Lily Njagi, HR lead for East Africa at Unilever explains what HR owes the people it shows the door has spent her career moving towards things before she had a plan for them. She graduated in social work, moved into media and then HR, transitioning into someone who believes the next level up is teaching.
Lily Njagi, HR lead for East Africa at Unilever has never forgotten what it felt like to be on the other side of the table. She did not arrive in the profession through a graduate scheme or a clear sense of calling. She arrived through a merger, a deadline, and a question she asked herself in December 2011: where can I make the most difference? She chose HR, and has been building the answer to that question ever since.
Lily describes herself as an avid, lifelong learner whose instinct in any situation is to ask what it is trying to teach her. She is also, by her own account, a mobiliser, someone who finds stagnation unnatural and who is happiest when she is initiating something. Those two qualities, the hunger to learn and the drive to move, have shaped a career that has rarely stayed still long enough to become comfortable.
“If there is one thing about me I am an avid learner, as in a lifelong learner. Everything in my day-to-day experiences and interactions with everyone or anything teaches me something, and I am always asking myself what I am picking out of them. Whether it's a success, whether it's a failure, whether it's just a conversation, there is something I'm going to learn out of it,” she says.
Lily studied social work at university, expecting to spend her career at the kind of organisation where ambitious young graduates imagine they will change the world. Her first job was in community outreach, and within weeks she understood it was not right for her. The work required a particular kind of emotional endurance she did not have, and she found herself unable to separate it from the rest of her life.
“I moved into the family business briefly, then into media, where I spent years learning the backend of how broadcast organisations function, sales, agency work, marketing, on-ground activation, traffic management and operations,” she says.
Finding HR
After she returned from her maternity leave, she found her role had been filled, so she moved into the managing director's office and began doing strategic partnering work.. Because the organisation had no HR manager, she also started drafting policy and building structures. One role became two. Over time, the HR work absorbed everything else and when a merger forced her to choose between media operations and HR, she sat with the decision.
“I went and thought about it and I was like, where I could make the most difference, where I could grow and where I could make an impact. So that was December 2011 when I was making the decision,” she adds.
Her first formal HR role was at Mediamax Network as HR and admin deputy manager, and it arrived at a moment of significant organisational upheaval. With this merger, the company had grown from a close-knit team of thirty to forty people to six hundred employees and the culture had not caught up with the headcount. The leadership's strategy for gaining market share was talent, specifically, acquiring the on-air personalities the competition relied on. Lily's job was to get them.
“I spent the first months of that year headhunting. I conducted interviews in cars and signed contracts in restaurants. I hired over two hundred people, negotiating buyouts and navigating the logistical complexity of bringing media personalities across from competitor organisations without being seen to do so,” Lily explains.
It was intensive, unconventional work, and it required every instinct she had developed across years of sales, marketing and operations. Then, in August of the same year, the business decided it had the talent it needed and initiated a large-scale retrenchment. The people Lily had spent months persuading, negotiating with and bringing on board were now in scope for redundancy notices.
“For me the hardest thing was executing a decision that you do not support, you do not understand, and now you are calling the person who you were begging in the parking, in the restaurant, in their house to sign a contract. Now I'm calling to give you a redundancy notice. I will not lie, it was difficult,” she says.
Learning by doing
The question HR leaders rarely ask themselves in those moments is how they want to be treated if the same thing happens to them. Lily did. Her answer shaped how she handled every exit that followed. She had heard of HR managers elsewhere who sent redundancy notices by text message.
“That was the benchmark I worked against. If the hiring process had been done with energy, care and personal attention, the departure deserved the same. I focused on making the exit an experience in which the employee left with their dignity intact, understanding how the decision was reached, what the process involved, and what came next,” she observes.
That principle has stayed with her. For any HR professional who has ever been handed a decision they did not make and asked to carry it, Lily's framework is straightforward: accept the role, focus entirely on the experience you are creating, and measure yourself not against how popular you are but against whether the person in front of you leaves feeling like a human being.
After Media, Lily joined Unilever, coming in through a people experience role in the commercial side, then supply chain, then a global HRBP position
In 2015 she completed a higher diploma in HR and graduated in 2016. In 2017 she completed her CHRPK, then, while the momentum was still running, she started her MSc in management and organisational development in 2019.
One of the highlights Lily returns to from her Unilever years is a flexible project she worked on in 2020 with the Netherlands-based Unilever business unit. They wanted someone from outside their business unit to help them think through the future of work to come in without knowing the constraints, paint outside the lines and produce something they could actually use.
“I was given freedom and I used all of it. There was no AI in 2020 to shape the thinking or compress the options. It was just me, a blank brief and the freedom to go as far as I wanted,” she narrates. “I was put in a room and I was told go wild, paint it, and do whatever you want to do, and I just went wild, and it was incredible, and these people they took it and they ran with it and for them it was a source of happiness because they are also a very forward-thinking organisation.”
The team took the playbook she produced and ran with it. For her, the experience crystallised something she believes about creative HR work, that the most useful thinking sometimes comes from people who do not yet know enough to be cautious.
The woman behind the role
Away from the office, Lily moves between a wide range of things with the same energy she brings to work. She gardens, cooks, goes to the theatre, travels to absorb cultures through their food and reads compulsively, currently working through three books at once, including a volume of fifty compressed titles she reads in the mornings, the Bible, and a book called The Four Agreements, which she picked up for its examination of why people think the way they do.
She is a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend. She describes these roles as offices she holds rather than definitions of who she is. She is direct about the pressure working mothers put on themselves to be everything at once, and more direct still about what she believes the solution is.
“A message for mothers is that we can have it all. When I'm in the office, I wear my hat as an HR manager. When I am at home, I shut off my laptop, I take off my shoes, I am on the ground seated with the children.. But above all, the first person to take care of is Lily,” she says.
As for what comes next, Lily has already decided. She wants to teach HR because she believes teaching is the best way to keep learning, and that a classroom is where she would be most useful to the next generation of people entering a profession that, as she would be the first to say, found her rather than the other way around.
“I am upskilling myself to become an HR professional, getting accredited by the right bodies and building the right networks to gain the skills required. Am I getting the right exposure to head to where I want to be? So, ask me what is next. I think I want to teach. I think that is the next feasible step,” she says.
