By Lisa Matomola
For many years, I worked with experienced professionals. I grew used to people who understood what needed to be done, often without much explanation. You could assign a task and there was already a shared understanding of the standard, the urgency and what a finished product should look like.
Then I started my own business and found myself working with graduates and young professionals entering the workplace for the first time.
That transition humbled me.
I remember assigning a task to a team member and getting it back. I looked at it and thought, This is not what I asked for.
I explained what needed to change and sent it back. The second version was better, but still not quite there. By the third round, the thought many managers know well crossed my mind: I could have done this myself in twenty minutes.
And I probably could have.
But what would that have taught the person on the other side? Nothing.
That experience, repeated in different forms over the years, taught me one of my biggest lessons about leadership: developing people sometimes means accepting that the work will take longer.
When you have done something for ten or fifteen years, you forget how much you know. Experienced professionals do many things almost automatically. We know which questions to ask. We spot problems in a report quickly. We hear when an email doesn’t sound right. We understand what a client means even when they haven’t explained themselves properly. We anticipate problems before they happen.
Then a graduate joins your team and takes three hours to do something you can finish in thirty minutes. It is easy to become frustrated.
But our thirty minutes took years to build. I have had to remind myself of that many times.
There was a time when I did not know what I know today. Someone corrected my work. Someone answered my questions. Someone allowed me into rooms where I was still learning. Someone trusted me with an assignment before I had mastered everything.
Someone was patient with me.
Experience has a strange way of making us forget our own beginnings.
Working with young professionals has meant explaining things I never imagined I would need to explain. Why you should not wait until the deadline to say you are struggling. Why you read an email again before pressing send. Why a client’s title matters. Why you check a document before submitting it. Why meeting a deadline is not enough if the quality of the work is poor. Sometimes you explain something today and find yourself explaining it again a few weeks later.
That requires patience. It also requires leaders to distinguish between inexperience and carelessness.
I have patience for someone who is learning. I have patience for mistakes when I can see effort, improvement and feedback being applied. I have patience for the young professional who asks questions because they genuinely want to understand.
Patience, however, should never mean lowering standards.
Being inexperienced does not remove accountability. A graduate can still be punctual, take notes, ask questions, follow instructions and show improvement. Someone may not yet know how to do the work, but their attitude towards learning tells you a lot about the professional they may become.
Running a business makes this harder, because mistakes have consequences. A missed deadline affects a client. Poor communication affects your reputation. A badly prepared document carries your company’s name. Under pressure, the easiest solution is to take the work back and do it yourself.
But there is a danger in becoming the leader who fixes everything. Every time we take work away from someone because we can do it faster, we solve today’s problem and create tomorrow’s. The employee never learns. The manager becomes the bottleneck. And eventually, you build a team that cannot function without you.
So I have had to ask myself a difficult question many times: do I want this person simply to help me get through today’s workload, or do I want to develop a professional who will eventually do this without me?
If the answer is the latter, then I have to teach. I have to review work, give feedback and explain the “why” behind my instructions. And sometimes I have to let someone struggle a little instead of rescuing them immediately.
There is something deeply rewarding about watching that process unfold. You remember the first report that came back covered in corrections, explaining the same concept several times, the first time they sat nervously in a client meeting. Then, months or years later, you watch the same person handle an assignment with confidence.
They don’t call you. They don’t ask you to check every sentence. They simply get on with it.
And you realise: They’ve got it.
That is the return on patience.
It has also changed how I think about the skills conversation in Namibia. Employers often say graduates are not workplace-ready. Job advertisements ask for three, five or even ten years of experience. Organisations understandably want people who can hit the ground running.
But we must also ask: where are experienced Namibian professionals supposed to come from if nobody is prepared to develop inexperienced ones?
Experience does not fall from the sky. Someone has to give a graduate their first job. Someone has to let a young professional prepare their first major report, take them to their first client meeting, and teach the first-time supervisor how to lead people.
And yes, they will make mistakes. That is how experience is created.
If Namibia is serious about closing its skills gaps, organisations cannot only consume experienced talent. We must also produce it.
Looking back, working with graduates and young professionals did not only develop them. It developed me. It forced me to communicate better. It taught me not to assume that people know what I know, and to explain instead of becoming frustrated. It taught me that when an employee doesn’t understand an instruction, I must also ask whether I communicated it clearly.
Most importantly, it taught me that leadership is not always about inheriting a strong team. Sometimes it is about building one.
My responsibility is not to lower the standard because someone is inexperienced. The standard must remain. My responsibility is to give people a fair opportunity, guidance and feedback until they can reach it.
Because if every organisation wants experienced people but nobody is willing to develop inexperienced ones, we will all end up searching for talent that nobody took the time to create.
Lisa Matomola is the Founder and Managing Consultant of HITO HR & Training Consultants and the CEO of the Institute of People Management (IPM) of Namibia.
