Pamella Sittoni on why women leaders should not change who they are

By  Moraa Obiria

Senior Gender Journalist

What you need to know:

• Pamella Sittoni says women in leadership should remain true to themselves while developing the confidence, skills and values needed to lead effectively.
• She reflects on more than three decades in journalism, urging women media leaders to combine firmness with empathy, listening and genuine care for their teams.

When Pamella Sittoni was starting out in journalism, she was told she was too polite to make it. More than three decades later, that memory has become part of the story she tells about leadership, femininity and the temptation to change oneself to fit an idea of authority.

The criticism did not put her down. In fact, it strengthened her resolve. “I was not going to change who I am just to fit a certain bill. And I was not going to give up on journalism because she said so,” she said.

She chose instead to prove herself through her work. And the work took her a long way. Pamella became an icon of women’s media leadership in Kenya, spending more than two decades at Nation Media Group (NMG) from November 2003 until July 2024, when she left while serving as Group Managing Editor.

During her career, she served as Executive Editor, Daily Nation; Executive Editor, Partnerships; Executive Editor and Managing Editor, Daily Nation; and Managing Editor, The EastAfrican.

On September 16, 2026, speaking to women journalists in leadership roles in Nairobi at a Journalists for Human Rights workshop on strengthening women media leaders’ newsroom management in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), her message was not about becoming tougher, louder or more intimidating. 

It was about knowing who you are, caring about the people you lead and being deliberate about the kind of leader you want to become. “There’s no best way,” Pamella said when asked about her leadership style.

But she was clear about one thing: “The authoritarian is not a good way to lead people.”

Being firm, she said, does not mean being harsh. “Even in being firm, you still have to be polite and you still have to give people a chance to be heard and you still have to be a good listener,” she said.

A leader can still lead the way while giving people an opportunity to contribute, she said. Pamella says one framework that influenced her leadership at NMG was the “care and growth” model. “I approach leadership from a point where I see my team as people that I genuinely care about and whose interests I have at heart,” she said.

She said termed it important for a leader to find ways, however small, to show people that they genuinely care about them. That, she said, allows the leader and the team to grow together. But caring does not mean abandoning authority, she said.

Pamella said some circumstances demand authoritative leadership while still maintaining a team that believes in your leadership. But before leading other people, Pamella said, a person must first learn to lead themselves.

Leadership, she said, has to start with the individual. That means deciding what values to embrace as a human being and developing the skills needed to have the confidence to lead others, she said.

She acknowledged that no leader can possess every quality, but said a lack of some qualities, skills and values can make leadership difficult.

For people who are naturally polite, quiet or reserved, leadership can also require learning how to make themselves heard, she said. “You must learn to talk, and to talk loudly, and you must also learn to walk fast,” Pamella said.

But learning to speak with authority does not mean becoming someone else, she said. As a young correspondent, she remembers a man coming from an editorial meeting and telling her that her story had been discussed. “I was just a 22-year-old girl who’s finished her internship and now a correspondent,” she said.

Titles and authority

The editorial meeting, she recalled, was a room full of men with titles and authority. Yet her work had caught their attention. “I started getting noticed, I think, very early in my career. Not because of how tough I was, but just because of my work,” she said.

Pamella said that became a pattern throughout her career. After applying and being interviewed for her first job as a reporter at Nation, she said she was given every other job without having to apply. “Everything else I’ve done, somebody looks at my work and says, ‘I think Pam can do this,’” she said.

For Pamella, the experience reinforced her belief that women do not have to construct a different personality simply because they have entered leadership. “I might speak very gently, I might look very polite, I might even wear lipstick sometimes…, but when it comes to work, I will get the work done,” she said.

That included making difficult decisions. “If it comes to making a call, even on disciplining somebody, I will do it. And if I have to let somebody go because they’ve not done their job, I will do it without any regrets,” she said.

Pamella said women should therefore not feel compelled to become a different person just because they have become leaders. But leadership, she acknowledged, comes with a weight of its own.

A leader may be bereaved, going through the breakdown of a marriage or dealing with another deeply personal experience while remaining responsible for a team. Pamella knows what that feels like. She was in a demanding role when she lost her mother. “And for me, my world stopped,” she said.

After the burial, she took two weeks off and returned to the newsroom. But grief does not disappear simply because a person returns to work. “If you’ve been through grief, you know that it doesn’t go away. But you are expected to carry on with your leadership,” she said.

Yet such experiences can unsettle a person's identity as a leader, affect how they perform their role and challenge their ability to exercise authority with clarity, she said.

Pamella’s advice is to keep reminding yourself that a personal crisis does not erase the authority you still hold in your professional role. As they continue their leadership journey, Pamella reminded the women media managers to give leadership development the same attention they give their careers.

“I know that your work is important and you go to work to produce a TV show, you go to work to do a radio programme, or you go to work to lead people, but you must invest in leadership parallel to your investment in your career,” she said.