She spent 17 years, 1983–2000, at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Belk College of Business Administration, rising through the academic ranks to Full Professor.
Stella Nkomo
Featured Leadership Topics
Influences and Impacts
“I thought, ‘I need a way to capture the lived experience and what is it like to be a black woman manager in a very white-dominant company?’”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: Okay. So, what we’re going to do, and I say this for the sake of anyone using this and trying to work their way through the interview, I’m going to begin by asking you several big picture questions in order to get the conversation going. Then when we’re done with that, I’m going to ask you about your childhood and get some basic demographic information on the record. Then we’ll talk about your youth and young adulthood, questions aimed at providing users of the interview with an answer to the big picture question, “Who is Stella Nkomo?” When we’re done with those questions, we’re going to work our way more or less chronologically through your career with a lot of discussion about leadership. So, let’s get started. Again, with big picture questions, the thing that occurred to me as I read all the information on you was how did you get interested in studying leaders and leadership?
Nkomo: Oh.
Scarpino: Where did that come from?
Nkomo: Where did that come from? Okay. That’s a good question. I think it probably came from my orientation about making things better. I remember one incident, although you haven’t asked about my childhood, but I remember one incident that I still remember that happened to me as a young woman. I think I would’ve been about maybe 14 or 15 and we lived in the Bronx. My mother wanted us to attend church, and we normally would have attended a Baptist church, but that was in Harlem and we lived up in the Bronx, so my mother sent us to the local Lutheran church. There was a young white pastor there and he would come and visit where we lived, which was the projects where we lived. And my mother said, “Okay, I’ll send my children there.” So I started going to church to this Lutheran church which was primarily white Lutherans, many of them from Germany and Europe, and got very involved with the church and really admired the minister, who I saw as a very good leader in reaching out. But then something bad happened. It was a time that the Civil Rights Movement was going on. At one church sermon, he spoke about the need for the church to support the Civil Rights Movement, and the church leadership turned on him. They said that there’s no room in this church for politics and they actually eventually forced him out. And I thought, “What is this about leadership? I thought this was what a leader does, you know.” So I started thinking about leadership and how leadership could make a difference but, of course, at that point, I didn’t have any idea of research about it or getting involved with it, but I just remember thinking, “Isn’t this what a leader does?” A leader tries to make things better for people and I saw him as trying to reach out to the poor black community which we were part of, and clearly the church was mostly middle class people, but they kind of put a stop on that. So I just remember, I still remember that incident even though I’m 70 years old. I can still see his face. I remember his name, Pastor Nester. (laughing) So that was just a moment, but in terms of formal interest, it was probably more at the time of my Ph.D. to study it and to understand it and particularly what were the challenges of people who didn’t fit the so-called leadership mold or image? What was it like for them to be a leader?
Scarpino: I want to pick up with a question there related to something I read about you. It touches on something that you’ve already said, but when you were in high school, you mentioned that your family had attended, or your mother had her children go to a mostly white church and you did. You mentioned some difficulties between the congregation and the pastor, who you admired. But one of the things that I read was that there was a situation where the pastor and some members of the congregation wanted to authorize a church bus to take members of the congregation…
Nkomo: That’s right.
Scarpino: …to see Martin Luther King, the 1963 March on Washington, I assume.
Nkomo: It was mostly the black members.
Scarpino: And the congregation – the white members said, “No, we don’t want to do this.”
Nkomo: Yeah. Exactly. It’s related to all of that, yes.
Scarpino: So, I have two questions. One is, did you go to the March on Washington?
Nkomo: No, I didn’t go. My mother didn’t let me go, but my oldest sister went. So in the church, we were there. We were mostly the black people. There with a couple of other black people. My oldest sister, Mamie, she did go. I did not make it to the March on Washington. I watched it on television.
Scarpino: So…
Nkomo: So it was more like the black members of the church with the support of the pastor who wanted to go.
Scarpino: What was the outcome of that? Because you resisted, right? You stood up…
Nkomo: We resisted and what happened – my mother said, “You can’t do that.” But we did it. We didn’t actually – well, we told my mother we were going to do it. And what we did following that decision when they didn’t authorize the bus and didn’t really want the Bethlehem Lutheran Church associated with this event, we picketed the church.
Scarpino: Oh my goodness. Signs and everything?
Nkomo: We made signs. We made signs and stood in front of the church and said, “Bethlehem Lutheran Church is a racist church.”
Scarpino: Oh my! (laughing)
Nkomo: There were about five of us, including me – I think I was about 15 or 16 -- standing there with these placards. And when those people came that morning, Phil, the hatred – they were so angry at us, it was palpable. And after that day, I never went back to the church again. They were very angry with us. It kind of turned my taste off for religion because I saw that profound hypocrisy and also the fact that Martin Luther King was a minister himself, he was a man of God. So, I didn’t quite understand it and I couldn’t – I just lost faith in religion. I lost faith in the people who would come every Sunday. They were devout Lutherans and they hated us. I remember we went home and we were kind of crying, upset with my mother, and my mother said, “That’s their church. It wasn’t your church. Of course they’re going to be upset with you.” In a kind of sense, like, yeah, well you should have expected that when you decided to do that. I think it kind of triggered in me the importance of standing up for what you believe in but, I tell you, it really soured me towards religion because I couldn’t – people know me like that -- I cannot take hypocrisy very well. If you’re saying this and you’re doing that, that’s a deal-breaker for me. It’s a deal-breaker for me.
Scarpino: It does raise some interesting issues, doesn’t it? About what does it mean to be a religious person?
Nkomo: Exactly. It raised it for me – and the contradiction and the whole, you know, this is about social justice, so it kind of just opened my eyes to a lot of things about honesty and standing up for what you believe in and also in the sense that I had an idealistic view that people who…
Scarpino: Fifteen-year-olds should have an idealistic view. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, well, that people who are religious and God-fearing would do the right thing all the time. So that was a little bit disserting – kind of upsetting that, you know, I would have expected it from maybe some stereotypical guy down in Alabama, saying, “Don’t go there.” But here people in the northeast, you think you’re living in New York, kind of a progressive area. But I could distinguish – and I really felt bad for the minister because he really was doing the right thing. But they also punished him.
Scarpino: It cost him his job.
Nkomo: Yeah. Cost him his job. So that was – so I’m – people like that. People know, like, I do have a high tolerance but when I see hypocrisy or injustice, I will speak up.
Scarpino: I read an interesting piece that I think you sent to me but I’d also read. Just sort of play off some of the things that we’ve talked about. The piece is titled “Postcards from the Borderlands: Building a Career from the Outside/Within” and you coauthored that with Ella Edmondson Bell, published in 1999 in The Journal of Career Development. I had it, but you also sent it to me which caused me to believe that you believed it said something important about you. You sent me two articles and that was one of them. In this article, you wrote, and I’ll read it for the benefit of anybody using this, you said, “Building careers in the perilous space between the multiple demands of two cultures. As black women scholars, we function within an outside white academia. Our visibility and minority status are inseparable, ever present, always apparent. At the same time, our status as academics makes us at times strangers in our own ethnic community, a community we want to uplift. We end up doing our work from the borderlands, belonging and feeling a part of two worlds, yet never at home in either.” By the time I read this, I had done a lot of background reading on you on your life and your career. And, for me, it was like the final turn on an old 35 mm camera that brought the image into focus. I want to talk more about some of these ideas here in a few minutes, but in seeking to understand your life and career, it seems to me that the idea of borders and maybe refusing to accept the limits of borders imposed by others is really a reasonable way to look at your entire life and your entire career.
