Misan Rewane is a remarkable young leader from Nigeria who took the lessons learned from her leadership coach to heart. She created WAVE Academies to tackle the problem of youth unemployment by getting young people ‘work ready’ and helping employers to find the local talent they need to grow their businesses.
Having met Trilogy Effect’s Wendy Appel through The Coaching Fellowship, Misan applied the leadership information and knowledge she gained from this coaching experience to create an organization with powerful social impact.
The Coaching Fellowship is a non-profit organization matching volunteer coaches with young women leaders interested in making a real difference in the lives of others. Misan and Wendy took their relationship way beyond one-on-one coaching to share the learning across the whole WAVE Academies team and to the young people they support.
The WAVE Academies curriculum includes leadership skills needed to be ‘work ready,’ such as communications, problem solving, negotiations, and teamwork.
Misan Rewane
“Where I’m from, we don't get a lot of space to reflect inward. We're struggling to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing and security, so we don’t get a lot of space to reflect on who we are and how we show up in the world,” Misan explains. “At Wave Academies, we’re teaching emotional intelligence to unemployed young people who often don't have emotional vocabulary beyond ‘I’m happy or I’m sad.’”
Wendy has travelled to WAVE headquarters in Nigeria several times to work with Misan’s team. She says, “This is far and away some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. I don't know that I've ever worked with an organization where the tools and frameworks I share would have such immediate impact. I would teach them the tools and then they'd apply and make them their own, all before I left the meeting. Their thirst for knowledge was extraordinary.”
The impact is real. More than 50,000 young Nigerians have been trained through Wave Academies and the employment rate among alumni is 70%.
In this episode, you’ll learn about Misan’s incredible leadership journey and how working with a coach not only dramatically improved her effectiveness as a leader, it helped her discover a direct path to creating effective and long-lasting change for the young people in her community.
Listen to the full LIVE episode to learn:
What is emotional intelligence and why having it is important?
About tools and frameworks to develop leadership capability and capacity.
Why is being human good for business?
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Being Human Is Good For Business Podcast with Misan Rewane
Sherrilynne Starkie: Hello. I'm Sherrilynne Starkie and welcome to the Being Human is Good for Business podcast. Today I'm joined by leadership expert, Wendy Appel, who is a partner at Trilogy Effect and is also the author of Inside Out Enneagram the game-changing guide for leaders.
We are welcoming as our guest, today a leader who has worked with Wendy, initially through the Coaching Fellowship, which is a not-for-profit organization. The fellowship relationship begins with six months of coaching with young women leaders, of impact, who are dedicating their lives to building the world of tomorrow, today. Their fellows become part of a global “women of impact network” which stretches across more than 80 countries.
Misan Rewane is the founder of Wave Academies, a Nigerian organization which tackles the problem of youth unemployment by getting young people “work-ready” and helping employers, so they can focus on their businesses and growing them. All that is to say, welcome to the show Misan.
Misan Rewane: Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Welcome to you too Wendy.
Wendy Appel: Good morning.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Misan, can we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Misan Rewane: Sure, I was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and wanted to be a teacher at some point when I was growing up, and I learned very early on that teachers are not as appreciated as they should be. So, I wanted to do something to fix that, someday, and to make sure that teachers, who I felt were doing some of the most important work in the world, worked in systems where they were encouraged, appreciated and rewarded for the hard work that they do.
Fast forward to several years later, I was fortunate enough to go to Stanford University for my undergraduate education. That was the first time I got exposed to the idea of financial aid and initiatives to increase access for young people to have opportunities. I wanted to sort of replicate that one day, so that anyone could afford to get a world-class global education that would open up more doors for them. Since then I’ve worked in management consulting and went on to business school. Then went on to work with other West Africans who are also passionate about this idea of ‘how do we level the playing field’ so that every young African does have access to the skills and opportunities to become what they imagined and that’s how we were born.
Just from meeting other West Africans who were also excited about changing the narrative for African young people, given that we were the counterfactual to that narrative of having been exposed to global education opportunities, which opened several doors for us.
For six and a half years, I was fortunate enough to find other like-minded young people, who bought into this vision, and we worked together to build Wave Academy into an organization that employed over 40 young people, had directly trained over 3,000 young people and had indirectly worked with about 30 growth partners to then train about 50,000 young people.
