Building a community of world-class African operators — one step at a time
This week, I finally forced myself to sit down and share two exciting things I’ve been up to during the past four months. One of my great joys of these last few years has been helping to grow the number of African business and startup operators who are world-class.
Every time I see a LinkedIn career update of yet another one of my former team members or mentees who has landed an amazing new role, I’m overjoyed. This is something I hope to keep doing for the rest of my life as a side project, irrespective of what I do full-time.
This post was initially an email update to friends about two mini-projects I’ve worked on, along those lines. But I decided to share more broadly.
Update 1 of 2: High performance masterclass
One of the great benefits of my sabbatical was being able to reflect on and document some of my learnings on what it takes to build high-performance teams and great cultures of excellence within organizations, drawing from my own experience (incl. both successes and failures) building and scaling operations and leading across 6 diverse countries, 5+ business functions and over 1,000 employees.
Around September/October of last year, I also had one-on-one calls with 30+ founders and senior executives at startups (from early to mid stage) where I would ask them to name two challenges they wish they could pay to solve. Every single one of them pointed out that they would love a way to continuously level up their teams on how to achieve excellence in execution and building great cultures, especially as their businesses scale. This isn’t an African problem, it’s a global problem for younger companies, and particularly for fast growing companies.
With that nudge, I put together an MVP for a masterclass aimed mostly at funded startups, titled “Building and Leading High Performance Organizations & Teams”. With some amazing support and collaboration from Sharon Ikechi, a former Andela colleague and curriculum designer turned Product Manager, I began finalizing the structure and content, pretty nervous about how it would be received. In my final moments of vulnerability, Adia Sowho, Rotimi Thomas and Eloho Omame also came to the rescue, encouraging me to cross the finish line and just ship it. The goal was to sell 15 seats. If I sold 10, I would have celebrated a win and run some victory laps.
Three months later we’ve run 3 sessions via Zoom, with 100+ participants across senior management, Director, VP and C-level roles at 20 of the most exciting companies in Nigeria/Africa, including Paystack, Flutterwave, Andela, Ventures Platform, Spacefinish, FlexiSAF, Moove Africa, Arnergy Solar, and many more. The feedback has been incredible, with a combined participant Net Promoter Score of 80 (72 in Jan, 83 in Feb, 82 in Mar).
Going forward, I’ll continue to teach the high-performance masterclass once or twice each quarter, based on demand. Somewhere down the road, I’ll likely invite other superb operators to teach additional topics.
If you’d like to have people from your team join a future session (or if you’d like to sign up yourself), please fill out this ‘expression of interest’ form and we’ll keep you informed as we begin planning the next session (likely in May/June).
Here’s a snippet of what participants said they enjoyed the most:
“The presenter was knowledgeable and the content was amazing”
“Seni was a great facilitator. He broke things down and gave practical examples.”
“The breakout sessions were a great chance to understand what my peers in various industries were going through and learn from each other.”
“The diversity of the cohort especially across industries and roles. It brought different perspectives into the conversations.”
“The networking — getting to hear from experienced people in various roles”
“Very succinct information, as well as practical takeaways”
“The insights from other company executives and leaders”
Update 2 of 2: Black Ops community
The most consistent feedback we got during the masterclass sessions was that participants loved the ability to engage with people from other companies and wanted EVEN more of that! Many people wanted to continue the conversation afterwards, so we are creating a community for top African operators who are building great companies.
How have you improved the quality of meetings within your organization? What are ways to increase the productivity of our teams? What are some tried and tested best practices for structuring an interview process? Is there a useful checklist someone is willing to share on how to setup operations in a new country? Should you use Asana, Monday or Trello to manage your team’s output? How often should you do performance reviews? Should procurement be a Finance or Operations function? What are some tactical steps to improve the culture within your organization? Should the People operations team report centrally or into the Country Manager? Does a quarterly or semi-annual OKR work better for earlier stage companies? How much should you tolerate a high performer who is abrasive?
These are just a few of the types of pragmatic conversations, on the “how” of building great organizations, that people who lead functions and departments (aka operators) have on an ongoing basis. The best answers come from other experienced operators who have faced similar situations in their journey.
Whenever I’ve had questions like this over the past few years, I’ve had to send multiple emails, WhatsApp messages and Telegram messages to different people scattered across the planet. Twitter didn’t quite work because I’d get a lot of responses from people who hadn’t actually done these things. And LinkedIn didn’t work because I have a large network of people who might not fully capture the nuances of being an African.
What I really craved was a single location with a large group of experienced African operators where I could have a mix of synchronous conversations (e.g. via Telegram) and longer, asynchronous discussions or content sharing (e.g. Circle.so). It sounds like many other people have the same need.
That’s the entire premise behind Black Ops.
We’ve launched an invite-only beta (starting with Telegram) to better understand whether it is possible to build a highly valuable community for African operators who hold the critical responsibility of figuring out “how” to translate strategy into execution in order to help build great companies and cultures. There are many such communities for founders, engineers and industry observers. But where are the communities for actual operators? I’ve asked that question every few months.
Whether you are in operations, finance, people & culture, customer success or marketing, operators who are interested can apply to join. To maintain the quality of conversations and peer-to-peer learning during our beta, we are currently only reviewing applications from people who hold roles at the CxO, VP, Director and Senior Manager levels.
The beta test will be free, though we’ll consider a low-fee subscription model as we figure out additional ways to create more value within the community.
You can find me @senisulyman on Twitter if you’d like to engage, or drop a comment below.
The end.
#WeMove! 🚀🚀🚀
Update: Black Ops is live @ https://blackops.community