Nkomo: I think so, and crossing borders because -- I told somebody, here’s the simple story for me. So my parents came from the south. If you met my parents, very much southerners, so we ate southern food. Very close-knit family, kind of protected because the streets were not great, and then kind of staying in a very nuclear situation. Then you think that your world, Phil – I had no idea of life much outside of the projects because when you live in a – maybe you know this, even from your own experiences – when you live in the projects, the projects are low income housing. They have their own culture, their own ways of doing things and so you think that’s your world. I used to think that was the world. I mean, maybe we went to Manhattan a couple of times as children, but we would go to 114th Street and Park Avenue because they had cheap shops there. My mother would go there at Christmastime to buy us clothes, but I had no idea of the corporate world, five-star hotels, hadn’t been on an airplane, so your world looks like this. Then you start going out, like I said, going to James Monroe High School and here’s these Jewish kids, not that they were wealthy wealthy, but compared to us, they’d had a lot of experiences that I hadn’t had and sometimes they would talk about things and I really couldn’t connect. And the other thing, because we were so poor, I told somebody, I didn’t realize that spaghetti was eaten with a red sauce (laughing) until I started working down it the bank and the tellers and I, on a Friday night -- which my father did allow -- on Friday night I could go with the girlfriends from the bank. We’d go out and have a dinner and I went to Mama Leone’s Restaurant (laughing). And there – I’m like, “Okay,” because my mother – it was a way to stretch food. So she’d buy spaghetti towards the end of the week because my father got paid weekly. So normally about Wednesday or Thursday, it’s getting a little shaky and she would buy spaghetti and then buy margarine and melt it. So we would eat spaghetti with margarine because it filled us up, ten kids.
Scarpino: It was a way to fill up all those kids (laughing).
Nkomo: To fill up the kids. But the thing my mother and father taught us was experiencing. My mother used to give us – now when I think about it, I think it was not politically correct advice – she would say, “What are those white kids doing? That’s what you should be doing if you want to get a good education.” She would always say, “What are they doing? What are they talking about? Where are they going?” She kind of taught us to impose yourself and don’t hold back.
Scarpino: That part was pretty good advice (laughing).
Nkomo: It was good advice. I mean, it’s sort of like acculturation. She would say, “Okay, acculturate.” So if the girls – she would say, “If they invite you, you should go.” And that’s how I met a couple of my very good friends in high school, nice young ladies who said, “Oh, you know, let’s study together. You can come to my house and before you go home, let’s study together for the test.” So that’s how I made some friends. Then I would see their house and they’d have stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, this is interesting. I’d like to have this.” So it’s about broadening one’s horizons. I always tell young people that in South Africa, “Where you are in that shanty, that’s not the world. There’s a lot out there, kiddo, and the sooner you can see that, the broader sense you will have.” So that kind of helped me and that’s always been my strategy. So even when I got to South Africa, like, I was really afraid. I told people I was over 50 when I went to South Africa but I was petrified in a sense of, okay, this is going to be another border crossing, using your phrasing. Will I be able to do it? I wasn’t quite sure if I would be able to make a contribution there. Here I’m coming from a totally different environment. So, yeah, so I think that’s right, but I think that the thing that I did learn is cross the border. So when kids – like at the bank, I know my mother said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Oh, some of the girls – they said we should go to Bear Mountain. They’re going to go skiing.” My mother said, “Skiing? Like I’ve seen on television? Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah I just want to see what it is.” So I went on ski trips. (laughing)
Scarpino: (Laughing) Good for you. That must have been kind of scary to get up on that.
Nkomo: It was scary but every time you went, you kind of said, “Oh, wow, there’s more out here. There’s more out here.” And that’s how I decided to go eventually to get my college education, which my counselor had told me I couldn’t. Because I was in the bank, I was a secretary, I had a very nice boss, Mr. Elder, very nice man. But if you work as a secretary in a bank, there’s not a lot of challenge there, I can tell you that, because it was the same old stuff where, you know, these letters you write are pretty standard. I could type, I could do shorthand. The customers – you knew the customers. I got to the point I was memorizing account numbers. So if you walked in, I would say, “Oh, Mr. Scarpino. Okay, fine.” And you would say, “Help me with this.” I’d be like “Okay, I’ve got your number, I know it,” and I would help. Or, “You want to see Mr. Elder? Okay, I’ll make sure you see him.” My boss got to the point, he said, “You know that letter. I don’t need to dictate it to you, Stella.” And I thought, “Maybe I should be doing more.” But the thing that made me do more was I would see these young white guys come into the bank and they were sent around to branches, so they were typically people who had either gotten a B degree in business or MBA. And they would send them to the branches and they’d be there like three weeks and they would learn what a branch does. Not that they were going to stay there, they were going to go to the corporate office. But this was for them to learn, how does a branch operate? And they’d ask me questions like “How does this work? What do you do with this? How do you handle this?” “Talk to my boss.” So finally, I went to my boss one day and I said to him, “You know, these guys ask me a lot of silly questions but they’re going to be big-time – they’re going to be like you. How do I become like you?” And he said, “Are you really interested?” I said, “I want to know. How do you do this?” That’s the other thing. I couldn’t ask my father. He’d never done it. And he said, “Well, Stella, you’re going to have to first get a college degree and then you can think about getting an MBA.” That was the first I’d heard of an MBA. I didn’t really know that. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” So I started going to school at night.
Scarpino: Where did you go?
Nkomo: I went to Bronx Community College because I’d done that commercial track, so I didn’t have the sciences and the math. So I went to Bronx Community College for two years at night to get the college prep courses, then I took the SAT and I was going to go to City University. I was going to stay in the city. I was still living at home. I was going to go to City University of New York, which is a very good school. But I was in – one of the people tutoring us – all of us who were trying to make the transition back into university and, God bless New York State, they had a very good programs for you – one of the teachers was a young woman, a young white woman, very nice. She was helping us with one of the classes, I can’t remember – she was a tutor. They gave us free tutoring and I would go to the tutoring.
Scarpino: I think it was Sociology.
Nkomo: Sociology. Thank you.
Scarpino: I just read it two days ago. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, that’s right. So, yes. So I had taken a Sociology class and, yeah, I remember her. I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. She had blonde hair. She was a doctoral student and this was how she earned some money, by teaching us sociology. I don’t know if she took an interest in me or I was asking her questions. So I was like, “Oh, doctoral. What are you doing with that?” And so she told me about it, but I didn’t think about a Ph.D. then. But she said to me, “There’s a small college in Rode Island and they’re looking for African American students. I think you ought to look at that because they have scholarships and you could go to school free.” And then I was like, “Oh, that means I would have to quit my job, leave New York.” But I did go and talk to them at Bryant University and they said, “We can admit you.” And I got my undergraduate education with a scholarship. So I left New York and went to Rhode Island – Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Scarpino: That’s one of the questions I was going to ask you. How in the world did you get from the South Bronx to Smithfield, Rhode Island?
Nkomo: That’s how. Because of that opportunity. And that’s the only thing I tell young people, “When a door opens, be brave enough to go through it.” I mean, it was sort of like leaving the family, leaving – I was still living at home/ And I said, “You know what? I’m going to go.” And I went there and it was out in the boondocks and it was Bryant College which was started by the Tupperware family. It’s a private university (laughing), I didn’t know any of that. Handful of black students. I could see why they wanted black students. I went there and I thought I wanted to be a teacher, so I studied Business Education in Rhode Island. Now it’s Bryant University.
Understand Leadership
“I define leadership as helping people to realize a goal and that the leader provides guidance and support structures.”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: Okay. So, what we’re going to do, and I say this for the sake of anyone using this and trying to work their way through the interview, I’m going to begin by asking you several big picture questions in order to get the conversation going. Then when we’re done with that, I’m going to ask you about your childhood and get some basic demographic information on the record. Then we’ll talk about your youth and young adulthood, questions aimed at providing users of the interview with an answer to the big picture question, “Who is Stella Nkomo?” When we’re done with those questions, we’re going to work our way more or less chronologically through your career with a lot of discussion about leadership. So, let’s get started. Again, with big picture questions, the thing that occurred to me as I read all the information on you was how did you get interested in studying leaders and leadership?
