Leadership Beyond Boundaries

The Leadership Beyond  Boundaries effort has been working with social entrepreneurs and young changemakers to enhance their leadership and innovation skills. Lyndon Rego was part of a roundtable hosted by Meridian International Center on expanding volunteerism.

Here’s a report on the proceedings from Meridian:

Inspired by the call from President Obama for renewed commitment to public service, Meridian International Center, Points of Light Institute, and Gallup joined together to discuss Innovative Global Leadership Networks: Powering Service and Volunteerism. Held on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at Gallup World headquarters in Washington, DC, the conference brought together 50 leaders from the corporate, non-profit, and government sectors to discuss ways of strengthening collaboration worldwide through technology and public/private partnerships

Among the featured speakers at the conference were Michelle Nunn, CEO of Points of Light Institute, Ambassador Stuart Holliday, President and CEO of Meridian International Center, Stan Litow, President of the IBM Foundation, Lynn Luckow, President and CEO of the Craigslist Foundation, Steven Koltai, The U.S. Department of State’s Senior Advisor on Global Entrepreneurship, and Dennis Whittle, Co-founder and former CEO of GlobalGiving. The event was moderated by Karen Baker, California’s Secretary of Service and Volunteerism. A complete list of speakers and a full agenda can be found here.

A report on the panel that CCL participated in was featured in a blog post by Molly Thompson on the VOLiNTEER site:

Secretary Baker opened the second panel, looking for the “Aha!” moments in applied social innovation and volunteer networks. Secretary Baker turned to Valeria Merino from Ashoka first with the question “How are the Fellows integral to Ashoka?” “Ashoka is trying to contribute to a world in which everyone is a changemaker,” Valeria Merino explains. Ashoka coined the concept of social entrepreneurship. The core program is called “Venture,” looking for individuals with the ideas to change the world and the drive to make those ideas come true. Ashoka wants to accelerate social change. “The first thing is trust. People want to be part of a network where they know where everyone is coming from.” It’s important that everyone goes through the same selection process. Also, it’s important to be able to answer the question “What does the network give me? What is the value added of the network?” They also want to know how to solve problems – they can ask the problem-solving peer network, and the network that can provide them with potential partners that can help them scale up.

Secretary Baker asks Merino how they identify their leaders. Merino replies that they look for people with a history of entrepreneurship and leadership from a young age, who looks for ways to get involved. It must be a person with the capacity to make things work; a person with a problem-solving mind. The third thing we look for is people with the right ethical fiber, who are in it for the right reasons. Many people participate in the process; there is no one person who decides who is involved.

Scott Beale from Atlas Corps asked about the entrepreneurs. Valeria replied that maybe 2 out of 100 applications are the type of entrepreneur they’re looking for. She said that the program looks for people who will make a long term commitment to stay engaged with Ashoka for periods of three years or more. Online or offline, it is important to have long term responsibilities for both parties. Changemakers is going through a transformation to becoming a platform to engage people from all walks of life. She spoke of creating instant feedback loops through online competitions and other engagement incentives.

Lyndon Rego spoke of the “Leadership Beyond Boundaries” program at the Center for Creative Leadership, as to how to empower people at the bottom of the pyramid, as well as working with organizations to grow capacity. They work with young people, after having heard many times, “This program is wonderful. If only I had experienced it 20 years ago.” Through their youth programs, they are working on making leadership skills part of the education process. “Leadership development is about unlocking that fire for motivation,” and Leadership Beyond Boundaries is helping to take that motivation to people in developing countries. The Center for Creative Leadership is helping to build and package these skills for people around the world. There is enormous potential to unlock for young people to become changemakers. This is the generation most poised to bring about change in 100 years. We have an enormous potential to bring change to the world.

Tim Kane, from George Washington University, asked how to navigate the formal credential piece in empowering people and enabling leaders. Lyndon replied that the magic in what they do is about facilitating and creating an environment where they can learn from each other, rather than formal teaching.