About two years ago I was able to “succession plan” with the help of Wendy and some of the coaching work that we'll talk about today. Now, the organization is run by even more phenomenal people than myself and I am working on multiple initiatives, one of which I'm very excited about, is an on-line university, to also work on educating the next billion people, as we call it.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Well I think as testimony to the fantastic level of success that you've achieved, this podcast goes out once or twice a month and it goes out globally and we have a lot of listeners in Canada and the United States but, Lagos and Nigeria, is the third most popular place for downloads.
Misan Rewane: Hello, my peoples!
Sherrilynne Starkie: So let's talk a little bit about the coaching fellowship. How did you find out about it? How did you get involved with it?
Misan Rewane: I don't actually remember how I found out about it, but I do remember seeing an email with it as an opportunity, and in the early days, I did apply to a lot of fellowship programs. One of the key criteria was, “where can we get free money”, for fellowship programs that had some prize associated with it. So I can't remember who forwarded it to me, but I should go check that out and give them a big thank you and a hug.
So, I saw the opportunity and it felt good, given that it was affordable access to coaching that I felt would be helpful. I don't think I knew that many people who had talked to me about their coaching journeys back then, but I just read it and felt, ‘Yes, I'm constantly consuming books because I always feel out of my depth and I don't know how to lead a team and do it well, and any resource that could help would be welcomed.’
I think it was probably back in 2014. I was just maybe a year or two into my journey at Wave Academy, probably a year and a half when I saw this email about the coaching fellowship, which was open to women who wanted to change the world in their own way and I was fortunate enough to be matched to Wendy and the rest is history in the making.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Wendy, how did you first get involved with the fellowship?
Wendy Appel: Well, Misan was my first coachee and I had been, for years, wanting to volunteer for something that was important to me and I really thought about ‘how can I give a hand up to young women?’ I happened to be on Facebook and a friend posted something about the Coaching Fellowship was looking for coaches.
I contacted Jane Hatton Finette, who is kind of like the Misan, for the Coaching Fellowship, she wants to democratize coaching. This was at the very beginning, maybe the first or second year of the Coaching Fellowship coming into an existence, and I got paired up with Misan, and I still work with the Coaching Fellowship.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Misan, tell us a little bit about what that experience was like?
Misan Rewane: I had an awareness of various sorts of personality assessments and was a bit wary of them. Phrasing what someone mentioned the other day about how they think about some of that work, they think, ‘oh, this is useful bullshit, useful in some regards, but don't, take it too seriously,’ and that was sort of my approach.
So working with Wendy, initially, and trying to figure out ‘okay what “type” am I on the Enneagram?’ I don't like things that sort of set you in stone, because I do believe that we show up in different ways and I just appreciated Wendy's approach for helping to understand ‘what are the constants around the things that drive you, the things that you are driven to avoid?’
Then, how do you recognize the automatic ways in which you behave and, in those moments, catch yourself and try to generate a better self that has better outcomes. So that has been just one thread, constantly, and there are many days that I go through each year, where I totally oblivious and happy to play around in my automatic self. Then there are those moments where I realize, ‘Okay, something's getting out of hand, an argument is escalating and I need to catch myself in this moment and do a better job of listening perhaps. Do a better job of trusting someone's intentions. Do a better job of taking the other person's perspective, do a better job of scaling up to see things either at a higher level or even a lower level, closer to the ground, where some of the real emotions and impact of being felt.’ Yeah, there's just been a lot around how to work with teams and how to better collaborate.
It's made my team or, my former team, a healthier collaborating team. It's stuff that, over the last couple of years, any opportunity that I get to speak or minister to other entrepreneurs in the trenches, I have seen those ‘aha’ moments come alive. Where they are able to take some of that back to their teams.
So, I think with Wendy it’s just ‘how do you be a better team player, a better team leader and a better team follower,’ and Wendy's done an awesome job of just helping us. This includes myself, and my former team, to just come to a better place of trusting each other and being focused on results and being comfortable with conflict and giving feedback and clearing the air.
We carry a lot of cognitive load worrying about how people are interpreting our intentions or what we're saying. Just having some tools to use in those moments, to seek clarity and alignment, to get the ball rolling, has been tremendously helpful.