Nkomo: Oh.
Scarpino: Where did that come from?
Nkomo: Where did that come from? Okay. That’s a good question. I think it probably came from my orientation about making things better. I remember one incident, although you haven’t asked about my childhood, but I remember one incident that I still remember that happened to me as a young woman. I think I would’ve been about maybe 14 or 15 and we lived in the Bronx. My mother wanted us to attend church, and we normally would have attended a Baptist church, but that was in Harlem and we lived up in the Bronx, so my mother sent us to the local Lutheran church. There was a young white pastor there and he would come and visit where we lived, which was the projects where we lived. And my mother said, “Okay, I’ll send my children there.” So I started going to church to this Lutheran church which was primarily white Lutherans, many of them from Germany and Europe, and got very involved with the church and really admired the minister, who I saw as a very good leader in reaching out. But then something bad happened. It was a time that the Civil Rights Movement was going on. At one church sermon, he spoke about the need for the church to support the Civil Rights Movement, and the church leadership turned on him. They said that there’s no room in this church for politics and they actually eventually forced him out. And I thought, “What is this about leadership? I thought this was what a leader does, you know.” So I started thinking about leadership and how leadership could make a difference but, of course, at that point, I didn’t have any idea of research about it or getting involved with it, but I just remember thinking, “Isn’t this what a leader does?” A leader tries to make things better for people and I saw him as trying to reach out to the poor black community which we were part of, and clearly the church was mostly middle class people, but they kind of put a stop on that. So I just remember, I still remember that incident even though I’m 70 years old. I can still see his face. I remember his name, Pastor Nester. (laughing) So that was just a moment, but in terms of formal interest, it was probably more at the time of my Ph.D. to study it and to understand it and particularly what were the challenges of people who didn’t fit the so-called leadership mold or image? What was it like for them to be a leader?
Scarpino: I want to pick up with a question there related to something I read about you. It touches on something that you’ve already said, but when you were in high school, you mentioned that your family had attended, or your mother had her children go to a mostly white church and you did. You mentioned some difficulties between the congregation and the pastor, who you admired. But one of the things that I read was that there was a situation where the pastor and some members of the congregation wanted to authorize a church bus to take members of the congregation…
Nkomo: That’s right.
Scarpino: …to see Martin Luther King, the 1963 March on Washington, I assume.
Nkomo: It was mostly the black members.
Scarpino: And the congregation – the white members said, “No, we don’t want to do this.”
Nkomo: Yeah. Exactly. It’s related to all of that, yes.
Scarpino: So, I have two questions. One is, did you go to the March on Washington?
Nkomo: No, I didn’t go. My mother didn’t let me go, but my oldest sister went. So in the church, we were there. We were mostly the black people. There with a couple of other black people. My oldest sister, Mamie, she did go. I did not make it to the March on Washington. I watched it on television.
Scarpino: So…
Nkomo: So it was more like the black members of the church with the support of the pastor who wanted to go.
Scarpino: What was the outcome of that? Because you resisted, right? You stood up…
Nkomo: We resisted and what happened – my mother said, “You can’t do that.” But we did it. We didn’t actually – well, we told my mother we were going to do it. And what we did following that decision when they didn’t authorize the bus and didn’t really want the Bethlehem Lutheran Church associated with this event, we picketed the church.
Scarpino: Oh my goodness. Signs and everything?
Nkomo: We made signs. We made signs and stood in front of the church and said, “Bethlehem Lutheran Church is a racist church.”
Scarpino: Oh my! (laughing)
Nkomo: There were about five of us, including me – I think I was about 15 or 16 -- standing there with these placards. And when those people came that morning, Phil, the hatred – they were so angry at us, it was palpable. And after that day, I never went back to the church again. They were very angry with us. It kind of turned my taste off for religion because I saw that profound hypocrisy and also the fact that Martin Luther King was a minister himself, he was a man of God. So, I didn’t quite understand it and I couldn’t – I just lost faith in religion. I lost faith in the people who would come every Sunday. They were devout Lutherans and they hated us. I remember we went home and we were kind of crying, upset with my mother, and my mother said, “That’s their church. It wasn’t your church. Of course they’re going to be upset with you.” In a kind of sense, like, yeah, well you should have expected that when you decided to do that. I think it kind of triggered in me the importance of standing up for what you believe in but, I tell you, it really soured me towards religion because I couldn’t – people know me like that -- I cannot take hypocrisy very well. If you’re saying this and you’re doing that, that’s a deal-breaker for me. It’s a deal-breaker for me.
Scarpino: It does raise some interesting issues, doesn’t it? About what does it mean to be a religious person?
Nkomo: Exactly. It raised it for me – and the contradiction and the whole, you know, this is about social justice, so it kind of just opened my eyes to a lot of things about honesty and standing up for what you believe in and also in the sense that I had an idealistic view that people who…
Scarpino: Fifteen-year-olds should have an idealistic view. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, well, that people who are religious and God-fearing would do the right thing all the time. So that was a little bit disserting – kind of upsetting that, you know, I would have expected it from maybe some stereotypical guy down in Alabama, saying, “Don’t go there.” But here people in the northeast, you think you’re living in New York, kind of a progressive area. But I could distinguish – and I really felt bad for the minister because he really was doing the right thing. But they also punished him.
Scarpino: It cost him his job.
Nkomo: Yeah. Cost him his job. So that was – so I’m – people like that. People know, like, I do have a high tolerance but when I see hypocrisy or injustice, I will speak up.
Scarpino: I read an interesting piece that I think you sent to me but I’d also read. Just sort of play off some of the things that we’ve talked about. The piece is titled “Postcards from the Borderlands: Building a Career from the Outside/Within” and you coauthored that with Ella Edmondson Bell, published in 1999 in The Journal of Career Development. I had it, but you also sent it to me which caused me to believe that you believed it said something important about you. You sent me two articles and that was one of them. In this article, you wrote, and I’ll read it for the benefit of anybody using this, you said, “Building careers in the perilous space between the multiple demands of two cultures. As black women scholars, we function within an outside white academia. Our visibility and minority status are inseparable, ever present, always apparent. At the same time, our status as academics makes us at times strangers in our own ethnic community, a community we want to uplift. We end up doing our work from the borderlands, belonging and feeling a part of two worlds, yet never at home in either.” By the time I read this, I had done a lot of background reading on you on your life and your career. And, for me, it was like the final turn on an old 35 mm camera that brought the image into focus. I want to talk more about some of these ideas here in a few minutes, but in seeking to understand your life and career, it seems to me that the idea of borders and maybe refusing to accept the limits of borders imposed by others is really a reasonable way to look at your entire life and your entire career.
Nkomo: I think so, and crossing borders because -- I told somebody, here’s the simple story for me. So my parents came from the south. If you met my parents, very much southerners, so we ate southern food. Very close-knit family, kind of protected because the streets were not great, and then kind of staying in a very nuclear situation. Then you think that your world, Phil – I had no idea of life much outside of the projects because when you live in a – maybe you know this, even from your own experiences – when you live in the projects, the projects are low income housing. They have their own culture, their own ways of doing things and so you think that’s your world. I used to think that was the world. I mean, maybe we went to Manhattan a couple of times as children, but we would go to 114th Street and Park Avenue because they had cheap shops there. My mother would go there at Christmastime to buy us clothes, but I had no idea of the corporate world, five-star hotels, hadn’t been on an airplane, so your world looks like this. Then you start going out, like I said, going to James Monroe High School and here’s these Jewish kids, not that they were wealthy wealthy, but compared to us, they’d had a lot of experiences that I hadn’t had and sometimes they would talk about things and I really couldn’t connect. And the other thing, because we were so poor, I told somebody, I didn’t realize that spaghetti was eaten with a red sauce (laughing) until I started working down it the bank and the tellers and I, on a Friday night -- which my father did allow -- on Friday night I could go with the girlfriends from the bank. We’d go out and have a dinner and I went to Mama Leone’s Restaurant (laughing). And there – I’m like, “Okay,” because my mother – it was a way to stretch food. So she’d buy spaghetti towards the end of the week because my father got paid weekly. So normally about Wednesday or Thursday, it’s getting a little shaky and she would buy spaghetti and then buy margarine and melt it. So we would eat spaghetti with margarine because it filled us up, ten kids.