Dennis Whittle spoke about GlobalGiving, which is around enabling anyone with good ideas around the world to find funding. It is different from Kiva in that Kiva is primarily a lending organization. Five surprises that have hit him in the last few years through GlobalGiving: 1) He is not a do-gooder. A lot of people, like him, just want to help people. It cuts across political, religious, and cultural values. This brings people together. How do you enable people, incentivize people, and then recognize them. 2) Surprise in how many companies use GlobalGiving. GlobalGiving enables companies to engage their employees in a way that makes them more dedicated. 3) “It’s not about me.” What does that mean? “We succeed when we push value to the partners and the users and the network.” We succeed when we help an organization like Atlas Corps, like Kiva, get started. 4) Quality is not static. It is not just the “experts” and the elite who succeed. 5) It’s all about stories. It’s not about policy analysis, it’s not about polling, it’s about people’s stories about their lives.

Scott Beale reiterated that stories are important justification for the work being done – emphasizing quality, personal stories over simple numbers and metrics. Stan Litow reiterated that it’s both stories and numbers, and in the corporate world, the numbers have to be there, but in communicating results, giving examples helps people connect in a personal way. Even in the public sector, there’s a real passion for demonstrating return on investment. Valeria Merino opined that the two ways of evaluating impact are not mutually exclusive. “There are kinds of things that are very difficult to prove with numbers.”

Secretary Baker then turned to Lynn Luckow from Craigslist Foundation. “Most people don’t take enough time to think about the ‘why’ before they think about the ‘how’,” Luckow says. The Craigslist Foundation not only asks, “How do we bring the next generation of nonprofit leaders into existence and support them?” but also “To what end?” The answer to that, for the Craigslist Foundation, is “To build better communities.” “Healthy, vital, sustainable communities and relationships are the cornerstone for healthy, vital, sustainable societies.” We, as a people, as a community, need to take greater responsibility for where we work and play. “The most profound conclusion we came to, and the most scary, is that no one is responsible for the public good.” If it’s so divided into sectors, how do we make public society work? To provide a solution to this question, Craigslist Foundation is focusing on building alliances of partners from all sectors to get a dialogue going, and also on creating “online tools for offline action.” They are providing tools, such as All For Good and its Bootcamp, to address the question, “How do we think on a hyper-local way, yet global in scale?” For Likeminded, Craigslist Foundation asks people to answer “What are you doing for your community? How are you doing it? What was the result?” with only three sentences per answer. This tool is a way to aggregate micro-stories and see larger trends.

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The 15 participants were doctors and senior public health administrators working on the frontlines of HIV/AIDS. In their work, they shoulder great responsibility and are charged with tackling a spectrum of public health challenges that involve an array of stakeholders. The ability to build relationships and shape collaborative outcomes is imperative as is the urgency to get things done. Said one participant before the program:

“The major challenge is not having the patience to listen and let the mentee or the other people formulate a position or take full charge of the situation, and endure or enjoy the consequences. It requires an ability to both pull back and to be strong and frank giving an honest assessment, whether this is praise, compliment or correction. I have a tendency to “smooth over” some circumstances, adopt a protective posture or just do it myself.”

The mentor training methodology used the Creative Leadership Conversations toolkit to help participants learn to engage others in a constructive, appreciative and developmental way that builds shared ownership and leadership. The program provided the public health leaders with the opportunity to learn and practice essential coaching and mentoring skills, and equipped them with key leadership concepts and simple yet powerful assessment tools they could use for mentoring and collaborative work. The program wove together coaching demos and practice sessions so that the participants had the immediate opportunity to practice new techniques in peer- based learning groups as soon as they learned them.

The participants found the experience powerful, personal, and practical. In the closing reflections we heard that it was an “enthralling, inspiring” experience that used practical methods that were “perfect examples of adult learning.” The peer discussions, participants said, brought forth “issues of significance that were hidden.” We were urged to “continue to promote this new paradigm of mentorship” and use the low-tech, high touch methods that characterized the program.

With programs conducted in India, Ethiopia, and Jamaica, we’re delighted by the power of this methodology to transform people’s ability to think more expansively, engage respectfully, and seek collaborative outcomes.

