Interview With Sandra Ann Baptiste

Mentor Yourself With Sandra Ann Baptiste

Interviewee Name: Sandra Ann Baptiste, Consultant and Trainer 

To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interview, while you are reading it, answer the following questions:

1. Are their similarities between Sandra Ann Baptiste and yourself?
2. In what ways can you use the information?
3. In what ways would you respond differently from the interviewee?
4. What are your five takeaways from the interview?
5. After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  I’m a veteran communicator. I’m a former journalist with many years experience working internationally, including with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Toronto and the Caribbean News Agency based in Barbados. I’m currently a business and communications consultant trainer, and I specialize in business skills training. I’m also still involved in writing. I have a monthly column in Caribbean Perspectives that focuses on issues affecting CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market). I spend a lot of my time working on projects for the Caribbean.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Sandra Ann Baptiste: Living on my computer and my phone. I spend a lot of time on the phone doing marketing calls and following up with clients. I spend a lot of time reading and researching because I have to be up-to-date on a lot of topics, and so a lot of time on the research side on reading. I also do a lot of research for my writing for my column, for training programs that I write, for marketing purposes.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  I always focus on my goals and remind myself that I have a purpose in life. I believe my purpose is to use the skills that God gave me to enrich the lives of people educationally, socially, and economically. I want to give back the skills I have been given to others, so I motivate myself by knowing that whatever I’m focusing on there is a greater good involved in it.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  I’m not sure if I would change anything because I believe that God puts you on a path so that you can learn. Some of the painful or negative experiences were learning experiences. However, I would say that maybe one of things I would change is to not be so much of a perfectionist when I was younger. I was critical of a lot of stuff, and beat myself up too much because I didn’t meet up to certain standards at the time. That I would change!

Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?

Sandra Ann Baptiste: I would say that in the last 12 months I have been focusing a lot on the impact of social media on marketing and business. It’s something that I was not that familiar with, and I have been discovering how important it is to use social media to market, develop and enhance your business.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:

1. Threats to the business would be the economy that everybody is facing globally because training is something that gets put on the back burner when people have limited budgets
2. Political stability in terms of the Caribbean: When you have situations where there may be public demonstrations or fallouts after elections. Things like those could be a threat to your business if you have a contract at the time and you have to shift them. That has happened in the past with Guyana.

I have to take on limited projects so I don’t advertise – I do a lot of word-of-mouth. I am always booked up six months ahead with projects so that’s why I don’t put myself out there because I wouldn’t be able to handle the volume of business. It’s important to service the clientele that you currently have in the best way you can rather than overstretch yourself.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Sandra Ann Baptiste: A lot of the training I do is tailored to the specific needs of the company so it’s not generic. It always focuses on what the challenges the businesses are going through. I always do training needs assessments discussing some of the practical day-to-day issues involved in the business and design the training around that. After, I do a feedback report on training recommending what came out of the training in terms of issues that affect the company, the individuals, and further training or coaching that might be necessary. The training that I do has a lot of practical examples because I’ve had a variety of experiences both as a communicator and consultant, and I’ve worked in many industries – manufacturing, tourism, and services. I use practical examples that people can use to improve and enhance on the job.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Sandra Ann Baptiste: I think the biggest challenge I ever had in my life was setting up the Guyana Office for Investment when the President of Guyana Dr Cheddi Jagan invited me to come back in 1994 in March. I didn’t open the doors to GO-Invest – which is similar to JAMPRO in Jamaica – right away. I got a building, had to paint it, fix it up, hire the staff, train them, and set all the policies in motion. The biggest problem was working with all the agencies that would affect foreign investments -customs people who give permits for land, Tourism, Manufacturing, Mining and Forestry, and getting those people to understand what was needed to attract investors in terms of the timeline to delivering permits and explaining procedures, and then training my staff to deal with all of that, and also sitting down with all the Ministers to ensure that their people were on board. There were a lot of challenges in getting all of that done in an environment were people were not accustomed to working at a pace where the business community expects business to be done.

That was a very big challenge, and in the end we managed to exceed the expectations of World Bank, which had hired me for that project. I was able to get quite a bit done in terms of turning things around, shaping the policies and getting people to respond to the needs of investors and working with all the agencies. What I learned from that is that I took the right approach in asking to be attached to JAMPRO in Jamaica because although I had been trained in investment, I did international relations. I had a grasp of all the issues that were involved by dealing with the business community throughout the Caribbean for years, working with the Chambers of Commerce and the manufacturing association as a writer, and also working with the Caribbean Export in Barbados as a consultant, I felt I needed that extra mentoring and exposure so I went to JAMPRO in Jamaica, which was a tremendous help to me, and eventually went to the Invest in Britain in the UK.

All the time I was in Guyana working on this project, I had to remember why I was there and push on even though there were many times when we were short on budget for basic stuff. And when we were having foreign investment missions coming we had challenges with budgets but we managed to surmount all the difficulties. I also learned that one has to be extremely patient and tolerant in developing countries when you are trying to implement these kinds of changes because the level of skills is not what you’d like it to be, but in the circumstances what I did was beef up the skills by providing training for the staff and getting them upgraded.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Sandra Ann Baptiste: My biggest break was when I joined the Guyana Broadcasting Service (GBS) in 1974. While I was there, I was given the opportunity to cover parliament and CARICOM which are things that women never did in the seventies. I blazed the trail in that regard in Guyana. I went on to become a specialist in Caribbean Affairs. I covered CARICOM from its inception and I got to interview all the Ministers at the CARICOM meetings and that’s how I got my foot into the door in terms of Caribbean Affairs. When I ended up in Barbados, I had that edge as a journalist because I knew all the key players in the Caribbean and in CARICOM.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  I don’t know that I have any major failures that I can put my hands on because the only thing that I wanted to be when I was a young teenager was to become a journalist. I ended up winning all the Caribbean media awards and being at the top of my game in the Caribbean, and becoming a well-recognized specialist at CARICOM, so I don’t have any big failures because that was my major goal.

