What does a human resources leader at one of the most impactful startups operating in Africa look for when hiring? “You can have the best engineer in the world who has a brilliant jerk attitude and just disrupts your whole company,” says Juliet Oshagbemi, Zipline’s Chief People & Culture Officer, Africa.
For a drone technology company where technical skills are critical, Oshagbemi says character and attitude can take precedence.
This can range from a talent’s humility and vulnerability, the kind that encourages taking responsibility for mistakes, to being entrepreneurial, curious, and willing to share informed and direct feedback without stripping a person of their dignity. When she asks for your past career experience in an interview, it’s less about where you’ve worked or for how long, and more about how you articulate those past experiences. For a global company with distributed teams, the ability to articulate and communicate your work and output is crucial.
At Zipline, she looks for people who are “able to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty” across various roles, in typical startup fashion. It’s grit, resilience, and being “good at collaborating cross-functionally.”
“I think the other piece is looking [for] someone who has leadership potential, someone that could lead a team in the future,” Oshagbemi says. “At Zipline, we’re very quick to identify people that could lead and give you the skills you need to lead.”
Finding purpose in uncertainty
More than two decades ago, long before Zipline, Oshagbemi sat before a recruiter at Blue Arrow, a recruitment agency for seasonal workers in London, to find out if any jobs had shored up. She’d dropped her resume at the agency a week earlier, on her way home from a part-time job at Marks & Spencer, eager for an inroad into a more stable career path. Already, she’d left behind studies in Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “I just couldn’t deal with not being in control of the outcome,” she says of her time in the medical sciences.
Just minutes before she’d walked into the agency, however, the recruiter had trashed her resume. “I just threw your CV away!” Oshagbemi recalls the recruiter telling her before reaching back into the trash to retrieve the resume and attempt to straighten it out.
She was asked to sit and, within half an hour, was placed in a supporting role for the recruitment team at the Metropolitan Police. At the station, she was tasked with putting together recruitment packs for individuals who’d expressed interest in the police force. There was nothing particularly exciting about this job, but Oshagbemi recalls doing it with fervour: listening to music from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m. at the station along Brook Street, sorting some 30 pages of recruitment information, gathering them in a file, sending it off to a would-be police officer, repeat.
Someone was taking note. Three weeks in, she says, the station’s recruitment manager bumped her into the recruitment team where she was tasked with hiring police officers who respond to 999 calls.
“I absolutely did not like it,” she says.
It was too routine, like checking the same items off the same lists over and over. So a year and a half later, she moved into generalist HR and climbed the ranks, from deputy HR manager to a HR manager responsible for about 900 staff. She was around 23.
You won’t be remiss to say her foray into personnel management was accidental, but nearly a decade later, Oshagbemi says seeking out the best talent in Africa and creating work environments that allow them to thrive has become a life’s mission.
A life-changing experience
After eight years at the Met Police, Oshagbemi truly cut her teeth as an HR professional at the Dangote Group. At the time, she did not know she was interviewing for a role at the conglomerate until late in the process. After interviewing with an all-male hiring panel in fishnet tights and a forwardness not often expected of women in corporate settings, she was surprised to learn she’d been hired.
“I think it was August 31st, 2009. I walked into Marble House, and I was responsible for learning and development for the group,” she says.
At the time, the conglomerate was looking for disruptors, a leader who could transform the group’s approach to personnel management. They’d appreciated the forwardness she’d brought to the interviews, her refusal to respond in ways “people wanted to hear”, and were confident that she could drive the change the company needed.
“Apparently, they were deadlocked. I think out of the panel—there were six—four wanted me to be hired, two did not,” she says. Those two would later tell her that “they were happy that they agreed in the end.”
At Dangote Group, Oshagbemi truly grew as an HR leader. From maintaining a high-quality talent pipeline, identifying and budgeting for personnel learning and development to recruiting, relationship building and succession planning, the size and complexity of the business presented a rare opportunity to work across every aspect of human resources management.
But after more than a decade working across those subsidiaries, Oshabegemi says she was ready to move on to newer opportunities. It was in the process of figuring out what this next move was that she was head-hunted by Zipline.
Oshagbemi says she’d never heard of the company when she was approached to join the team. She Googled them, of course, and took a preliminary conversation with the recruiter, “and I still wasn’t very convinced.” For one, the company had about a tenth of the staff capacity at Dangote, and it was going to be a significant downgrade in the scale of responsibilities she’d been handling for almost 13 years.
“Of course, another lesson learned for me was, just don’t look at the number of employees. Look at other things,” she reflects.
That ‘other thing’ took a visit to one of Zipline’s distribution centres in Ghana.
“When I walked into that distribution centre, and I heard the drone being launched, I think that was like a life-changing moment for me.”
Oshagbemi lost her father in 1999. Tragically. He’d been shot six times in the stomach, she recalled. At the hospital, five of the bullets were extracted, but the lone remaining bullet was lodged in his intestine, and he was losing so much blood that they couldn’t save him.
“Now imagine me, fast forward to many, many years later, at a facility where they were putting blood into a drone to send it to a hospital to save a life,” she says quietly.
She knew for sure that she was going to join the Zipline team then, to continue a career trend of working in companies whose impact is often ubiquitous and central to everyday survival.
At the time, the company was scouting for someone to lead learning and development, but after conversations with the recruiter and realising they needed more human resources structures in place, the role broadened in scope. She joined Zipline as its Chief People & Culture Officer in March 2022.