Sherrilynne Starkie: So following your initial coaching engagement you guys continued to work together. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
Misan Rewane: So with the Coaching Fellowship we had six or eight sessions over a six-month period. Then afterwards Wendy and I were able to come to an arrangement, to continue working together, just one-on-one coaching. Then, there were a few opportunities when I would be going into a big meeting or, into a retreat session for the whole team, and would need her help in navigating how to make sure that the message was passed and the intentions were understood. You got people to act, or do, or feel or think what you wanted them to do.
A few years in, one day we're planning our annual retreat and I was like, ‘Wendy, how do you feel about coming to Nigeria and running our retreat?’ In the previous years I would run the retreat and when you're running the retreat and trying to facilitate these moments of shared meaning, it's hard to be fully present yourself. So you miss out on the experience because you're just curating it for everyone else. Wendy agreed and to come down to Lagos and facilitated our very first retreat and it became, sort of, part of our culture every summer, to have Wendy come down.
Even in COVID, I hear Wendy was able to run a similar session for the team last year, with the new CTO. So yeah, from working with me as an individual, to working with a team, because she understood the team and had all this history from working with me, she was better able to show up for them.
So, yes, it's evolved, I’m excited even in work that I've done subsequently, in bringing Wendy in just to help leaders navigate themselves and their teams.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Wendy, give us your take on the work that you've done with Wave Academy?
Wendy Appel: How much time do you have? It is, by far and away, some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. Both working with Misan, and then her team, and they’re an extension of Misan, she sets the culture. Then, me going into the Nigerian culture, Misan sent me a book ahead of time to read, to prepare myself and Misan was an incredible cultural guide. I had never been to Nigeria before. So I approached it with trepidation because it was all new to me, but they were the most welcoming, appreciative group of people, unbelievable, I'd never felt so appreciated in the work that I do.
I don't know that I've ever worked with an organization where the tools that I would bring forward, they would immediately take. It was like Velcro, they would stick to them, they'd apply it, and they'd make it their own, before I even left the retreat. The hunger and the thirst for knowledge and information and tools was, extraordinary.
Misan Rewane: I just wanted to add additional context and it probably happens in many places in the world, but I do find that where I'm from, we don't get a lot of space to reflect inward. Maybe it's a fast-paced culture, a start-up life, maybe it's just that we're just really struggling on the hierarchy of needs; food, shelter, clothing, and security, they are all the things that will take up 99% of your time. So we don’t get a lot of space to reflect on who we are and how we show up in the world and those bigger questions, the “one percent” type of questions, you might say.
So that’s part of why the team would latch onto these things, and these moments, it was because they just don't get that anywhere. The time to meditate, and use these practices of centering yourself, of mining conflict, and understanding how you listen. Most people just don't get that, so I was very excited to be able to build an organization that provided that space for people to reflect and find language, to describe how they feel and it shows up in the work that we do. We train unemployed young people, most of who live on less than two dollars a day, and when we teach emotional intelligence, they don't have the vocabulary beyond ‘I’m happy or I’m sad.’ There’s little nuance because they don't have the vocabulary to even express that. So, you can imagine how that leads to escalations that aren’t necessary just because someone thought you were angry when, actually, you weren't, you were just a bit riled or ruffled, you don't have that range of vocabulary, to calibrate.
So yes, some of the tools that we use there's the ‘fab four’ and I've talked about them without mentioning them because some people sort of have an aversion to frameworks. Anything that sounds ‘frameworky” they shut down, they don't want to hear it. So, using everyday language, like helping you figure out how to listen, helping you figure out how to grant trust.
Most of us operate in a basis of earned trust, ‘you didn't do what you said you were going to do, so I no longer trust you, hands down.’ If you do something good, your trust goes up in the bank account, but the yo-yoing, and that mental load that you carry of, ‘Can I trust this person? Do they really care? Are they committed to this team? It’s just being able to agree, as a team, that these are the things that we will grant trust about.
Anytime anyone joins our team we will grant them trust that they care, that they are committed, and that they are competent.
The moment we can trust them on those three areas than need to have a conversation. Okay, recalibrate, and maybe go our separate ways. My team would struggle with that, ‘What do you mean granting trust? If someone messes up, I cannot, for example, you can never grant me trust that I will show up on time, I'm not a punctual person.’
