Having benefited from mentors and coaches throughout her career, Airtel Uganda HR director Susan Mataka now mentors young HR professionals and supports initiatives that help women develop as leaders. She reflects on how listening to younger employees has influenced her approach to the workplace and why understanding the business is essential to effective HR leadership.
Soon after Susan Mataka joined Kakira Sugar, where she led human resources for about 12,000 employees, her young assistant told her something few people would dare say to their boss. The office looked awful. Now the human resources director at Airtel Uganda, Susan recalls how that candid feedback challenged her to think differently about the workplace and the importance of listening to younger generations.
“I asked her, what would make this place look nice, and then she told me, I need to come into a space that makes me alive. Little did I know she was talking about having flowers,” she recalls.
Susan told her assistant, a Gen Z, to make the place look alive in any way she liked. The young woman came back with a painting and a potted plant with a real flower, along with a challenge: anyone who could care for the flower could care for anything living. Susan has been looking after it ever since.
“I've never been in an office where I have a plant, but when I come in, I check on it. I make sure I water it. If I'm going out over the weekend, I'll put it outside myself so that it can receive enough sun,” she says.
Listening well
The assistant did not stop at the flowers. She felt the company's diaries and calendars had no life either, so Susan arranged for her to pass that feedback to the PR manager. The diaries and calendars now carry pictures about the company.
“Those are some of the things we can't get when we do not relate with the different generations, when we don't become intentional,” she notes.
Susan began her career in 2006 as a university lecturer, and she says that once she moved into the corporate world she never looked back. She went on to hold senior HR roles at a national water utility and at a power distribution company in Uganda before joining Kakira four years ago, and she is clear that her progress was never a solo effort.
“My growth is not individual. It has been intentionally done through various people that have handheld me, that have mentored me, that have coached me. I've learned to surround myself with so many senior people,” she explains.
Mentoring also shapes how Susan sees the years ahead. She counts the next generation of HR professionals as part of her own vision, and she reaches for an image from nature to explain it.
“Grooming, mentorship and coaching the next generation is part of my vision and dream. Without the butterfly, who are these nymphs that are going to break out and fly?” she says.
That experience has changed what she does with her own time. Susan now mentors five young HR professionals in Uganda, three women and two men. She is also a member and mentor with the Girls for Girls project, which encourages women to lead and to make room for others, and she has joined a Rotary club to serve beyond herself.
“I can only grow when I grow others, so I've become more intentional. I can grow others by sharing my journey of growth to where I am and where I want to be, and then also intentionally mentoring other people,” she says.
Girls for Girls, she says, overturned an assumption she once held about how women support one another.
“Initially we had a perception that women fight other women to grow. But now the Girls for Girls project has taught me to create space to unfold other ladies, because I've been held by ladies to grow where I am,” she adds.
The shift that changed how Susan practises HR came when she moved from a public water utility to a private electricity company. Both were utilities, so she assumed the work would be much the same.
“I thought that it was the same thing. Little did I know that it's all about understanding the business, and that changed my perspective about HR, because I was coming from the public sector and now, I was joining a private entity with shareholders. The bottom line makes a lot of sense,” she says.
Business first
Kakira Sugar is a different kind of business. It is family-owned and sits on around 10,000 hectares, running sugar farming, manufacturing, energy generation and agro-industrial operations side by side, with staff of around 86 nationalities. Susan has written about balancing its highly unionised side against its highly mechanised side, and her first question in any new workplace is a plain one.
“In any space I join, I need to understand the business. How the business makes its money, whatever I'm going to put out to operate will require money,” she explains.
The question has shaped practical decisions. Around 70 per cent of Kakira's operations run on fuel, and Susan looked to how people were scheduled as one way of keeping the business running efficiently.
“Let's put you in the shifts so we work 24 hours and we are able to maximise on the time but also optimise on the fuel and be able to operate efficiently. Less people, more time, more products, and then we are working. That kind of thinking wasn't there before,” she says.
Susan is also a wife and a mother of two daughters, aged eight and ten. Each of them owns a dog, and she grows food for the household rather than to sell. The dogs have become a lesson in responsibility. Her younger daughter counts out every coin, works out what her dog's meat will cost, and earns the money by washing the car and sweeping the compound.
“I've taught my children how to clean them, to manage them from the time they come when they are puppies, and even to manage the cost as well. When I pay you pocket money, you have to reserve some money for your dog as you go to school,” she says.
