I’m the general manager for Bayer consumer healthcare in the UK and Ireland. My division includes brands ranging from Berocca and Rennie to the women’s intimate health range Canesten.
I like that our products are genuinely helping people feel better, faster. We’re also helping save the NHS millions by providing products, advice and self-diagnosis tools for people that allow them to care for themselves and save them from visiting a GP until they need their expertise.
I like that my job allows me to build brands and customer relationships, be that through retailers, pharmacists, GPs, nurses or specialists.
As a leader, you’re always outnumbered. The calls on your time from internal demands like email can take over your life if you don’t manage it properly.
My biggest break was that, when I was 11, my grandmother tried to marry me off in our village in Cameroon to a very respectable family.
I explained that I did not want to get married at 11 because I wanted to graduate from university and run a company one day.
She looked at me in the middle of the bush and stared intensely after working hard to arrange such a marriage, and simply said: “Then surround yourself with the best, learn from the best, strive to be the best, and lift as you climb.”
I knew as we walked back to our village that evening, looking at other young women with families, that I had my first big break in life.
It was in my final year at secondary school in America. I knew I wanted to be a general manager of a business and asked one of the professors how to do it.
He said I needed an internship at Procter & Gamble because they’d trained more CEOs than any other company. I said: “how do I get one of those?” and he said I wouldn’t: I was only 16 and they only hire MBAs.
Nothing spurs me more than being told I can’t do something, so I asked every adult I met for a year if they could help, and eventually one said P&G were opening up their intern programme to a few non-MBA students.
I applied and got a P&G internship at 17 and had exceptional mentors. I worked hard to get an invitation back every summer through college, and the experience was so positive I stayed for 18 years. I took my African grandmother’s advice and learned from the best.
Biggest setback, and what did it teach you?
I got a job as Merck’s general manager for Western Europe consumer care and moved my husband and two young kids over here.
But just a few months later the business was sold to Bayer. It felt like being the child of a single parent who suddenly tells you they’re getting married and the wedding’s tomorrow. It was, like: “Who is he? Do I still get to live in the house? Do I get to keep my bedroom?”
Eventually, after being interviewed many, many times, I secured my dream job, which I have now. After sleepless nights of the unknown for myself and my family, it turned out great.
I tell young people all the time: get experience because one day when things get shaken up, and they will, your experience is all you can rely on.
How is your work-life balance?
You have got to accept that there is no balance. I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, and I work eight to 12 hours a day.
I only have a few hours to be with my family and perform all those other roles too. So I found that striving for harmony, not balance, helped me stop feeling guilty.
I focus on trying to make sure everything is working well, and if not, I pause and work it out.
We have childcare and I have taken the lessons from my upbringing and created a supportive “village” around us of fellow parents and friends to help out with things. It really does take a village to raise a family.
What’s helped you most in your career?
So many things! I was born and raised in the US but my dad is African, and every summer when I was growing up, we’d go to my family’s village. It has its own king and a tribe. You had to walk to get water and carry it back on your head. You’d bathe out of a bucket, make your own toys.
Growing up with that, you will rarely hear me complain or think something is impossible: there is always someone who has it worse and I believe anything is possible!