Scarpino: It was a way to fill up all those kids (laughing).
Nkomo: To fill up the kids. But the thing my mother and father taught us was experiencing. My mother used to give us – now when I think about it, I think it was not politically correct advice – she would say, “What are those white kids doing? That’s what you should be doing if you want to get a good education.” She would always say, “What are they doing? What are they talking about? Where are they going?” She kind of taught us to impose yourself and don’t hold back.
Scarpino: That part was pretty good advice (laughing).
Nkomo: It was good advice. I mean, it’s sort of like acculturation. She would say, “Okay, acculturate.” So if the girls – she would say, “If they invite you, you should go.” And that’s how I met a couple of my very good friends in high school, nice young ladies who said, “Oh, you know, let’s study together. You can come to my house and before you go home, let’s study together for the test.” So that’s how I made some friends. Then I would see their house and they’d have stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, this is interesting. I’d like to have this.” So it’s about broadening one’s horizons. I always tell young people that in South Africa, “Where you are in that shanty, that’s not the world. There’s a lot out there, kiddo, and the sooner you can see that, the broader sense you will have.” So that kind of helped me and that’s always been my strategy. So even when I got to South Africa, like, I was really afraid. I told people I was over 50 when I went to South Africa but I was petrified in a sense of, okay, this is going to be another border crossing, using your phrasing. Will I be able to do it? I wasn’t quite sure if I would be able to make a contribution there. Here I’m coming from a totally different environment. So, yeah, so I think that’s right, but I think that the thing that I did learn is cross the border. So when kids – like at the bank, I know my mother said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Oh, some of the girls – they said we should go to Bear Mountain. They’re going to go skiing.” My mother said, “Skiing? Like I’ve seen on television? Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah I just want to see what it is.” So I went on ski trips. (laughing)
Scarpino: (Laughing) Good for you. That must have been kind of scary to get up on that.
Nkomo: It was scary but every time you went, you kind of said, “Oh, wow, there’s more out here. There’s more out here.” And that’s how I decided to go eventually to get my college education, which my counselor had told me I couldn’t. Because I was in the bank, I was a secretary, I had a very nice boss, Mr. Elder, very nice man. But if you work as a secretary in a bank, there’s not a lot of challenge there, I can tell you that, because it was the same old stuff where, you know, these letters you write are pretty standard. I could type, I could do shorthand. The customers – you knew the customers. I got to the point I was memorizing account numbers. So if you walked in, I would say, “Oh, Mr. Scarpino. Okay, fine.” And you would say, “Help me with this.” I’d be like “Okay, I’ve got your number, I know it,” and I would help. Or, “You want to see Mr. Elder? Okay, I’ll make sure you see him.” My boss got to the point, he said, “You know that letter. I don’t need to dictate it to you, Stella.” And I thought, “Maybe I should be doing more.” But the thing that made me do more was I would see these young white guys come into the bank and they were sent around to branches, so they were typically people who had either gotten a B degree in business or MBA. And they would send them to the branches and they’d be there like three weeks and they would learn what a branch does. Not that they were going to stay there, they were going to go to the corporate office. But this was for them to learn, how does a branch operate? And they’d ask me questions like “How does this work? What do you do with this? How do you handle this?” “Talk to my boss.” So finally, I went to my boss one day and I said to him, “You know, these guys ask me a lot of silly questions but they’re going to be big-time – they’re going to be like you. How do I become like you?” And he said, “Are you really interested?” I said, “I want to know. How do you do this?” That’s the other thing. I couldn’t ask my father. He’d never done it. And he said, “Well, Stella, you’re going to have to first get a college degree and then you can think about getting an MBA.” That was the first I’d heard of an MBA. I didn’t really know that. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” So I started going to school at night.
Scarpino: Where did you go?
Nkomo: I went to Bronx Community College because I’d done that commercial track, so I didn’t have the sciences and the math. So I went to Bronx Community College for two years at night to get the college prep courses, then I took the SAT and I was going to go to City University. I was going to stay in the city. I was still living at home. I was going to go to City University of New York, which is a very good school. But I was in – one of the people tutoring us – all of us who were trying to make the transition back into university and, God bless New York State, they had a very good programs for you – one of the teachers was a young woman, a young white woman, very nice. She was helping us with one of the classes, I can’t remember – she was a tutor. They gave us free tutoring and I would go to the tutoring.
Scarpino: I think it was Sociology.
Nkomo: Sociology. Thank you.
Scarpino: I just read it two days ago. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, that’s right. So, yes. So I had taken a Sociology class and, yeah, I remember her. I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. She had blonde hair. She was a doctoral student and this was how she earned some money, by teaching us sociology. I don’t know if she took an interest in me or I was asking her questions. So I was like, “Oh, doctoral. What are you doing with that?” And so she told me about it, but I didn’t think about a Ph.D. then. But she said to me, “There’s a small college in Rode Island and they’re looking for African American students. I think you ought to look at that because they have scholarships and you could go to school free.” And then I was like, “Oh, that means I would have to quit my job, leave New York.” But I did go and talk to them at Bryant University and they said, “We can admit you.” And I got my undergraduate education with a scholarship. So I left New York and went to Rhode Island – Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Scarpino: That’s one of the questions I was going to ask you. How in the world did you get from the South Bronx to Smithfield, Rhode Island?
Nkomo: That’s how. Because of that opportunity. And that’s the only thing I tell young people, “When a door opens, be brave enough to go through it.” I mean, it was sort of like leaving the family, leaving – I was still living at home/ And I said, “You know what? I’m going to go.” And I went there and it was out in the boondocks and it was Bryant College which was started by the Tupperware family. It’s a private university (laughing), I didn’t know any of that. Handful of black students. I could see why they wanted black students. I went there and I thought I wanted to be a teacher, so I studied Business Education in Rhode Island. Now it’s Bryant University.
Storytelling
“I think a lot of people give up too soon. I think a lot of people want a big bang or they want things quickly. When you get 70 years old, you realize that things take a while.”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: Okay. So, what we’re going to do, and I say this for the sake of anyone using this and trying to work their way through the interview, I’m going to begin by asking you several big picture questions in order to get the conversation going. Then when we’re done with that, I’m going to ask you about your childhood and get some basic demographic information on the record. Then we’ll talk about your youth and young adulthood, questions aimed at providing users of the interview with an answer to the big picture question, “Who is Stella Nkomo?” When we’re done with those questions, we’re going to work our way more or less chronologically through your career with a lot of discussion about leadership. So, let’s get started. Again, with big picture questions, the thing that occurred to me as I read all the information on you was how did you get interested in studying leaders and leadership?
Nkomo: Oh.
Scarpino: Where did that come from?