Culture as currency
Long gone are the days when a human resources leader’s role entailed payroll management, hiring, and firing. Today, human resources leaders are not only maintaining a healthy talent pipeline, establishing and fostering healthy work cultures, and handling change management, but they’ve also become, according to Oshagbemi, critical business partners to a company’s leadership. To contribute meaningfully, HR leaders of today must understand the numbers, how they influence decision-making, how profit and loss (P&L) works, how balance sheets work, and, for companies like Zipline that are heavily regulated, how regulation impacts business operations.
Especially for startups, an HR leader may need to wear more than one hat—Oshagbemi supports procurement, logistics, and security efforts at Zipline—and must embed themselves into the companies they work with to truly understand how to advocate for staff.
“You need to know what people are doing, what their pain points are,” Oshagbemi says. “You need to do a day in the life of someone in operations so that when you’re making that policy or when you are aligning on a decision at [the] board level, you have the right data points.”
At Zipline, “operations is our bread and butter,” she adds. “I need to understand what operations need, what are their priorities, or even speak the operation language.”
This capacity and intent to place oneself in the shoes of staff members with the aim of understanding their motivations and pain points are captured by the principle of ethical leadership. To create an enabling environment in which human capital thrives, where talent has the freedom and encouragement to do their best work, as well as the psychological safety to fail and learn without reproach, an ethical leader leads by example and with integrity. They embody the traits and cultures they want to see in their organisations and empathise with the limitations of those tasked with bringing the company’s vision to life.
“I can sit here and talk to you about performance management, talent management, chain management, and all those things,” she says. “But I think without having [an] enabling environment, all those things are just, you know, words.”
Though some studies show limitations, this style of leadership is largely regarded as beneficial. According to Legal Research Network’s Benchmark of Ethical Culture, which surveyed more than 8,500 full-time employees across 13 industries and 15 countries (African countries not included), companies with strong ethical cultures outperform companies without by about 50% across metrics such as customer satisfaction, adaptability, innovation, growth, and employee loyalty. This style of leadership fosters, perhaps crucially, team psychological safety—a term coined in 1999 that describes an environment where staff can speak up without fear of embarrassment or retribution when things go awry.
For some leaders, empathy and ethical behaviour might be innate, while for others, especially younger leaders and middle managers, they have to be learned, Oshagbemi says.
In addition to ethical leadership, enabling work environments are corporate cultures that favour expertise over the personal preferences of a single, often top company leader, according to Vivian Offodile-Adukwu, a human resources expert with over a decade of experience, including in tech startups.
“I always say that if you recruit me or if you bring me on board your team, it means that you have value or trust in the experience that I bring,” Offodile-Adukwu says.
In other words, great benefits and pensions are no longer enough to keep a multigenerational talent pool truly committed. “When I was in the police force, you’d have people wanting to work there for 30, 35 years because there was a great pension and there were great benefits. That has changed now,” Oshagbemi says. At Dangote, people stayed on for a decade, two, more, “because they were growing, because they were given opportunities to do other things.”
The “brilliant jerk” trap
The concept of ethical leadership—modelling healthy culture and empathy towards staff—is especially critical in startups where entrepreneurs often zero in on product and marketfit, fundraising, and scaling, while people management falls to the side.
“People will probably hire the CTO before they hire an HR person. Or the CFO. But why are you not looking at people person first and being able to build a solid culture for your company from the beginning, [rather] than making it an afterthought?” Oshagbemi asks.
Offodile-Adukwu agrees, adding that when founders fail to establish healthy corporate culture strategies and protocols from the start, there’s a higher chance that the culture will become unhealthy and toxic, leading to high attrition rates. And when fixes are eventually pursued, often without expert change management personnel or processes in place, the same results occur: talent leave.
“Your policies, your structure, reporting chain, modus operandi, everything has to reflect the culture that you see your company or startup [looking] like in the next 5, 10 years,” Offodile-Adukwu says.
When companies place greater emphasis on technical skills, which Offodile-Adukwu argues can be taught or developed, they can miss out on soft skills that often can’t be taught or are harder to teach in adulthood, but which have dire consequences for a team when they’re absent.
Global corporate culture and legacy
Zipline’s drone technology enables the company to deliver essential medical supplies, food, and other consumer products with speed and efficiency. The company was founded in America and now operates in eight countries across four continents. Bridging the gap between different corporate cultures and aligning them with the central global strategy is another critical part of Oshagbemi’s job.
“My role and the role of the other people partners in the company is to be a bridge, right? It’s to educate people on the cultural differences,” she says.
To do this requires cultural intelligence and awareness of how simple things like salutations, language, and sociocultural norms can creep into the ways people work and do business. It means communicating these nuances across the company’s various markets or organising cultural awareness workshops for American staff coming to Africa and vice versa to make cross-cultural interactions less nerve-racking and more beneficial.
Why does all of this work matter to Oshagbemi?
Africa has great talent, and many go undiscovered or unsupported to reach whatever summits they dream of in their careers, she argues. In addition to her role at Zipline, she works as a career coach, “because people do make wrong career decisions” and sometimes need assistance to get things right.
But when she looks back at her career in years to come, Oshagbemi says a worthwhile legacy is one that reflects her contributions to developing ethical leaders whose personal and company impact is felt beyond their individual companies, across entire industries and for years to come.
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