Still, we can agree to grant trust that, ‘I care, I'm committed’ and the moment something happens, out of that understanding, something that seems out of sync and you say, ‘wait a second, you did that and I know you're committed to this cause’. So that action is out of whack with that trust that I've granted you.
So I'm going to unpack that, I'm going to try and inquire of you, “what happened there, what are you seeing that I'm not seeing’, was one of those questions that Wendy helped me with, to learn how to ask, and that has just served me well. It always works by asking someone what they see, that you’re not seeing, recognizes that they see a lot more. They have an entire perspective that you can't fully be aware of unless you ask and they let you into that.
This idea of not getting attached to outcomes, it's simple, the serenity prayer. When you're an entrepreneur, you get attached to the outcome, ‘Why did this happen? Why did this person stop using our product? Why did this person leave the team and resign? Why did this funder stop funding us?’ You get attached and your day can go up and down in seconds, yo-yoing. Just learning not to get attached, you do your best, you put in your best, but one of the phrases I learned from Wendy is ‘the idea of strong ideas loosely held.’ You care very much about something, you research it intently, you go to bat for that perspective, but you hold it loosely so that it can interact with other people's perspectives, other people's ideas, and it can be a stronger idea or you let it go completely.
There are many tools, the ability to give feedback, by letting people know how they've lost influence with you, or how they've gained influence with you becomes, it's a less tense or less frictional way to give feedback. ‘I’m not chastising your action, I’m just saying that you didn't lose influence with me when you did X,’ and it allows the person to listen and then you ask and you end your feedback with a request.
So you're empowering the person and bringing them above the line. I could go on for a long time, but there are a lot of everyday tools and the story that I tell that's the most poignant in my mind about when I felt really empowered by the work I was doing with Wendy was and many years ago, my phone, my iPhone was stolen.
I would use my iPhone everywhere and I had left it on the table in the Academy and it was stolen. It was stolen by a student and I was angry because, ‘wait a second, we're here training unemployed people and trying to change your narrative and you steal my phone.’ It was a Friday and we were about to go out as a team to our TGIF once a month, and typical me was in an automatic mode, I was in a bad mood, and I already had a plan as to how we were going to show up at the Academy tomorrow and get to the bottom of this investigation. And I thought, ‘I can cancel TGIF, I can go home, I’m not going to be any fun, there’s no point in me going to TGIF.
Then I remember thinking, ‘well, that's my automatic mode, I have the power to generate whatever self I want to be, and so I'm going to go to TGIF and I'm going to have fun and just be a great team member for the next few hours, and I can worry about my phone later.’ I remember the entire night everyone kept saying, ‘oh my gosh, Misan, I can’t believe it, like if I was you I’d be so mad, so frustrated, that my phone’s been stolen and your laughing and having fun.’ That was one of those “aha” moments, this is what Wendy has been talking about. We have our automatic selves, but we also can generate who we want to be in any moment, we always have a choice.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Wow, that’s powerful. I think there are lessons in that for everybody.
Wendy Appel: I'm getting teary.
Misan Rewane: I never told you that story, but yes.
Wendy Appel: No, you haven’t. But, this is what I’m talking about, Sherrilynne, Misan
just hears it and she really gets an idea, immediately, of how to apply it and she uses it like, boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s faster than I could even re-articulate the idea. So, Misan is always experimenting saying ‘okay, I'll try this,’ there’s an openness. It’s not like ‘that will never work or what’s she talking about?’ That makes all the difference for any of us, right.
Misan Rewane: Yeah, I remember when we were sort of moving with what we call from “Wave 1.0” to “Wave 2.0”, where we had been this organization that was very small and hands-on with every single student that we worked with and we were trying to get folks to say, ‘Hey, now we're not going to just be running our own academies and training people directly, but we're going to be working with other organizations to train their thousands of people.’
So, it's a step back, it's not the same, and there was a lot of grief that we needed to go through in the change curve, which was something that Wendy introduced to us. We needed to recognize and hold the space that we are in bargaining mood, we're in grief, or in anger, and then we eventually get to a place of resignation. Then we'll eventually come up and start to be positive and explore and think about the possibilities that could come out of this. When we were going through the CTO transition and I was leaving as a leader, and just teaching us how to come together and sort of hold the space for the story so far and getting excited about the new possibilities with a new CTO, and the stories that would lie ahead in these moments of big change and transition. Wendy, again, has given us the tools to cope and to thrive.