Nkomo: Where did that come from? Okay. That’s a good question. I think it probably came from my orientation about making things better. I remember one incident, although you haven’t asked about my childhood, but I remember one incident that I still remember that happened to me as a young woman. I think I would’ve been about maybe 14 or 15 and we lived in the Bronx. My mother wanted us to attend church, and we normally would have attended a Baptist church, but that was in Harlem and we lived up in the Bronx, so my mother sent us to the local Lutheran church. There was a young white pastor there and he would come and visit where we lived, which was the projects where we lived. And my mother said, “Okay, I’ll send my children there.” So I started going to church to this Lutheran church which was primarily white Lutherans, many of them from Germany and Europe, and got very involved with the church and really admired the minister, who I saw as a very good leader in reaching out. But then something bad happened. It was a time that the Civil Rights Movement was going on. At one church sermon, he spoke about the need for the church to support the Civil Rights Movement, and the church leadership turned on him. They said that there’s no room in this church for politics and they actually eventually forced him out. And I thought, “What is this about leadership? I thought this was what a leader does, you know.” So I started thinking about leadership and how leadership could make a difference but, of course, at that point, I didn’t have any idea of research about it or getting involved with it, but I just remember thinking, “Isn’t this what a leader does?” A leader tries to make things better for people and I saw him as trying to reach out to the poor black community which we were part of, and clearly the church was mostly middle class people, but they kind of put a stop on that. So I just remember, I still remember that incident even though I’m 70 years old. I can still see his face. I remember his name, Pastor Nester. (laughing) So that was just a moment, but in terms of formal interest, it was probably more at the time of my Ph.D. to study it and to understand it and particularly what were the challenges of people who didn’t fit the so-called leadership mold or image? What was it like for them to be a leader?
Scarpino: I want to pick up with a question there related to something I read about you. It touches on something that you’ve already said, but when you were in high school, you mentioned that your family had attended, or your mother had her children go to a mostly white church and you did. You mentioned some difficulties between the congregation and the pastor, who you admired. But one of the things that I read was that there was a situation where the pastor and some members of the congregation wanted to authorize a church bus to take members of the congregation…
Nkomo: That’s right.
Scarpino: …to see Martin Luther King, the 1963 March on Washington, I assume.
Nkomo: It was mostly the black members.
Scarpino: And the congregation – the white members said, “No, we don’t want to do this.”
Nkomo: Yeah. Exactly. It’s related to all of that, yes.
Scarpino: So, I have two questions. One is, did you go to the March on Washington?
Nkomo: No, I didn’t go. My mother didn’t let me go, but my oldest sister went. So in the church, we were there. We were mostly the black people. There with a couple of other black people. My oldest sister, Mamie, she did go. I did not make it to the March on Washington. I watched it on television.
Scarpino: So…
Nkomo: So it was more like the black members of the church with the support of the pastor who wanted to go.
Scarpino: What was the outcome of that? Because you resisted, right? You stood up…
Nkomo: We resisted and what happened – my mother said, “You can’t do that.” But we did it. We didn’t actually – well, we told my mother we were going to do it. And what we did following that decision when they didn’t authorize the bus and didn’t really want the Bethlehem Lutheran Church associated with this event, we picketed the church.
Scarpino: Oh my goodness. Signs and everything?
Nkomo: We made signs. We made signs and stood in front of the church and said, “Bethlehem Lutheran Church is a racist church.”
Scarpino: Oh my! (laughing)
Nkomo: There were about five of us, including me – I think I was about 15 or 16 -- standing there with these placards. And when those people came that morning, Phil, the hatred – they were so angry at us, it was palpable. And after that day, I never went back to the church again. They were very angry with us. It kind of turned my taste off for religion because I saw that profound hypocrisy and also the fact that Martin Luther King was a minister himself, he was a man of God. So, I didn’t quite understand it and I couldn’t – I just lost faith in religion. I lost faith in the people who would come every Sunday. They were devout Lutherans and they hated us. I remember we went home and we were kind of crying, upset with my mother, and my mother said, “That’s their church. It wasn’t your church. Of course they’re going to be upset with you.” In a kind of sense, like, yeah, well you should have expected that when you decided to do that. I think it kind of triggered in me the importance of standing up for what you believe in but, I tell you, it really soured me towards religion because I couldn’t – people know me like that -- I cannot take hypocrisy very well. If you’re saying this and you’re doing that, that’s a deal-breaker for me. It’s a deal-breaker for me.
Scarpino: It does raise some interesting issues, doesn’t it? About what does it mean to be a religious person?
Nkomo: Exactly. It raised it for me – and the contradiction and the whole, you know, this is about social justice, so it kind of just opened my eyes to a lot of things about honesty and standing up for what you believe in and also in the sense that I had an idealistic view that people who…
Scarpino: Fifteen-year-olds should have an idealistic view. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, well, that people who are religious and God-fearing would do the right thing all the time. So that was a little bit disserting – kind of upsetting that, you know, I would have expected it from maybe some stereotypical guy down in Alabama, saying, “Don’t go there.” But here people in the northeast, you think you’re living in New York, kind of a progressive area. But I could distinguish – and I really felt bad for the minister because he really was doing the right thing. But they also punished him.
Scarpino: It cost him his job.
Nkomo: Yeah. Cost him his job. So that was – so I’m – people like that. People know, like, I do have a high tolerance but when I see hypocrisy or injustice, I will speak up.
Scarpino: I read an interesting piece that I think you sent to me but I’d also read. Just sort of play off some of the things that we’ve talked about. The piece is titled “Postcards from the Borderlands: Building a Career from the Outside/Within” and you coauthored that with Ella Edmondson Bell, published in 1999 in The Journal of Career Development. I had it, but you also sent it to me which caused me to believe that you believed it said something important about you. You sent me two articles and that was one of them. In this article, you wrote, and I’ll read it for the benefit of anybody using this, you said, “Building careers in the perilous space between the multiple demands of two cultures. As black women scholars, we function within an outside white academia. Our visibility and minority status are inseparable, ever present, always apparent. At the same time, our status as academics makes us at times strangers in our own ethnic community, a community we want to uplift. We end up doing our work from the borderlands, belonging and feeling a part of two worlds, yet never at home in either.” By the time I read this, I had done a lot of background reading on you on your life and your career. And, for me, it was like the final turn on an old 35 mm camera that brought the image into focus. I want to talk more about some of these ideas here in a few minutes, but in seeking to understand your life and career, it seems to me that the idea of borders and maybe refusing to accept the limits of borders imposed by others is really a reasonable way to look at your entire life and your entire career.
Nkomo: I think so, and crossing borders because -- I told somebody, here’s the simple story for me. So my parents came from the south. If you met my parents, very much southerners, so we ate southern food. Very close-knit family, kind of protected because the streets were not great, and then kind of staying in a very nuclear situation. Then you think that your world, Phil – I had no idea of life much outside of the projects because when you live in a – maybe you know this, even from your own experiences – when you live in the projects, the projects are low income housing. They have their own culture, their own ways of doing things and so you think that’s your world. I used to think that was the world. I mean, maybe we went to Manhattan a couple of times as children, but we would go to 114th Street and Park Avenue because they had cheap shops there. My mother would go there at Christmastime to buy us clothes, but I had no idea of the corporate world, five-star hotels, hadn’t been on an airplane, so your world looks like this. Then you start going out, like I said, going to James Monroe High School and here’s these Jewish kids, not that they were wealthy wealthy, but compared to us, they’d had a lot of experiences that I hadn’t had and sometimes they would talk about things and I really couldn’t connect. And the other thing, because we were so poor, I told somebody, I didn’t realize that spaghetti was eaten with a red sauce (laughing) until I started working down it the bank and the tellers and I, on a Friday night -- which my father did allow -- on Friday night I could go with the girlfriends from the bank. We’d go out and have a dinner and I went to Mama Leone’s Restaurant (laughing). And there – I’m like, “Okay,” because my mother – it was a way to stretch food. So she’d buy spaghetti towards the end of the week because my father got paid weekly. So normally about Wednesday or Thursday, it’s getting a little shaky and she would buy spaghetti and then buy margarine and melt it. So we would eat spaghetti with margarine because it filled us up, ten kids.
