Teju Fola-Alade, On Life, Career and Creating a Positive Workplace Culture
Culture Leaders is a new content series by Cadana to celebrate all People Managers across Africa. On this week's episode, we spotlight Teju Fola-Alade—People and Culture Leader at MANO.
As an HR practitioner in the corporate sector and a professional biographer, she partners with senior executives, business owners and solopreneurs to consciously develop and build their professional brands in print/web, and human-to-human.
In addition to her divergent experience within the start-up and commercial industries, Teju is the founder of Tejuwrites, an IG social platform that addresses all things career, leveraging humour and creativity to drive home its message. She is also the founder of Betaworka, a boutique human capacity development firm addressing behavioural and competency issues in the workplace and across society at large.
She is an alumnus of Babcock University, Nigeria and with several professional certifications and qualifications from leading institutions such as Lagos Business School, Chartered Institute of Marketing UK, London Academy Business School, Human Resource Certification Institute and American Certification Institute.
In this week’s edition of Culture Leaders, Teju tells us about the impact of her work especially in Tech Startups.’
On accomplishments thus far in her career:
I am a divergent careerist and my career trajectory is a great testament. I have spent the last decade in tech startups and have held different roles. Presently, I am an HR Practitioner but I don’t expect that to be for long. Another career transition is imminent. (Lol) I have built very good and quality experiences that have allowed me to combine my multipotential abilities, and create a rewarding career and an entrepreneurship experience for myself.
On how her work as an individual impacts her industry and society:
I am an HR practitioner involved heavily in shaping the careers of people through critical areas of practice my profession requires.
As a Writer and Blogger, my writing skills allow me to tackle topical issues in a most lighthearted way without losing the message or impact. As an entrepreneur with divergent business interests, I have provided my boutique services to individuals, corporates, and institutions for immediate capacity change, and for the ultimate good and success of the individual or business.
I have no doubt that Teju the HR Practitioner, Teju the Writer, Teju the Employee and Teju the Entrepreneur have jointly and individually made an impact on the lives of people she has met personally, digitally and/or worked with professionally.
On the one thing she desires for the HR industry in Nigeria/Africa:
I earnestly look forward to seeing the HR industry unify and heavily regulate its practices, just as we have in the medical field.
On social impact and how she drives change in her community:
I am a social content creator who loves to use humour to pass across my message for the social good. My creative side is quite dominant. Across my entrepreneurial adventures, the mission for me has always been to build a capacity development ecosystem using innovation, creativity and technology to make a change.
I am highly passionate about influencing behavioural change through ‘socialpreneurial’ activities. If we want to get people to either behave in a certain way, adopt a new system of thinking, or drop a bad behaviour that is detrimental to the society at large, such as corruption and impunity, we had best begin to believe that we need to get urgently creative and innovative about how to send this message across to them. This means that earnings must be customized to suit the age and cultural demographics of each learner.
So, for every person, group of people or organization that I offer my services whether as an HR Practitioner, an Ideator, a Training Facilitator or as a Career Humorist, it has always been important to me that they derive great value from the experience I am able to provide to them, that which transcends my job title or current career path.
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