Wandera Kweyu, director of people and culture at Jambojet, believes people should never have to leave themselves at the door when they come to work. Her journey through law, human resources and humanitarian work, alongside her own experience with mental health, has shaped her approach to leadership and creating workplaces where people can show up as their whole selves.
Every Friday evening, Wandera Kweyu, director of people and culture at Jambojet sits down with her husband and their children close by. Their 11-year-old has a full account of everything that has happened since morning while their 16-year-old, now taller than her, calls her his old lady, a title which she has told him she is not ready to accept, at least not yet. The four of them talk, plan family trips, check in on each other properly.
“Friday is our night. We sit together and our children fascinate us, from the younger one with his wild stories, the elder one finding his way. Beyond the general. How have you been?,’ we ask, really, how are you? And we make time for the answer,” she says.
Away from family, Wandera describes herself as an extroverted introvert who loves to watch people. She can sit quietly in a room and read the dynamics of a conversation without participating.
“I pay as much attention to what people leave unsaid as to what they say. That instinct drew me to law as a young woman, but eventually led me away from it,” she says.
From law to people
Wandera studied law and intended to practise. Her first job was at Heidelberg East Africa, attached through a law firm, where her brief was to help manage the relationship between the company and its union. She arrived thinking about the work the way a lawyer thinks about it: cases, precedents, outcomes. Within two months, the frame had shifted entirely.
“A lot happens before things go wrong. It’s never a case of waking up one day and finding everything has fallen apart. I became fascinated by understanding how we get to that point and what leads us into situations that eventually become disastrous,” she recalls.
She came to see that by the time a workplace dispute reaches court, the damage has often already been done. What interested her was not how to win a case, but how to prevent the problems that led to it. The answer lay beyond the law, in a field she did not yet have a name for.
“It struck me that the way human relations are handled in the workplace is what creates these problems, and I decided I wanted to understand it better. I Googled my way into the answer.”
She goes on: “Soon, Heidelberg was sold to another institution, the HR manager retired midway through the transition, and I, young and knowing very little about HR, was left to manage the function through a round of redundancies. My legal background helped me navigate the procedures, but everything else was new territory.”
Difficult conversations
The first person Wandera sat down with to deliver a redundancy notice had been with the company for 15 to 20 years. As she explained the situation, the conversation became deeply emotional, and they found themselves crying together. The experience shook her, and when she returned to her managing director, she admitted that she was not sure she could handle the responsibility. He reassured her, telling her that he could not think of anyone better suited to handle such difficult conversations. His words reminded her that, while delivering redundancy notices required strength, it also called for empathy and compassion, qualities that made her the right person for the task.
“I think that was my first lesson in having difficult conversations. People often assume that they have to be argumentative. They don't. Simply because a conversation is calm doesn't mean it's not difficult,” she says.
She sat with more than 50 people through that redundancy and it changed her. When the new group absorbed a handful of Heidelberg staff, Wandera was one of them.
The move to the new company introduced a different kind of challenge. Reporting to a CFO, she was given an office and told to start by organising them, without any further explanation of what that entailed. Unsure of what was expected but without asking for clarification, she returned to her desk, opened a search engine and typed: “How do I organise a company as an HR professional?”
“What I found led me to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), where I found that learning was experiential, practical and grounded in deep research in a way that my master’s degree in HR had not been. Too much of what we teach in our institutions focuses on HR processes and personnel administration. We teach professionals how to run the HR function, but too rarely how to translate that expertise into business solutions. You need to understand the business, identify what it needs and demonstrate how your work creates value,” she says.
Bringing whole self to work
Wandera went on to demonstrate that value across a career spanning consulting, humanitarian sector, development sector, media and finally aviation, and finally, Jambojet. Of particular note was her time with Doctors Without Borders, where she lived in tents at the Dagahaley refugee camp. It was there that she experienced, for the first time, what it meant to work in an environment united by a genuine sense of purpose.
“Through all of it, one conviction stayed constant. I don’t believe people should leave themselves at the door when they come to work. I find that instruction both impractical and counterproductive. If you’ve left yourself at the door, who is at work? It’s very confusing. For you to function well, you have to be there, be present and be in the moment,” she says.
Wandera has been diagnosed with anxiety and major depressive disorder, both of which she manages with medication, therapy and a deep practice of self-awareness. She speaks about her experience openly and without apology, having found that these conditions have made her a more effective leader.
“My mental health condition is one of the reasons I am very strong and grounded in people. The journey, the experiences that I've had, they make it easier for me to relate with people. They have helped me become a better leader, a more empathetic present human being,” she says.
Mental health and leadership
Wandera says her conditions have taught her to recognise the difference between being fully present in a moment and simply occupying a room while her mind is elsewhere. This awareness, she says, has taught her more about what employees need than any module she has studied.
“When I say bring the entire human to work, I actually have a very deep understanding of what that means and how that can be supported, especially because of how I was supported,” she adds.
The other thing that drives Wandera outside her own organisation is a free platform she built during COVID called Conversations With Wandy. She watched employers treat staff badly, unpaid for months, declared redundant without settlement, and traced much of it to ignorance rather than intent.
“Small organisations with no HR capacity were operating without the most basic frameworks. I founded the platform and ran monthly webinars that drew up to 900 participants, and gave away customisable HR manuals, job description guides and toolkits and how to guides, entirely free,” she says.
She had to pause it when she joined Jambojet, but says she intends to resume it soon, possibly as early as next week. For Wandera, the work is inseparable from her belief that HR brings the greatest value when it is present before the problem, not after. For Wandera, the work is inseparable from her belief that HR brings value when it is present before the problem, not after.
“I don't believe in this story where people tell you if HR is not given a seat at the table, bring a chair. You have to bring value. You can bring a chair and the conversation can move to another table. But if you bring value, people are bound to listen,” she says.
Her greatest joy, she says, is running into someone she mentored or taught something small, now a chief people officer somewhere. She does not need a formal role in that outcome to feel its weight.
“My greatest joy is to look and say I used to know that person. I taught that person something,” she says.