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By Sangeeth Varghese

For my Development Studies thesis at the LSE, I chose to study the effect of leadership in the development of nations. What I found, during my study was interesting – that leadership plays a larger than proportional role in the development – in fact more than most other factors. This newfound knowledge raised another question in my mind, ‘What would it take for a person to become a leader? Is it heredity or is it education?’ As I gleaned through the biographies of 105 leaders – drawn from all walks of life, I realized that leaders are rarely there because of a legacy or an institution, but because of a personal choice. They made a conscious decision to stand up and lead, as they faced a defining moment, inspite of the fact that most of them came from very average circumstances. At this point, I asked myself another important question – a question that henceforth has defined my life. Would it not have a high positive impact on the nation, if a million individuals in India were able to discover their true leadership potential?

 With this thought overbearing my mind, I returned to India and started up ‘LeadCap’ a non-profit movement founded on the corner stone that leaders are not extraordinary people, in terms of their intelligence and any other abilities, but ordinary people who have been bold enough to take a decision to lead. At LeadCap we strive to empower people to take that leadership decision.

LeadCap is defined by three beliefs:

1. Teaching how to fish is better than providing fish: Helping individuals discover their true potential would help them more in the longer term than any other aid.

2. Leadership is a decision, not a position: Individuals who emerged as some of the greatest leaders had nothing extraordinary about them. Anyone could be a leader irrespective or birth or living conditions, if willing to decide.

3. Leaders breed more leaders: More individuals would embrace the leadership mantle, if they are made aware that leadership is a decision. Hence, true leaders are those who nurture more leaders, not followers.

Oscar award winner Danny Boyle, director of the movie Slumdog Millionaire once remarked that the greatest asset India has is the aspirations that every Indian secretly thrives on – street side vendors, students, businessmen, everyone of us aspires to be better, greater, everyday. LeadCap’s Million-Leader-Mandate Programme strives to awaken a million of these ambitious individuals, that they could realize their true potential by reaching out to them in various means – mass media, leadership awakening programmes etc.

Another high impact projects that we are working on is ‘Leadership Villages’ – a project by which we hope to create self-supporting and self confident communities from marginalized areas in every country. Creation of a ‘Leadership Village’ (it could be a village, slum or any marginalized place) is done through two simple but greatly powerful tools – ‘Story Circle’ and ‘Living Library’. Story Circle is a weekly gathering of a smaller group of villagers (typically each group is of 8-10 people), where one of the members discusses the story or biography of a great leader. Through these stories the villagers relate and reinforce powerful truths – that great leaders were also normal individuals like them and that they also have in them the potential to transform their village. In ‘Living Library’ several ‘Story Circles’ join together and invite an outside person to discuss his/her life like a book, where they can learn from his/her experiences.

Though our vision was powerful, one of the most important challenges that we faced was that we did not have a powerful enough programme to match up with our vision that could empower our grass roots. Yes, the first phase of evangelising that leadership is just a decision worked very well and people were enthusiastic to be leaders, but we could not offer them a clear direction on how to proceed to the next step. This was the time, when I happened to read an article written from CCL in Forbes.com. The article caught my attention, because it spoke about the right value systems for a leader, and more importantly, when I did some research, I found that CCL is probably the most credible organisation in the world in creating leaders. I wrote to CCL and in no time I was sitting across the table in India with Lyndon Rego, the Director of Innovation Incubator at CCL. Lyndon introduced to us the Train-the-Trainer materials of the Youth Leadership Programme of CCL and handed over a working copy to us, which he allowed us to use for our programmes.

To be frank, the materials appeared to be simple, prima facie. However, that also meant that the senior management of LeadCap was easily able to roll it out to the key stake holders in our organization as well as the Leadership Villages. However, the results that we witnessed right from the first session from this programme was just amazing. The seemingly simple techniques – like the one where you discovered your values, the one where you find the attributes that you respect in a true leader – they just opened up the inner most beings of our people. Suddenly, they could relate to what they want to be and had a reason why they want to be.