The only thing I could mention is that I have an interest in starting a Caribbean business magazine, which I looked at over a year ago with a colleague, and we wanted to get it off the ground year before last, but we decided not to go with it because of the economy. We’re going to be relooking at it in terms of launching it in 2012. That was a disappointment. I learned that one has to go with business ventures that make economic sense. Although we were very gung ho about doing this for the Caribbean because there isn’t a proper Caribbean journal out there, the economy at the time would not have supported it.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  It was going back to Guyana to accept the offer from the World Bank to start the Guyana Office for Investment. I had just come to Canada. I had been here less than six months. I came here in 1993 from Barbados where I had lived for 13 years. And you can imagine packing up all your stuff and coming to Toronto and having a very senior and secure position at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to have to give that up out of the blue and go all the way back to the Caribbean was a big decision for me because I had come to Canada to start a new life, settle down and find someone to share my life with.

I had to give that up because I had a commitment to the President of Guyana, Dr Cheddi Jagan, who I had known since a teenager, his wife who is like a mother figure to me. When they asked me to come back and be a part of that new adventure of having a country that was now going to start out on free and fair elections, it was wonderful opportunity and an honour for me. That was a very big decision to make, and I had to decide whether I wanted to have a new life in Canada or go back to Guyana. I have never regretted it because that was such a major learning experience for me that when I left GO-Invest and returned to Canada, I was asked by the current President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo (at the time he was the senior Minister of Finance) to go back and work with him for two years. I worked very closely with him as an advisor on investment and private sector development, which also had a major impact on my life and allowed me to work with the business community in Guyana to help shape government policy on business development and also to work with the business community to advance their economic interest.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:

1. My exposure at an early age to media and being allowed to cover CARICOM. Having senior journalists around like Rickey Singh, who I consider to be a mentor, and a senior journalist at the Guyana Graphic when I joined the newspaper at 17 years old.
2. Leaving Guyana unexpectedly in the middle of the night – because of threats from a dictator, Mr Forbes Burnham – to flee to Barbados, and this was after the assassination of Walter Rodney, when many of us were threatened about covering the funeral and so forth. Those of us who did the right thing to make sure the funeral was covered were subject to threats. I ended up in Barbados and never expected to be there to stay. I was on my way to Canada and would have had to claim political asylum, but I ended up being offered the job of senior reporter at the brand new first privately owned radio station in Barbados called the Voice of Barbados in July 1980. That shaped my life because I took a new direction, and it ended up being a turning point in me becoming a recognized specialist on Caribbean Affairs and working with the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation as an assistant news editor, working as a senior Journalist for a Caribbean news agency and ultimately for five years as a specialist in the Caribbean for the BBC. During that time, I ended up going to the University of the West Indies in Trinidad to do a Diploma in International Relations. I did a diploma and Masters in the UK. That stint in Barbados shaped my life, and allowed me to become a well-recognized specialist in Caribbean Affairs. I have covered every Heads of Government for over 20 years, and every Trade and Finance Minister meetings of CARICOM.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  Setting up the investment agency for Guyana. It’s not something you would have expected a woman to be doing at that time, and therefore to have that, and working with the entire Cabinet of Guyana, and being asked by the President of Guyana to come back to do that I think was the biggest honour I ever had. I ended up working with three presidents of Guyana – Dr Cheddi Jagan, his wife Janet Jagan when she took over, and Bharrat Jagdeo who is now the president but I worked with him when he was Minister of Finance.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  William Demas who was the first CARICOM Secretary General and the President of the Caribbean Development Bank was my mentor. For most of my career, he was the one who encouraged me from the time I was a teenager to get involved in covering CARICOM. He used to send me books and talk to me at length when he became President of the Caribbean Development Bank. And when I moved to Barbados, the mentorship continued and he was one of the people who guided me and had a big effect on my life.

The other person is Dr. Vishnu Persaud who is based in the UK and is with the Commonwealth Secretariat. He was a senior economic advisor at the Commonwealth Secretariat and he also helped to shape my life and interest in global affairs because I covered a lot of international meetings affecting the Caribbean and covered many Commonwealth Heads of Government and Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ meetings so in terms of understanding the global issues, Vishnu Persaud and William Demas are the two people who helped as mentors throughout my career.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Sandra Ann Baptiste: The core message was that I should continue to do the kind of detailed research that I was doing, and focus my interest on global affairs as they affect the Caribbean because there weren’t many people doing it. Most journalists in the Caribbean were national journalists covering their own national events. Even when they went to international meetings they covered their own prime ministers. My focus was always on covering the Caribbean and their message to me was to continue to focus on the Caribbean – continue when you go to the global meetings to speak to the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados and cover the regional perspective as opposed to a national perspective. The work I was doing by focusing on CARICOM and not on any individual country was the message that I got, that’s why I have continued to be a specialist in Caribbean Affairs.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Sandra Ann Baptiste:  Have integrity and be qualified in what you do because you can’t shape people’s lives, you can’t be respected if you don’t have integrity. And if you’re mentoring people, you have to be an expert in the area. Although I had so much experience as a journalist, I eventually made sure that I went and studied international relations. I went and got my Masters with distinction from the UK because I wanted to have the professional experience and qualification so that if I’m mentoring anybody it’s not just me having experience, I know what the standards are globally.

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