Esther Akinnukawe: Nurturing Trust Within SME Work Space
When Esther Akinnukawe appeared before over 100 SME owners at the virtual MTN Revv masterclass which held recently, her core message to them was ‘Building Trust’.
The Revv Programme, an initiative by telecommunication giant MTN, is a series of virtual training sessions aimed at helping SMEs relearn, rethink and retool their businesses for growth in the emerging digital economy. Akinnukawe is the Chief Human Resource Officer at MTN Nigeria who has efficiently managed talents in different organisations during the course of her illustrious career spanning over 26 years. She didn’t mince words as she spoke on the importance of business owners building trust with their employees.
While it is likely that falsehood and deception may drive short-term profit, making the temptation of cutting corners more luring, it is ephemeral and no serious business with a vision of building a strong and lasting institution heads in that direction. It is only by trust that businesses build a strong institution and a customer base that can be kept and nurtured. For any business to survive, grow, and thrive, trust is essential between the company and its customers as well as its employees.
Akinnukawe is an authority in the business of hiring and training, with a proven track record. An alumna of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, with over two decades of experience in talent management, she maintained that building trust with employees begins from the hiring process.
“Get your hiring right. If you don’t bring the right people into the organisation, unfortunately the foundation has not been properly built,” she said.
With an MBA from IESE Business School, Universidad de Navarra, Spain, she joined MTN Nigeria in 2012 as the General Manager, Business Partnering and Services and became the Human Resources Executive in 2018. She is a Chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Management (CIPM), as well as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
Before joining MTN, Akinnukawe was on the Faculty of Lagos Business School of the Pan African (now Pan-Atlantic) University and had garnered experience from consulting, teaching and HR management drawn from positions held at: Andersen Consulting, Lagos (now Accenture); Societe Generale Bank, Trust Bank for Africa and FCMB.
The task of leading the team in charge of hiring the right people, for a multinational with more than 1800 employees, according to Bloomberg, demands more than just hiring, motivation plays a crucial role in ensuring the right hires take responsibility to meet the goals of the organisation and expectations of the customers.
Undaunted by the challenge of managing over 1800 ‘right people’, it is safe to say she has motivated the team to constant wins.
A year after Akinnukawe joined MTN, the telecom giant bagged the Investors in People (IiP) Standard Certification for the first time in 2013 and in six years, it moved on to clinch the Gold Certification in 2015 and Platinum in 2019 which implies that MTN has a robust Employee Value Proposition (EVP) as an organisation.
The IiP is an internationally recognised people management standard accreditation programme, and “what it means is that internationally, including the United Kingdom and USA where IiP has a presence, we are in the top percentile of organisations with the best people practices,” Akinukawe said in an interview in December 2019.
A self-professed motivator, Akinnukawe is focused on what she knows how to do best: living a life of impact and significance, influencing others to be the best they can be while enjoying the ride. She is passionate about an environment that inspires greatness and empowers people to unleash their potentials to achieve personal and professional growth.
And this is exactly what she demonstrated on The Revv Programme as she opened her pool of experience to SMEs to tap from the knowledge and strategies that have helped her stay at the top of the game for close to three decades.
With an Oxfam report on the challenges confronting Nigerian SMEs and Start-ups in the COVID-19 pandemic revealing that 71.43% of businesses are experiencing market decline and about 47.62% of the companies have stopped all forms of production, MTN is showing true leadership with The Revv Programme Masterclass.
If the succession of developments brought upon the world by the pandemic could challenge the survival of multinationals, small businesses need not be told to stand firmly in order not be blown away by the raging storm.
MTN introduced the Revv Programme which consists of a series of business related masterclasses, advisory services, marketing and technology support targeted at over 10,000 SMEs to address the critical needs of SMEs and proffer solutions to their many challenges as they struggle for balance amid the COVID-19 storm.
“The right hire is the first foundation you can then begin to build on,” she advised. “If you’re going to build a culture of trust, you can’t afford to be disrespectful.”