Scarpino: It was a way to fill up all those kids (laughing).
Nkomo: To fill up the kids. But the thing my mother and father taught us was experiencing. My mother used to give us – now when I think about it, I think it was not politically correct advice – she would say, “What are those white kids doing? That’s what you should be doing if you want to get a good education.” She would always say, “What are they doing? What are they talking about? Where are they going?” She kind of taught us to impose yourself and don’t hold back.
Scarpino: That part was pretty good advice (laughing).
Nkomo: It was good advice. I mean, it’s sort of like acculturation. She would say, “Okay, acculturate.” So if the girls – she would say, “If they invite you, you should go.” And that’s how I met a couple of my very good friends in high school, nice young ladies who said, “Oh, you know, let’s study together. You can come to my house and before you go home, let’s study together for the test.” So that’s how I made some friends. Then I would see their house and they’d have stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, this is interesting. I’d like to have this.” So it’s about broadening one’s horizons. I always tell young people that in South Africa, “Where you are in that shanty, that’s not the world. There’s a lot out there, kiddo, and the sooner you can see that, the broader sense you will have.” So that kind of helped me and that’s always been my strategy. So even when I got to South Africa, like, I was really afraid. I told people I was over 50 when I went to South Africa but I was petrified in a sense of, okay, this is going to be another border crossing, using your phrasing. Will I be able to do it? I wasn’t quite sure if I would be able to make a contribution there. Here I’m coming from a totally different environment. So, yeah, so I think that’s right, but I think that the thing that I did learn is cross the border. So when kids – like at the bank, I know my mother said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Oh, some of the girls – they said we should go to Bear Mountain. They’re going to go skiing.” My mother said, “Skiing? Like I’ve seen on television? Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah I just want to see what it is.” So I went on ski trips. (laughing)
Scarpino: (Laughing) Good for you. That must have been kind of scary to get up on that.
Nkomo: It was scary but every time you went, you kind of said, “Oh, wow, there’s more out here. There’s more out here.” And that’s how I decided to go eventually to get my college education, which my counselor had told me I couldn’t. Because I was in the bank, I was a secretary, I had a very nice boss, Mr. Elder, very nice man. But if you work as a secretary in a bank, there’s not a lot of challenge there, I can tell you that, because it was the same old stuff where, you know, these letters you write are pretty standard. I could type, I could do shorthand. The customers – you knew the customers. I got to the point I was memorizing account numbers. So if you walked in, I would say, “Oh, Mr. Scarpino. Okay, fine.” And you would say, “Help me with this.” I’d be like “Okay, I’ve got your number, I know it,” and I would help. Or, “You want to see Mr. Elder? Okay, I’ll make sure you see him.” My boss got to the point, he said, “You know that letter. I don’t need to dictate it to you, Stella.” And I thought, “Maybe I should be doing more.” But the thing that made me do more was I would see these young white guys come into the bank and they were sent around to branches, so they were typically people who had either gotten a B degree in business or MBA. And they would send them to the branches and they’d be there like three weeks and they would learn what a branch does. Not that they were going to stay there, they were going to go to the corporate office. But this was for them to learn, how does a branch operate? And they’d ask me questions like “How does this work? What do you do with this? How do you handle this?” “Talk to my boss.” So finally, I went to my boss one day and I said to him, “You know, these guys ask me a lot of silly questions but they’re going to be big-time – they’re going to be like you. How do I become like you?” And he said, “Are you really interested?” I said, “I want to know. How do you do this?” That’s the other thing. I couldn’t ask my father. He’d never done it. And he said, “Well, Stella, you’re going to have to first get a college degree and then you can think about getting an MBA.” That was the first I’d heard of an MBA. I didn’t really know that. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” So I started going to school at night.
Scarpino: Where did you go?
Nkomo: I went to Bronx Community College because I’d done that commercial track, so I didn’t have the sciences and the math. So I went to Bronx Community College for two years at night to get the college prep courses, then I took the SAT and I was going to go to City University. I was going to stay in the city. I was still living at home. I was going to go to City University of New York, which is a very good school. But I was in – one of the people tutoring us – all of us who were trying to make the transition back into university and, God bless New York State, they had a very good programs for you – one of the teachers was a young woman, a young white woman, very nice. She was helping us with one of the classes, I can’t remember – she was a tutor. They gave us free tutoring and I would go to the tutoring.
Scarpino: I think it was Sociology.
Nkomo: Sociology. Thank you.
Scarpino: I just read it two days ago. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, that’s right. So, yes. So I had taken a Sociology class and, yeah, I remember her. I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. She had blonde hair. She was a doctoral student and this was how she earned some money, by teaching us sociology. I don’t know if she took an interest in me or I was asking her questions. So I was like, “Oh, doctoral. What are you doing with that?” And so she told me about it, but I didn’t think about a Ph.D. then. But she said to me, “There’s a small college in Rode Island and they’re looking for African American students. I think you ought to look at that because they have scholarships and you could go to school free.” And then I was like, “Oh, that means I would have to quit my job, leave New York.” But I did go and talk to them at Bryant University and they said, “We can admit you.” And I got my undergraduate education with a scholarship. So I left New York and went to Rhode Island – Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Scarpino: That’s one of the questions I was going to ask you. How in the world did you get from the South Bronx to Smithfield, Rhode Island?
Nkomo: That’s how. Because of that opportunity. And that’s the only thing I tell young people, “When a door opens, be brave enough to go through it.” I mean, it was sort of like leaving the family, leaving – I was still living at home/ And I said, “You know what? I’m going to go.” And I went there and it was out in the boondocks and it was Bryant College which was started by the Tupperware family. It’s a private university (laughing), I didn’t know any of that. Handful of black students. I could see why they wanted black students. I went there and I thought I wanted to be a teacher, so I studied Business Education in Rhode Island. Now it’s Bryant University.
Influences and Impacts
“When a door opens, be brave enough to go through it.”
Description of the video:
Scarpino: Okay. So, what we’re going to do, and I say this for the sake of anyone using this and trying to work their way through the interview, I’m going to begin by asking you several big picture questions in order to get the conversation going. Then when we’re done with that, I’m going to ask you about your childhood and get some basic demographic information on the record. Then we’ll talk about your youth and young adulthood, questions aimed at providing users of the interview with an answer to the big picture question, “Who is Stella Nkomo?” When we’re done with those questions, we’re going to work our way more or less chronologically through your career with a lot of discussion about leadership. So, let’s get started. Again, with big picture questions, the thing that occurred to me as I read all the information on you was how did you get interested in studying leaders and leadership?
Nkomo: Oh.
Scarpino: Where did that come from?
Nkomo: Where did that come from? Okay. That’s a good question. I think it probably came from my orientation about making things better. I remember one incident, although you haven’t asked about my childhood, but I remember one incident that I still remember that happened to me as a young woman. I think I would’ve been about maybe 14 or 15 and we lived in the Bronx. My mother wanted us to attend church, and we normally would have attended a Baptist church, but that was in Harlem and we lived up in the Bronx, so my mother sent us to the local Lutheran church. There was a young white pastor there and he would come and visit where we lived, which was the projects where we lived. And my mother said, “Okay, I’ll send my children there.” So I started going to church to this Lutheran church which was primarily white Lutherans, many of them from Germany and Europe, and got very involved with the church and really admired the minister, who I saw as a very good leader in reaching out. But then something bad happened. It was a time that the Civil Rights Movement was going on. At one church sermon, he spoke about the need for the church to support the Civil Rights Movement, and the church leadership turned on him. They said that there’s no room in this church for politics and they actually eventually forced him out. And I thought, “What is this about leadership? I thought this was what a leader does, you know.” So I started thinking about leadership and how leadership could make a difference but, of course, at that point, I didn’t have any idea of research about it or getting involved with it, but I just remember thinking, “Isn’t this what a leader does?” A leader tries to make things better for people and I saw him as trying to reach out to the poor black community which we were part of, and clearly the church was mostly middle class people, but they kind of put a stop on that. So I just remember, I still remember that incident even though I’m 70 years old. I can still see his face. I remember his name, Pastor Nester. (laughing) So that was just a moment, but in terms of formal interest, it was probably more at the time of my Ph.D. to study it and to understand it and particularly what were the challenges of people who didn’t fit the so-called leadership mold or image? What was it like for them to be a leader?
