How Anu Adasolum is Driving Transformational Agenda in Nigeria’s Energy Sector

Anu Adasolum is a hardcore business executive who is wired to take on bigger challenges, in whatever form they come. Her body of work across various industries, including manufacturing, private equity and real estate, has distinguished her as a transformational leader.

The latest big problem Anu is solving is power failure in Nigeria, the nation’s historic dilemma that has seemingly defied fixing. She’s doing this in her capacity as the Chief Operating Officer of Rensource Distributed Energy Limited, where she is providing day-to-day leadership and empowering the operational team to meet business goals and projections.

In this interview, she tells us more about her childhood and the work she’s doing to foster women’s inclusion in organizational structures.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your career path?

A: I have been working every holiday and sometimes beyond since I was 16 so it is hard to know where exactly to start. A quick summary – I started out in property development and then decided to make a change to general management. I’ve done a bit of manufacturing, management consulting, commercial and sales, and now, general operations and management. Right now, my focus is on working with the best team in the game to solve energy and access problems for Nigerian SMEs.

Q: Tell us about your current role and the most exciting part of your work.

A: I am the Chief Operating Officer at Rensource. It’s mostly about enabling other people and ensuring everything moves together. Of course, it never all moves at quite the same pace, so I spend my time trying to anticipate and remove potential bottlenecks. It really is a design role if you’re doing your job right and prepping the business for scale. The most exciting part? I like the whole thing. We have a great team, and while we haven’t chosen the easiest problems to tackle, it is great seeing it all come together.

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Q: What has been the most career-defining moment that you are proud of?

A: I don’t have a particular moment – I find the most rewarding moments to be watching someone else’s growth. It’s been gratifying to have contributed towards someone else’s development. I’ve found the end to end experience of working with the rest of the team at Rensource, building pioneering cases for off-grid power pretty career-defining.

Q: What challenges have you faced in the workplace, especially your experience in male-dominated environments?

A: I’ve worked in fairly fast-paced, high-performance businesses most of my career so a big challenge has always been finding the right balance between work rate and selfcare. I avoid burning out which is an underrated skill set. The other has been finding ease in direct leadership as a woman. In Nigeria, leadership tends to work differently for women than men. It’s a much more indirect process. That approach doesn’t work in a high growth business, so I had to learn comfort with direct leadership. Even in non-traditional contexts, there are still certain expectations of women – it takes some intentionality to do whatever you have to do to deliver. It took me some time to disregard the expectations and just focus on being the best leader I can be…

Read the complete interview in the Business Elites Africa magazine here: Find it on pages 40 & 41.