Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on strategic HR with Rokhaya Ndiaye, CEO and founder of Ro&Partners, a human capital consulting firm. Gain valuable insights and strategies for shaping your organization’s long-term goals and aligning your people strategies to meet future challenges.

When it comes to dealing with humans, whether growing a talent base in a global marketplace or downsizing to meet long-term goals, Rokhaya Ndiaye (who goes by Ro) recommends employing empathy, using cultural sensitivity, and making a break from post-colonial mindsets. Ndiaye, whose company is headquartered in Senegal but conducts business internationally, understands firsthand the existing bias that talent only comes from the West. Her mission: to unlock the potential of Africa through its people. And she believes every company – private or nonprofit – should be strategically investing in its people.

Key Takeaways:

Think strategically

“Strategic HR is HR that is supporting the organization for the future. This is everything you do in terms of creating the stage for the organization to have the change management framework to be able to adapt to the changing ecosystem environment, as well as projecting themselves in the future.”

Rethink one-size-fits-all compensation

“The smart companies are adjusting to this global market we are in, they're running away from these international versus local packages. It’s about how you are paying a job, not how you are paying a local versus a national, an international person.”

Consider the impact of downsizing on those who stay

“At some point we have to downsize. But when it comes to people, we need to understand that downsizing has a very negative impact on people, but not only the people that are leaving the organization, the people that are staying as well. So we need to just make sure that we are very transparent and have a strong communication plan.”

Let people go with care

“The better you plan it, the easier for you to get through it as a company because that's not where you want your energy to go. You have to have a level of empathy, especially at a leadership level, to show people that you care.”

Listen to Ro Ndiaye’s advice to entrepreneurs and HR leaders for building strategic HR frameworks that align with your company’s values and adapt to regional and cultural realities.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on leadership with Collins Dobbs, a Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in leadership and a seasoned executive coach. According to Dobbs, becoming a truly phenomenal leader requires a deeper understanding of both yourself and your team, enabling you to navigate tough conversations, develop real connections, and create a culture where people feel safe to offer real feedback.

As an executive coach, Collins Dobbs has worked with senior leaders across industries to help them navigate complex team dynamics and enhance their emotional intelligence. As an instructor for the popular Interpersonal Dynamics course (affectionately known as "Touchy Feely"), he also helps young leaders in the Stanford GSB classroom to foster self-awareness, communicate more authentically, and develop the building blocks for effective leadership in their personal and professional worlds.

Key Takeaways

Be a signal generator

“People are looking for leaders to communicate how they navigate in the good times, but also in the challenging times. Are they open to innovation? Are they open to ideas? Are they open to creating opportunities for success and failure? That's a big job of leaders to generate those signals to say, it's okay. We welcome mistakes and risks as long as we learn from them and fix them going forward.”

Be open to giving and receiving feedback

“We come in and we have thoughts. And often underneath those thoughts are feelings. And so while the thoughts sometimes say what's important to us, oftentimes the feelings signal how important they are. We try to help the students understand both their thoughts and their feelings. And then as they interact with each other, understand their intentions, the impact of the behavior, and what comes up for them and what comes up for others as well.”

Embrace the unknowing

“A piece of leadership is about: What do I do in the not knowing? I don't know exactly what I need to know when markets change, when staffs change, when skills change. That's part of leadership. And part of it is, is a willingness to stand in the unknowing and a trust in oneself and others that we can figure it out.”

Make sure you have the right support system

“I think peer groups are tremendously important. If it's a CEO roundtable, or a group of alumni, do you have a circle of people where you can really be authentic? Because you're not alone.”

Lead with space, pace, and grace

“Can we pause? Can we create an understanding? Can we see where we're missing expectations from each other? Can we state what those expectations are? And then can we make a plan in terms of how we're willing to work together to meet that?”

Listen to Collins Dobbs’ advice to aspiring and experienced leaders on how to become not just a good leader, but a phenomenal one.

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Every entrepreneur understands the critical importance of sales to business success. But often, in the early stages of growth, teams tend to focus on marketing without having a strategic plan or process for how to turn leads into sales. Yann Le Beux, co-founder of a research and design firm in Senegal, and Zia Yusuf, a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group and Stanford Seed consultant, share their experiences and strategies for building and strengthening your sales strategy.

Yann Le Beux’s company, YUX Design, focuses on creating user-centered designs that address the unique needs of African markets, helping their clients to bridge the gap between global tech and local context. But Le had his own gap to bridge — between marketing efforts and sales conversions. Zia Yusuf, who has taught at Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner School of Design, lent his expertise in innovation and design thinking to help Le Beux and his team realize that their marketing and sales strategies must be aligned with the needs of specific customer segments. “You don't sell to companies, you sell to human beings,” Yusuf advises. “You're selling to very large organizations, but they're not your client and it's not even the business unit that's your client. It's not even the head of that business unit. There could be actually two, three different roles – and understanding how to sell to those people and individuals was kind of a little bit of a breakthrough as well.”

Le Beux admits that his small company didn’t grow quickly because it was constrained by talent issues. “But as soon as you start growing, you realize you have to feed all these people ready to work and you need to be much more consistent in your approach to business development and stop behaving like a spoiled child where clients come to you naturally,” he says.

Le Beux’s process started with creating a strong product-market fit for each of his business units, honestly assessing the competition, and transitioning from targeting companies to connecting with key decision makers. Yusuf also advises entrepreneurs to think about the true cost of sales and the effort required to get something. “When you're at an early stage as a company, you feel that every dollar that comes in is fantastic, but it may have taken 60 percent of the company working for three weeks to respond to an RFP which leads to a small dollar amount of revenue. You want it. So you're excited, but should you have spent those three weeks and 60 percent of your team pursuing a different opportunity in a different way?”

Hear how Le Beux and Yusuf worked together to balance marketing and sales while trying to scale, plus stories of partnering with Google and meeting the demands of a tech giant, along with strategic pricing during a global recession.

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