LeadCap, from 2009, after we started using the CCL materials turned around to be a more focused organisation. We were not only evangelizing leadership to our various stakeholders, but were also showing them an effective way – an effective way by which not only they could understand why leadership is important, what kind of a leader they want to be, but also how they can lead, and how they can empower more of their kind. Now, before initiating any leadership village, we identify a small group (5-10 people) of opinion leaders/key stake holders from the village, and train them for a day using the CCL training methodologies. We then ask them to roll it out to a greater mass in their village. We further empower them to facilitate ‘Story Circle and Living Library’. The results we have noticed until now in the two Leadership Villages in India are absolutely marvellous – transforming marginalized individuals and societies.

Now we believe that we are ready for the next level of our growth as an organisation. We are already ideating on several new ideas. One such project is ‘LeadCapper’, an online platform that would empower more individuals by substantially reducing their ‘fear of failure’ – what we believe to be one of factors why less people are willing to lead. This project would also unleash the greater power of the Internet, as an enabler of real life action compared to a virtual communication and networking tool. We also have initiated an online leadership channel along with Microsoft on their MSN Network, that gets close to 2 million page views a month.

Sangeeth Varghese is the founder of LeadCap and is the author of the forthcoming title “Open Source Leader: The Future of Organizations and Leadership.” He can be contacted at sangeethv@leadcap.org

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Reflections by Lyndon Rego on a Youth Train-the-Trainer Program in Hyderabad

Economic forecasts project that India will emerge as the world’s largest economy by the middle of the century. A lot of this economic surge is based on leveraging India’s “demographic dividend.” India currently has the world’s youngest workforce and hundreds of millions of people under the age of 15. As many countries around the world tip towards an aging population in the next few decades, India’s youth bulge will yield a mammoth workforce. Yet to tap this demographic dividend India must do a lot to prepare young people for the future.

 In my recent travels to India, I’ve seen great recognition that India must get it right with the next generation. The country’s educational infrastructure is even more in need of attention than its subpar physical infrastructure.

 The author Rob Salkowitz  of Young World Rising put it this way:

 “It is possible to see India in a few years’ time, powered by its knowledge and IT services sectors, leading the charge of the mostly poor Young World toward the emergence of a radically reordered global economy. The great uncertainty is whether India’s educational system and institutions are capable of reaping the benefits of this demographic dividend, or whether the nation’s bumper crop of human potential will spoil in the fields.”

A key aspect of reaping this “bumper crop of human potential” is developing the ability of India’s young people to claim and create the future. Leadership skills that build confidence, focus, and commitment in young people and enhance their ability to be creative, collaborative, and resilient are an important supplement to the basic and technical education that the country needs.

To address this need, CCL’s Leadership Beyond Boundaries team partnered with Bhumi, a youth development organization, to hold a youth leadership train-the-trainer program in Hyderabad, India. Twenty trainers from organizations from across India participated in the program. They encompassed organizations working in schools, running fellowship programs and citizenship programs, and empowerment and social entrepreneurship programs. 

The 2-1/2-day program, delivered by Sarah Miller and Lyndon Rego, used the Early Leadership Toolkit to share leadership content, program design methods, and facilitation techniques. The second day of the program involved a live practice session where three teams of new trainers delivered a one-day program to local college students and residents from the city’s largest slum. This approach required participants to quickly apply what they had learned by teaching it to others, a challenging assignment related to language, audience education, and schedule. The program would have to be delivered in three different languages – English, Hindi, and Telegu – to accommodate the spectrum of attendees.

I sat in one of the programs delivered to a group of mainly young Muslim women from the local slum. At the start of the program these women were asked to introduce themselves. Many could not bring themselves to stand in front of the room and say their names. An hour later, however, the training room was buzzing. The participants had been shuffled across social groups (gender, age, and religion). People who lived in physical proximity but never really engaged each other were now talking about issues such as identity and purpose. In an adjoining room, another group engaged a group of college students, using games and experiential methods that kept people mainly on their feet.

