Linda Mfuchi Were has spent her entire career at one company, but she has never stood still. As L'Oréal East Africa's first black woman CFO, she is handling the shift from controller to strategic leader one lesson at a time.
There is a version of Linda Mfuchi Were that almost never made it past high school. She was in form four when her father, the family's breadwinner, died and the ground shifted under all of them. She was the firstborn and the only daughter, with three brothers behind her. The youngest was barely four years old. Immediately, school fees became a problem. Forcing Linda to start fending for the family early.
"I think I built resilience, just from that, and knowing that there is literally nothing that is impossible if you put your head into it. My dad passing on made me adjust to the reality that there is no one who will take me out for leisures or protect me or connect me with so and so. Everything I now had to figure out,”she says.
After high school, Linda received a basketball scholarship that took her to USIU. She had grown up in a world of scarcity, but suddenly, she found herself among what she calls “the cool kids”. There, a friend of a teammate introduced her to the CFO of L'Oréal East Africa, a connection that led to her first job. She joined as a master data officer, an operational role with no direct finance brief, but within two years she had demonstrated enough to be moved into financial management and cost accounting. She has not left the company since.
"I stayed in L'Oréal just because it was not permanently one position. After every two or three years, there was always a rotation, always a new opportunity that presented itself. I was equally eager to learn more and upskill myself. I am very different from the people I schooled with at USIU, and it is because of the opportunities within L'Oréal," she says.
Eight years into her time at the East Africa office, Linda moved to L'Oréal's regional headquarters in South Africa to do corporate controlling and report to the regional president. She describes the first few months as nerve-wracking. Her boss was exacting about how things were presented. She found herself, as she puts it, functioning almost like a personal assistant from a finance perspective, managing every finance-related requirement for board-level executives. It was her first real exposure to how top management thinks, what they ask, and how much they expect to be told in very little time.
"In those two and a half years, this really shaped my interest. After that, I thought: I think I can be a CFO at this point. It seemed like I had done it all with top management. I knew what questions they ask, what to prepare for," she says.
Making adjustments
Linda came back to Kenya in 2025 as CFO of L'Oréal East Africa at the age of 35. She was also the first black woman to hold the position. The weight of the milestone is not lost on her.
"I cannot fail. I need to deliver, and not only deliver but almost deliver to perfection, to prove a point, not only to myself but to many, many people. I don't take it as a negative thing. I think it helps me build my capacity and bring a certain vision to reality so that people can actually see it," she says.
A year into the role, Linda now leads a team covering accounting, controlling, treasury, tax and legal. She came up through controlling and admits that the breadth caught her off guard. Kenya's aggressive tax environment, which had been quiet when she left for South Africa in 2022, was another adjustment. More than anything, the hardest shift has been the mental one. She has had to move from someone who received direction to someone who gives it, particularly when several of the people she now leads were there when she was still finding her feet.
"CFO life is different. It has been only a year, but it is really weird to see time move so fast. The role has pushed me. I thought I had the grit and could crack it. But it is a different challenge to lead from a director position and cascade what you envision to other people," she says.
To navigate the transition, Linda has undergone career coaching from a former CEO, specifically to help with the mindset shift. The goal is strategic thinking and influence. She is working to change how her own team is perceived across the business, pushing them away from the identity of the people who say ‘no’ and towards something closer to business partners.
"You can only influence by knowing exactly the pain points of the people you work with, almost walking in their journey but acting as an advisor rather than someone who just pushes them. I am trying to change the notion that when finance speaks to you, all they want is to cut the money. I want my team to be business value partners. That is not equally reciprocated yet. But it is what I am working towards," she says.
Value in the age of AI
She often tells her team plainly that if they only know how to produce reports, they are already running out of time. A robot can do the reporting. What a robot cannot do is walk into a general manager's office and be consulted.
"If you do not add value in this day and age, AI will not steal your job, but you will lose it. Technical skills right now, tick, tick, tick. But what makes you stand out is your soft skills: critical thinking, problem solving, influencing. You cannot do this if you just look at numbers. In two or three years, if you do not continuously practise the value add, you are out of the job, just like that," she says.
Linda has recently discovered walking. From time to time, she goes to Nairobi’s Karura Forest, smells the trees, and lets herself be present in a way the job rarely allows. She is also thinking about retirement in a way she never has before after attending a seminar led by The Alpha Group International regional director Kinya Kimotho.
"Previously, I was not present in the moment, always thinking about the future. But more and more you appreciate the getaways with friends, you appreciate family, because if you are cracking at work, you need people around you to bounce off. Your husband, your mother, your friends. We need to know how to disconnect from our everyday life and live in the moment," she says.