Sherrilynne Starkie: When you talk about changes in transition, and I think that the whole world is kind of gone through massive change in the last year. You mentioned earlier on the call that you're looking at doing that a virtual university as a new business, but I kind of feel like all the universities have been virtual for a lot of the last year. Would you say the pandemic has changed your approach to leadership or have you experienced particular challenges during the pandemic?
Misan Rewane: I think for me, just learning how to create a “shared meaning” virtually, has sort of been the biggest skill set that I worked on and come through the pandemic. We’re still coming through the pandemic, and in it, and simple things like starting a call and just genuinely listening and waiting for people to tell you how they really are. Volunteering that information first. I think everyone expects when you say, ‘how are you?’ you get a one line broad, vague thing, so trying to show, first that vulnerability, and tell people how you really are and what's going on in the background and leaving your video on and letting people know, ‘hey, I'm going to have to go put off the beans that are burning on the fire.’
It’s letting people know that, there's no longer a perfect wall between our work and our lives and letting people know that it's okay. So creating spaces for, shared meaning, virtually has been an interesting challenge. I think people think it can be done and everyone's just waiting for, ‘okay, when the pandemic is over, then we’re going to go back to being in the classroom all the time, being in full space.’ But there’s no world where you're going to go back to just fully, in person, because virtual has opened up the room for you to work with so many layers of an organization that, in the past, would not have been accessible. I've seen a lot of possibilities but, very simply, it’s just giving and holding space for people.
I think that's something Wendy taught me as language. It’s something that I enjoy doing, and something that I think I do well, holding space for people to just be, in this time.
Sherrilynne Starkie: Wendy, what's the most important lesson you've learned from working with Misan?
Wendy Appel: The red thread that Misan pulled through from her childhood to the work that she chose to do, and then the manifestation that it took, and the commitment and the tenacity. Misan could have stayed in the States, she'd gone to Stanford, she'd gone to Harvard and she could have stayed there and got a nice high paying job. Instead she went back to her country to make a difference and it was pretty bad slog with her working out of her dining room and trying to corral people to help her. Just watching the unfolding of her, taking an idea from and idea to a manifestation, a very successful manifestation, and making a difference and the idea is living way beyond the sun now. Her commitment to finding a successor, knowing that she was going to hand off the reins, even though it was her child, that she had birthed, and talking about letting go and the ability to let go and let somebody else take over, grow it into what they think it should become.
Just this whole journey, just standing on the sidelines and watching has been nothing but inspiring. Misan, just to say about her, she's been so gracious and generous and has brought me into her community and she has quite an extraordinary community, and it has just taken me into the fold. It's been, and continues to be such a rich and rewarding experience that has lived way beyond our coaching engagement. Who could have known, that when we started, this is how it would manifest in the world. So, I just feel so grateful to you, Misan, and I just want to say that publicly, because I'm richer for knowing you.
Misan Rewane: Well, thank you! Yes, it's been quite a ride and just some parting words to anyone. Some people don't like the term coach, some people think that it's indulgent when you’re running a non-profit on a shoestring budget, you can't indulge and spend on coaching. Yet, it is the single most important investment you can make, it’s just figuring out someone to help you to move towards to your best self, so that you can help others do that. I think that's the job of a leader, it is to hold the space to help people be their best selves and finding someone to help you do that.
Sherrilynne Starkie: That’s wonderful. I think that's a really great place to end, so I'll just do the outro. So, we had a couple of hiccups this morning, ladies, but I want to thank you both very much for finding the time to spend some time on the call here and talk about this. Thank you, Misan, for joining us to share your experiences of being a coachee and of leadership. Thanks, Wendy, for continuing to volunteer for such an important organization and one that has such an impact on people's lives, and on society, larger than the individuals that you coach. I mean, when you could see the trickle down effect here very, very clearly.
Thank you, also, to all you leaders who are our listeners. See the show notes for links to information resources, about some of the tools and ideas that we discussed today. And please make sure that you never miss an episode by subscribing to our podcast. Please leave a rating or review and recommend us to your friends and family, or anyone who wants to learn to become a better, stronger, more effective leader. Visit, www trilogy effect.com, to subscribe to our free newsletter, which is full of leadership tips and practical ideas. I'm your host Sherrilynne Starkie, and this is the Being Human is Good for Business podcast.