The train-the-trainer program wrapped up the next day with a debrief that yielded moving reflections of impact. The live training the new trainers had delivered offered a great deal of learning about creating participant engagement and learning. The trainers learned much from each-other. They also saw that leadership development is about turning the learning over to participants, and facilitating learning rather than teaching content. They were also moved by the encounter with the largely underprivileged group they had worked with the day before. Their audience shared “amazing experiences,” sometimes offered a surprisingly deep understanding of leadership, and — when challenged to envision their futures without constraints — offered inspiring dreams.

We had much positive feedback about the crispness and depth of the toolkit (that it made the complex simple rather than simplistic) and the cycle of learning, doing, and reflection we had provided in the ToT. They appreciated our “non-training” approach.

In the month or so since the program concluded, we heard how the training has been incorporated into entrepreneurship programs in Hubli, citizen empowerment in Mumbai, and youth development efforts in Chennai. One of the trainers wrote: “Thank you for the kit, it is a very powerful tool and is an example of how knowledge can be disseminated at a fraction of the cost to benefit many who would otherwise have found it difficult to access such high quality learning.”

The train-the-trainer program is a small start to a challenge of great magnitude. Yet the toolkit represent what’s possible: how leadership development can, in the hands of tens of thousands of energized youth organizations, become a movement that unleashes the greater potential of the millions of young people to claim a brighter future.

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AmCham Connect interviewed Center for Creative Leadership’s EMEA MD Rudi Plettinx about the People in Aid report.

AmCham Connect spoke to Rudi Plettinx, VP and Managing Director of the EMEA region of the Center for Creative Leadership (www.ccl.org ) about a new survey looking at leadership and talent management in international aid organizations.

ACC: What motivated CCL to look at this sector? It’s quite different from your usual executive education client base, isn’t it?

RP: Our work around the world, particularly in Africa and India, puts us into working relationships with a number of International NGOs, and we thought we would benefit from a look at their leadership practices and challenges.

Leadership and Talent Development in International Humanitarian and Development Organizations is based on interviews with 37 international NGOs in Europe, Africa, Asia and the United States. We found that these NGOs face many of the same leadership and talent management challenges as the private sector, but they also have issues specific to not-for-profit groups charged with large-scale humanitarian missions.

Our partner for the survey was People in Aid (www.peopleinaid.org), a non-profit, global network of more than 180 member organizations dedicated to improving organizational effectiveness within the humanitarian and development sector worldwide. Their ethos and values are a good fit with CCL’s mission “to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide.”

ACC: Who participated in the survey?

RP: Those interviewed ranged from chief executives and members of management teams to HR directors and their direct reports. They often see the ‘people’ problems before anyone else, and try to figure out solutions within the constraints of their organizational structure and, more importantly, culture. Many of them were already rethinking who they are and what they do in the face of global economic upheaval and an unprecedented confluence of wars and natural disasters.

ACC: What was the biggest leadership issue?

RP: The number one failure of leadership at every level was lack of communication – up, down, and sideways. Part of that was a consistent failure to have ‘courageous conversations’ and deal with poor performers.

Ironically, there was also an issue of too much communication facilitated by social networking, which makes it difficult if not impossible to convey accurate messages and prevent damaging rumors from circulating around the world.

ACC: Did the economic downturn affect this sector as much as the private sector?

RP: The recession hit the international aid and development sector hard, but the upside was that it forced a more realistic assessment of leadership needs. The smartest organizations made cut-backs while keeping at least some training and development going even at the lowest point.

Competition with the private sector for recruitment is a major issue, but there’s evidence that as a result of the financial meltdown, the not-for-profit sector now looks more attractive to top performers – for job satisfaction as well as job security. But this means that the aid sector needs to be creative about reward packages, focusing not just on money but on professional opportunity and exceptional autonomy that come with humanitarian jobs.

ACC: What’s the outlook for the sector in terms of leadership and talent management?

RP: Our Leadership Beyond Boundaries (LBB) (www.leadbeyond.org ) work, which aims to make leadership development more affordable and accessible in the world, has shown us that successful International NGOs are adept at innovation in the face of challenge and change, and this survey reveals their recognition that leadership development is crucial.