Scarpino: I want to pick up with a question there related to something I read about you. It touches on something that you’ve already said, but when you were in high school, you mentioned that your family had attended, or your mother had her children go to a mostly white church and you did. You mentioned some difficulties between the congregation and the pastor, who you admired. But one of the things that I read was that there was a situation where the pastor and some members of the congregation wanted to authorize a church bus to take members of the congregation…
Nkomo: That’s right.
Scarpino: …to see Martin Luther King, the 1963 March on Washington, I assume.
Nkomo: It was mostly the black members.
Scarpino: And the congregation – the white members said, “No, we don’t want to do this.”
Nkomo: Yeah. Exactly. It’s related to all of that, yes.
Scarpino: So, I have two questions. One is, did you go to the March on Washington?
Nkomo: No, I didn’t go. My mother didn’t let me go, but my oldest sister went. So in the church, we were there. We were mostly the black people. There with a couple of other black people. My oldest sister, Mamie, she did go. I did not make it to the March on Washington. I watched it on television.
Scarpino: So…
Nkomo: So it was more like the black members of the church with the support of the pastor who wanted to go.
Scarpino: What was the outcome of that? Because you resisted, right? You stood up…
Nkomo: We resisted and what happened – my mother said, “You can’t do that.” But we did it. We didn’t actually – well, we told my mother we were going to do it. And what we did following that decision when they didn’t authorize the bus and didn’t really want the Bethlehem Lutheran Church associated with this event, we picketed the church.
Scarpino: Oh my goodness. Signs and everything?
Nkomo: We made signs. We made signs and stood in front of the church and said, “Bethlehem Lutheran Church is a racist church.”
Scarpino: Oh my! (laughing)
Nkomo: There were about five of us, including me – I think I was about 15 or 16 -- standing there with these placards. And when those people came that morning, Phil, the hatred – they were so angry at us, it was palpable. And after that day, I never went back to the church again. They were very angry with us. It kind of turned my taste off for religion because I saw that profound hypocrisy and also the fact that Martin Luther King was a minister himself, he was a man of God. So, I didn’t quite understand it and I couldn’t – I just lost faith in religion. I lost faith in the people who would come every Sunday. They were devout Lutherans and they hated us. I remember we went home and we were kind of crying, upset with my mother, and my mother said, “That’s their church. It wasn’t your church. Of course they’re going to be upset with you.” In a kind of sense, like, yeah, well you should have expected that when you decided to do that. I think it kind of triggered in me the importance of standing up for what you believe in but, I tell you, it really soured me towards religion because I couldn’t – people know me like that -- I cannot take hypocrisy very well. If you’re saying this and you’re doing that, that’s a deal-breaker for me. It’s a deal-breaker for me.
Scarpino: It does raise some interesting issues, doesn’t it? About what does it mean to be a religious person?
Nkomo: Exactly. It raised it for me – and the contradiction and the whole, you know, this is about social justice, so it kind of just opened my eyes to a lot of things about honesty and standing up for what you believe in and also in the sense that I had an idealistic view that people who…
Scarpino: Fifteen-year-olds should have an idealistic view. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, well, that people who are religious and God-fearing would do the right thing all the time. So that was a little bit disserting – kind of upsetting that, you know, I would have expected it from maybe some stereotypical guy down in Alabama, saying, “Don’t go there.” But here people in the northeast, you think you’re living in New York, kind of a progressive area. But I could distinguish – and I really felt bad for the minister because he really was doing the right thing. But they also punished him.
Scarpino: It cost him his job.
Nkomo: Yeah. Cost him his job. So that was – so I’m – people like that. People know, like, I do have a high tolerance but when I see hypocrisy or injustice, I will speak up.
Scarpino: I read an interesting piece that I think you sent to me but I’d also read. Just sort of play off some of the things that we’ve talked about. The piece is titled “Postcards from the Borderlands: Building a Career from the Outside/Within” and you coauthored that with Ella Edmondson Bell, published in 1999 in The Journal of Career Development. I had it, but you also sent it to me which caused me to believe that you believed it said something important about you. You sent me two articles and that was one of them. In this article, you wrote, and I’ll read it for the benefit of anybody using this, you said, “Building careers in the perilous space between the multiple demands of two cultures. As black women scholars, we function within an outside white academia. Our visibility and minority status are inseparable, ever present, always apparent. At the same time, our status as academics makes us at times strangers in our own ethnic community, a community we want to uplift. We end up doing our work from the borderlands, belonging and feeling a part of two worlds, yet never at home in either.” By the time I read this, I had done a lot of background reading on you on your life and your career. And, for me, it was like the final turn on an old 35 mm camera that brought the image into focus. I want to talk more about some of these ideas here in a few minutes, but in seeking to understand your life and career, it seems to me that the idea of borders and maybe refusing to accept the limits of borders imposed by others is really a reasonable way to look at your entire life and your entire career.
Nkomo: I think so, and crossing borders because -- I told somebody, here’s the simple story for me. So my parents came from the south. If you met my parents, very much southerners, so we ate southern food. Very close-knit family, kind of protected because the streets were not great, and then kind of staying in a very nuclear situation. Then you think that your world, Phil – I had no idea of life much outside of the projects because when you live in a – maybe you know this, even from your own experiences – when you live in the projects, the projects are low income housing. They have their own culture, their own ways of doing things and so you think that’s your world. I used to think that was the world. I mean, maybe we went to Manhattan a couple of times as children, but we would go to 114th Street and Park Avenue because they had cheap shops there. My mother would go there at Christmastime to buy us clothes, but I had no idea of the corporate world, five-star hotels, hadn’t been on an airplane, so your world looks like this. Then you start going out, like I said, going to James Monroe High School and here’s these Jewish kids, not that they were wealthy wealthy, but compared to us, they’d had a lot of experiences that I hadn’t had and sometimes they would talk about things and I really couldn’t connect. And the other thing, because we were so poor, I told somebody, I didn’t realize that spaghetti was eaten with a red sauce (laughing) until I started working down it the bank and the tellers and I, on a Friday night -- which my father did allow -- on Friday night I could go with the girlfriends from the bank. We’d go out and have a dinner and I went to Mama Leone’s Restaurant (laughing). And there – I’m like, “Okay,” because my mother – it was a way to stretch food. So she’d buy spaghetti towards the end of the week because my father got paid weekly. So normally about Wednesday or Thursday, it’s getting a little shaky and she would buy spaghetti and then buy margarine and melt it. So we would eat spaghetti with margarine because it filled us up, ten kids.
Scarpino: It was a way to fill up all those kids (laughing).
Nkomo: To fill up the kids. But the thing my mother and father taught us was experiencing. My mother used to give us – now when I think about it, I think it was not politically correct advice – she would say, “What are those white kids doing? That’s what you should be doing if you want to get a good education.” She would always say, “What are they doing? What are they talking about? Where are they going?” She kind of taught us to impose yourself and don’t hold back.
Scarpino: That part was pretty good advice (laughing).
