36: Ekpedeme 'Pamay Bassey': Leading by example

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 burdenWe 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 worldThank you Pamay Bassey for your generosity and time. If you want to know more subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google or your favourite podcast platformMemorable 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