Reabetswe earmarks building the leadership pipeline at all levels as top of her agenda as she takes on the new role.
Renewable energy solutions provider Scatec ASA has appointed Reabetswe (Rea) Motshegare as HR director sub-Saharan Africa.
Rea, who moves from being the people business partner lead at Bridgestone EMEA, says she is looking forward to bringing some fruitful and positive changes to her current role.
“Firstly, Scatec is a leading renewable energy player in Africa (and is present in South America, Europe, and Asia) with undoubtedly some of the best talent in the market. Among some of the key strategies we will focus on, in a market where there is ‘war for talent’, we are intentional on retention of our people, continuing to build an irresistible work experience and culture for our employees. Top of my agenda is building our leadership pipeline at all levels.”
Rea holds a BCom Honours in industrial psychology, HR management and services from the University of Johannesburg, an MBA from the University of Witwatersrand, as well as Leadership Acceleration Programme certification from GIBS.
Stepping stone into HR
Rea started her journey in HR after she received a bursary through JB Marks, which is a trust fund set up by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). She says her career and leadership started as a mentor to over 120 students while she served as a student development pillar head in 2007.
“Being a child of a mineworker and emancipating others who come from backgrounds like mine is my biggest highlight. Being part of the team that opened up an office in Morocco and Angola with Cummins in 2011, successfully turning the Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia business into a profitable business as well as implementing a transformation journey at Growthpoint where I was HR business partner commercial, retail and industrial between 2015 and 2019, as well as successfully achieving B-BBEE level 1 certification with Bridgestone and being certified as a top employer year-on-year with Bridgestone since 2022 to date are some of the key highlights of my career.”
Not luck but hard work
“It’s true that success follows hard workers and I can attest to that,” says Rea confidently. She explains that whilst she was at Growthpoint, she was approached to join Bridgestone by one of the leaders she had worked with at Cummins .
“Hardly two months with Bridgestone, we went into COVID-19 and the lockdown was imposed, which is where my leadership skills were mostly tested. That period tested my resilience, it tested my empathy and most importantly for the first time I could genuinely be vulnerable as a leader. I modelled this behaviour as I saw my leader at the time being vulnerable and this gave me the psychological safety to say ‘It's okay to not be okay.’ I could sum up my time with Bridgestone as the school of learning, as I believe since COVID-19 we all learned something about ourselves we didn’t know. Leadership is a journey, and while I have had a fantastic career path, finding my ‘true north’ and learning from my crucibles as a leader has been challenging, but so rewarding and worth it.”
Intention and professional steps
Speaking on her appointment, Rea says she has always been intentional about looking for opportunities that have an impact on her personal growth, those that allow her to serve others as a leader and have an impact on people's lives.
“Scatec for me meets these aspects and exceeds my expectations when it comes to changing people's lives and enabling economic growth. Scatec has close to 1GW in operation in South Africa, having success in rounds 1, 2, 4, and 5 in the renewable independent power producer programme (REIPPP) of the national procurement of renewable and emergency sources of energy. After connecting the country's first utility scale solar PV plant in 2012, Scatec has cemented itself as a long-term player in the South African market. In sum, we enable businesses (small to large), households and daily economic activities to happen as we provide energy to an ailing grid.”
She adds that the organisation has also had projects in Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, Chad, Cameroon and Egypt to name a few, and that is something that she looked up to.
“The socio-economic benefit of electricity access in Africa – as well as the abundant resources on the continent – means that development of people, economies, and achieving climate ambitions are at the centre of what the organisation does and is about. It is all these aspects that attracted me to Scatec.”