Nkomo: It was good advice. I mean, it’s sort of like acculturation. She would say, “Okay, acculturate.” So if the girls – she would say, “If they invite you, you should go.” And that’s how I met a couple of my very good friends in high school, nice young ladies who said, “Oh, you know, let’s study together. You can come to my house and before you go home, let’s study together for the test.” So that’s how I made some friends. Then I would see their house and they’d have stuff. I’m thinking, “Oh, wow, this is interesting. I’d like to have this.” So it’s about broadening one’s horizons. I always tell young people that in South Africa, “Where you are in that shanty, that’s not the world. There’s a lot out there, kiddo, and the sooner you can see that, the broader sense you will have.” So that kind of helped me and that’s always been my strategy. So even when I got to South Africa, like, I was really afraid. I told people I was over 50 when I went to South Africa but I was petrified in a sense of, okay, this is going to be another border crossing, using your phrasing. Will I be able to do it? I wasn’t quite sure if I would be able to make a contribution there. Here I’m coming from a totally different environment. So, yeah, so I think that’s right, but I think that the thing that I did learn is cross the border. So when kids – like at the bank, I know my mother said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “Oh, some of the girls – they said we should go to Bear Mountain. They’re going to go skiing.” My mother said, “Skiing? Like I’ve seen on television? Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah I just want to see what it is.” So I went on ski trips. (laughing)
Scarpino: (Laughing) Good for you. That must have been kind of scary to get up on that.
Nkomo: It was scary but every time you went, you kind of said, “Oh, wow, there’s more out here. There’s more out here.” And that’s how I decided to go eventually to get my college education, which my counselor had told me I couldn’t. Because I was in the bank, I was a secretary, I had a very nice boss, Mr. Elder, very nice man. But if you work as a secretary in a bank, there’s not a lot of challenge there, I can tell you that, because it was the same old stuff where, you know, these letters you write are pretty standard. I could type, I could do shorthand. The customers – you knew the customers. I got to the point I was memorizing account numbers. So if you walked in, I would say, “Oh, Mr. Scarpino. Okay, fine.” And you would say, “Help me with this.” I’d be like “Okay, I’ve got your number, I know it,” and I would help. Or, “You want to see Mr. Elder? Okay, I’ll make sure you see him.” My boss got to the point, he said, “You know that letter. I don’t need to dictate it to you, Stella.” And I thought, “Maybe I should be doing more.” But the thing that made me do more was I would see these young white guys come into the bank and they were sent around to branches, so they were typically people who had either gotten a B degree in business or MBA. And they would send them to the branches and they’d be there like three weeks and they would learn what a branch does. Not that they were going to stay there, they were going to go to the corporate office. But this was for them to learn, how does a branch operate? And they’d ask me questions like “How does this work? What do you do with this? How do you handle this?” “Talk to my boss.” So finally, I went to my boss one day and I said to him, “You know, these guys ask me a lot of silly questions but they’re going to be big-time – they’re going to be like you. How do I become like you?” And he said, “Are you really interested?” I said, “I want to know. How do you do this?” That’s the other thing. I couldn’t ask my father. He’d never done it. And he said, “Well, Stella, you’re going to have to first get a college degree and then you can think about getting an MBA.” That was the first I’d heard of an MBA. I didn’t really know that. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do this.” So I started going to school at night.
Scarpino: Where did you go?
Nkomo: I went to Bronx Community College because I’d done that commercial track, so I didn’t have the sciences and the math. So I went to Bronx Community College for two years at night to get the college prep courses, then I took the SAT and I was going to go to City University. I was going to stay in the city. I was still living at home. I was going to go to City University of New York, which is a very good school. But I was in – one of the people tutoring us – all of us who were trying to make the transition back into university and, God bless New York State, they had a very good programs for you – one of the teachers was a young woman, a young white woman, very nice. She was helping us with one of the classes, I can’t remember – she was a tutor. They gave us free tutoring and I would go to the tutoring.
Scarpino: I think it was Sociology.
Nkomo: Sociology. Thank you.
Scarpino: I just read it two days ago. (laughing)
Nkomo: Yeah, that’s right. So, yes. So I had taken a Sociology class and, yeah, I remember her. I can’t remember her name, but I can see her face. She had blonde hair. She was a doctoral student and this was how she earned some money, by teaching us sociology. I don’t know if she took an interest in me or I was asking her questions. So I was like, “Oh, doctoral. What are you doing with that?” And so she told me about it, but I didn’t think about a Ph.D. then. But she said to me, “There’s a small college in Rode Island and they’re looking for African American students. I think you ought to look at that because they have scholarships and you could go to school free.” And then I was like, “Oh, that means I would have to quit my job, leave New York.” But I did go and talk to them at Bryant University and they said, “We can admit you.” And I got my undergraduate education with a scholarship. So I left New York and went to Rhode Island – Smithfield, Rhode Island.
Scarpino: That’s one of the questions I was going to ask you. How in the world did you get from the South Bronx to Smithfield, Rhode Island?
Nkomo: That’s how. Because of that opportunity. And that’s the only thing I tell young people, “When a door opens, be brave enough to go through it.” I mean, it was sort of like leaving the family, leaving – I was still living at home/ And I said, “You know what? I’m going to go.” And I went there and it was out in the boondocks and it was Bryant College which was started by the Tupperware family. It’s a private university (laughing), I didn’t know any of that. Handful of black students. I could see why they wanted black students. I went there and I thought I wanted to be a teacher, so I studied Business Education in Rhode Island. Now it’s Bryant University.
About Stella Nkomo
Stella Nkomo earned the Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst in 1983, majoring in Human Resource Management and minoring in Strategic Management. She spent 17 years, 1983-2000, at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, Belk College of Business Administration, rising through the academic ranks to Full Professor.
During her last five years in North Carolina she held the position of Professor and Chair, Department of Management, Belk College of Business Administration. In 2000, she moved to Pretoria, South Africa, as Bateman Distinguished Professor of Business Leadership, University of South Africa Graduate School of Business Leadership. In 2009, she accepted an appointment at the University of Pretoria, holding positions as Professor, Department of Human Resource Management, Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences; and Deputy Dean for Research and Post-graduate Studies.
Her research interests include race and gender in organizations; women in leadership; diversity management; change leadership; and, leadership and management in Africa.
Dr. Nkomo has produced large body of publications, including four co-authored books and over ninety referred journal articles and book chapters, for about half of which she served as first author. She holds an “A” rating for her research from the National Research Foundation of South Africa, which is the highest category in the South African system based on the assessments of international peer reviewers. She was presented with a Leadership Legacy Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Leadership Association in November 2017.
Explore the complete oral history of Stella NkomoBorn or Made?
“You can train them what to do. How they will do it, I have no control over.”
Description of the video:
INTERVIEWER: So there is a debate that leaders are born or made. Do you think it's possible to train somebody to be a leader?
STELLA NKOMO: who can train them what to do, how they will do it. I have no control over that list and recipe thing. I think what you want to do is to have the person to be introspective about. Why do I want to lead an MI up to it? I think that's the best you can do. And maybe the person will realize. I tell people now in South Africa, my students, you know what? If your goal in life is to make a lot of money, to be wealthy, enrich, do us a favor. Become an entrepreneur? You know why? Nobody really expects an entrepreneur to give back to society. We know entrepreneurs are big about. You might do that, but it's not demanded. But if you take a job as a government minister, that's a different motivation. You want to serve the people. So that's it. That's the best we can do with people. Really. I don't think giving people a list because it's not then we lead from who we are. Phil, how do we lead differently otherwise, among pastoral masquerading? And people cannot hold that plot. They cannot hold it. It's almost like acting. And so they have to be in full script all the time. And I don't think that's really possible.
