is how a senior leader, make sure that they're taking in new information from time to time. And luckily my peers joined me, I had people who made their own learning commitments, we launched a specific campaign called 'Learn like an Owner' by the end of that year. And we've been continuing to do that and more people have been making their own learning commitments and sharing what they've learned. And I think that has had a real impact on our culture 

👉🏾 Yeah, it's changed tremendously. And I was in a meeting yesterday talking about how to develop our coaching culture and how there are so many more tasks that leaders, are expected to do and then perhaps in the past. And last year we had the pleasure of rolling out a new leadership framework for Kraft-Heinz, and in the conversation when we said, well what do we expect of leaders at Kraft Heinz?

The first thing was delivering results is just the baseline expectation, right? We have to deliver results, it's the price of entry, we're in a business. But we started having conversations about how, how do we deliver results right? We want people to work as a team. We said, how do we win (W I N) work as a team, we wanted people to inspire excellence and navigate our future and really drilling down and creating a whole framework that we use to communicate what we expect from leaders, and then assess them as they go along.

👉🏾 And I will highlight specifically out of that framework, we had a conversation about what do we expect from managers, certainly in the framework, individual contributors have different expectations than people managers, than senior leaders. And that idea of operating with empathy and care is part of that expectation for a people manager. We say the framework for managers is care, move, grow. Operate with empathy and care, move with speed and agility, so you still have to get the work done and then grow, grow people to their full potential. So we want to make sure people are growing and learning and developing. And so when you think of all of those things, it's a lot of things, right? If I'm trying to deliver results, but I want to do it with empathy and care.  

👉🏾 And I think the pandemic as a backdrop really, really amplified that because people saw people's lives in different ways. I'm looking into your living room, I'm seeing your kids, I'm meeting your family. We want to make sure we understand that we're not working from home because we chose just to work from home. We're doing it because there's like a threat, an existential threat out there. And everybody was dealing with how that impacted them and their families and doing the best to be empathetic about that, be kind to yourself because we are humans and also going through that and our teams to say, okay you need to take this time to go take care of your kids, or you have a parent you're taking care of, or you need just a moment to turn off the camera, whatever the case may be.

👉🏾 I think it's a lot, that's being piled up on top of delivering results, but I think going forward to your point, we're not done with this pandemic and we've been forever changed as humanity has been forever changed. And I think the way we do business has been forever changed as well. 

👉🏾 You know, I will tell you, I think, you know that I have a background in improv and one of the basic tenants of improv is 'Yes, and'. So I'll just say 'yes, and ', they're all important, right? I cannot say one is more important than the other. Certainly being able to know you do your job, IQ what do you know? Being able to have EQ and listen to people and actually interact and have empathy. And then the cultural intelligence really comes in when we're talking about diversity inclusion, we are wanting to bring people to the table from different walks of life. How can we be curious and humble and say "Oh I've never heard that before. Can you help me understand?" And even more importantly, sometimes if you ask somebody that, and they don't seem to want to help you understand, go do your own research and be humble enough to realise, you know what? Everyone is not required to be my educator, I should take that for the situation that I'm in and then perhaps do my own research, but continue to be curious.

👉🏾 And so, again as we talk about the many things that are necessary in order to be successful professionally, those are all important and so trying to figure out how to continually balance them and make time to learn about different cultures, about how to be more kind of empathetic and then also to learn what you need to learn in order to deliver so it's a mixture that's all very important. 

👉🏾 Sure. I mean, I think of it as a marathon and not a sprint, right? So when you are running a long race, perhaps sometimes you run fast, sometimes you run slow. Sometimes you kind of slow down to a walk depending on if you're not an Olympic runner right? And I think the idea of having that emotional labor, I mean as a woman of colour, it just is part of my experience. But I need to be kind to myself and realise when I need to be at the front of the conversation and when I need to just be quiet. It's a little bit more difficult for me as I'm a leader, I'm a Chief Diversity Officer, so I will have a voice, and I have over the years kind of figured out, what the cadence is and how much I should give and when I should rest. But if you are in the world and people are constantly asking you about the things that are just, this is just who I am, and I'm constantly having to have that conversation. That's why I tell people, yes be curious, but also, be thoughtful, because there's no requirement for someone to help you understand their way of life.

👉🏾 It is something that people have to opt in to do. And if I ask you to tell me about your background and your culture, and I get a sense that you don't really want to talk about that. Then I should back off and I should find a different way to learn. And frankly, I'll tell you, I mean, I'm not a saint sometimes I'll get, I have Pamay as my nickname, I have a long Nigerian name that shows up when I, you know, call an Uber or whatever the case may be. And someone wants to launch in to ask me about my whole family history. And I'm just trying to get to the place right? Sometimes I'm like, sure I'm going to now share with you my whole family history and sometimes I don't want to. I'm tired, I don't feel like it and that's just a very like, simple example of how no one can expect anyone to do that labour. And the way to lighten it is to hold it lightly and ask and be curious, but also be thoughtful, if you're getting the sense that they don't at this moment, want to share with you that history of all the things that have been difficult for that person, in an underrepresented group.

👉🏾 Thank you. I appreciate that and I don't take it for granted. You know, I process everything through laughter. It is the core of who I am and I mentioned that, I have a Nigerian name it's because I am a child of Nigerians my parents were born and raised in West Africa, I was born in the US. And you may have heard kind of what is expected of the children of immigrants. And there were a few, you know, there are a few career choices that are accepted and comedian is not one of them. And so when I was younger, I really wanted to be a standup comedian, but I was like, I can't tell my parents that. 

👉🏾 And so I ended up studying computer science, which was engineering adjacent, which is one of the approved selections, doctor, lawyer, engineer. But, I've always loved comedy and when I left consulting, I went to a startup, which died very quickly and I was left with kind of a fork in the road, what am I going to do professionally? And I did two things and one of them was to study at second city and I performed as a standup. Sometimes it went well and sometimes not so well. I did some acting, I did some improvising and some of the people who I performed with are now fantastic and committed and are now entertaining many. And I'm so proud of them, I continue to try to infuse humour into everything that I do. When I went back to corporate America, I said I would be on a stage once a year. My last one-woman show was many years ago, it was 2017, I believe. But it's just, I see humour in everything I try to incorporate, certainly as a facilitator of learning. If you make people laugh, that always helps. And I fully expect to be an older woman after I retire on the stand-up circuits someone, getting sympathy laughter from whoever might be within earshot. It's a love of mine that I hold that I hold very close. 

👉🏾 Yeah I agree with you absolutely. You know, for me it was a grief journey. So in 2009, I had a very difficult year where I lost my father and my...