UK 
United States
Big Interview | Louise Atkinson, Chief People Officer, Babcock International - Meet the CPO with no HR experience
Becoming Chief People Officer is usually preceded by climbing up the HR ranks but Louise Atkinson spent...
Tamera Campbell
Chief People Officer, Gong cha Global
Tamera Campbell, former CPO Of Nando's explains the lure of the bubble tea business she now works for which promises each new entrant their 'best first job'...
Tamera Campbell
Chief People Officer, Gong cha Global
Tamera Campbell, former CPO Of Nando's explains the lure of the bubble tea business she now works for which promises each new entrant their 'best first job'...
Thirty years after her first people job as a new graduate, Tamera Campbell has built a CV that covers four continents and five massively different sectors – heavy industry, hospitals, consulting, philanthropy, and hospitality. In every job she’s had she has carried the lessons she learned in her first: that the men and women who come through the door to put food on their table and a roof over their family’s heads are people, and not resources, and that without them no business can thrive.
In her current role as Chief People Officer at Gong cha Global, her mission is to make sure that every one of the 12,000 or so employees that work at Gong cha have their ‘best first job’ and that coming to work can be the start of a career, rather than just a wage.
Gong cha was founded in Taiwan 16 years ago and from a single store in Taipei it has grown into a global bubble tea phenomenon, with close to 2,200 stores across 28 countries. Having captured the imagination of a large private equity firm in 2019 it is now headquartered in London. We meet on a cold November day and as the weather begins to bite, she explains to me that Gong cha’s success is based on its philosophy about ‘the theatre of tea’. I’m more of an English breakfast cuppa kind of a girl but Campbell persuades me that there is so much more to tea than my regular brew.
‘I entered the world of people management at an exciting time’
Campbell spent her early years in Zimbabwe and Northern Ireland and her teens in South Africa. She holds an MBA from the Wits Business School in South Africa. Her career began at a British business based in Johannesburg in 1995. “It was an amazing time to be in people management in South Africa because it was the year after the country’s first democratic election in 1994. As a people practitioner everything was changing. Democracy ushered in a new progressive era of labour and workplace rights that had been brutally suppressed under apartheid,” she recalls.
With racial discrimination rife there was also a fundamental lack of investment in skills and talent development. “I entered the world of people management at an exciting time,” she says.
She spent the following four years working predominantly in labour relations and with trade unions, which by now were operating feely, in the oil and gas and hospital sectors. “We worked on collective bargaining rights and growing talent through the business,” she says.
In 1999 she was approached by a friend who was starting a public and private sector people-focused management consultancy business, The Resolve Group. The next 12 years were, ‘amazing’ – a perhaps underwhelming adjective given that her work was helping to shape the South African state. She was one of the first joiners, then took up the role of Managing Director of its largest division and was Chief Operations Officer of the Group when she moved on. The business was eventually sold to Ernst & Young.
Her time in consulting was, in Campbell’s words ‘life changing’ but after so long, and now with two young children (and five stepchildren), she decided it was time to make a change and tackle the next challenge.
The next step was to join Yellowwoods Ventures Investments in 2011. Yellowwoods is a family trust that owns Nando’s, whose inclusive and social investment strategy includes supporting a generation of young South Africans. “Yellowwoods focuses on several projects from early childhood development projects, primary school outcomes, school feeding programmes, financial inclusion and education to employment initiatives,” she explains. She joined Yellowwoods’ offshoot Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator as founding chief executive. Harambee aimed to bridge the divide between education and employment in South Africa where the unemployment rate amongst 18 to 25 year olds is over 60%. This primarily affects young black people who, decades after democracy, remain the biggest victims of apartheid’s continued legacy.
She led Harambee for the next five years. Over that time Harambee grew into a combination of ‘a dating agency and a finishing school’ for young people finding multiple pathways into formal employment. She focused on partnerships with the private sector for entry level jobs and securing funding for scaling and broadening into new sectors. Harambee built several bridging programmes to ready school leavers to take up and remain in these roles. During her time, Harambee placed 10,000 young people per year into full-time entry level roles across six sectors and raised long term funding with the South African Jobs Fund, the Mastercard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and JP Morgan Foundation.
While South African projects continued, life took hold in the way that it does, and Campbell’s broader family relocated to the United Kingdom.
Most people would up sticks and declare themselves out of their current job but not Campbell - she flirted with the idea of a ‘commute’ and then did so. “The work was exciting, it was the same time zone broadly and north-south is far easier than travelling east to west,” she says nonchalantly. She decided to eventually move on when she was offered a role at Nando’s and by then had trained up her successor and felt it was a good time to hand over.