As one of our LBB participants in Africa said: ‘Where you come from, this leadership training may result in better management and better business practices. Here in Uganda, this teaching has the potential to save lives.’
We’re confident that international aid and humanitarian organizations recognize the potential for leadership development to make a positive difference in the lives of the millions they serve.

The Center for Creative Leadership/People In Aid report can be downloaded at

http://www.ccl.org/leadership/capabilities/europe/index.aspx

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Andrés Alcayaga, who attended the LBB ANDE training applied the methods and models (such as Visual Explorer, Social Identity Mapping, Active Listening, and DAC theory) to offer a series of programs for mainly women entrepreneurs from less privileged backgrounds in the areas most affected by the 2010 earthquake in Chile. The programs included 8 separate week-long courses, two days of which were assigned to leadership, teamwork and networking. Each course had 20 participants in total. Andrés notes that what made the program so powerful was giving the entrepreneurs a means to learn from each-other’s experience. The following is an English translation of a report posted online: http://www.vertical.cl/home/noticia.php?id=77&Lang=es

Under the auspices of the Acompañar program, Andrés Alcayaga of Vertical delivered a highly impactful program specifically directed a micro- and small- enterprises in communities in the 6^th and 8^th regions of Chile.

The goal of the program was to contribute to the economic, social and emotional reconstruction of these areas affected by the February 27^th earthquake. The program provided entrepreneurs and small business owners with the administration and management tools needed to overcome problems related to starting up businesses once again. This was specifically focused on preparing these communities to once again get their businesses underway and to help them consolidate these after months of disruption following the earthquake. In addition, as important if not more so, the program sought to inform the group about ways to generate income in the short term.

Pablo Rivera, the leading force behind this initiative, emphasized that “we did not want this to be a ‘just another course’ which these microenterprises don’t really need, but one with true impact that delivered useful and practical tools for managing their businesses. That is what we have sought to deliver.” In order to achieve this, the program combined 50% theory with 50% practice. “Rather than just being a training session, we looked for ways to “accompany” them, to work along side them with their initiatives. For this, we used more of a “clinic” or workshop approach for SMEs, more individual and group consulting to deliver applicable advice,” noted Rivera.

Understanding that a key challenge that SMEs force is of a financial nature, during the final few sessions, representatives from Fondo Esperanza, Sercotec, Sence, Fosis, Corfo and the local municipalities through Dideco and Omil were invited to develop connections to channel support and financing between these organizations and the business owners. This in turn ensured that each of the groups developed relationships with individuals in these financing organizations, allowing for continued communication to guarantee access to financial support in the future.

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CCL’s Leadership Beyond Boundaries effort hosted a 5-day leadership train-the-trainer program for ANDE, a global network of organizations that work to propel entrepreneurship in emerging markets. The program was attended by 19 participants from 13 organizations working in some two-dozen countries around the world. The program, delivered by Lyndon Rego, Michael Hoppe & Janet Carlson, was designed to enable ANDE members and other organizations working in the small and growing businesses (SGB) sector to fold leadership development into their support for entrepreneurs.

There is increasing awareness of the importance of leadership skills to entrepreneurs. The effectiveness of entrepreneurs and their organizations is closely linked to the quality of leadership. Entrepreneurs must draw others to their vision and leverage the efforts of other dedicated individuals to build organizations that can adapt and grow. Despite this, there is little leadership development that is available to entrepreneurs and people in small and growing businesses, especially in the developing world. Existing leadership programs offered by executive education providers are neither accessible nor affordable to small and growing businesses.

The LBB train‐the‐trainer (ToT) program offered a means for the ANDE network to use its collective capacity to address this essential need. The five-day intensive program provided participants with core facilitation skills and content knowledge to deliver leadership development programs around the globe. The LBB ToT model is based on a methodology developed and tested by CCL in Ethiopia, India, Sudan, and the US that can be delivered at low cost with minimal amenities.

Participants who completed the program indicate plans to roll out the training in more than a dozen countries — including Chile, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Hong Kong, and Yemen — in the next 8 months.

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Reflections  on coaching in Ethiopia  – November 2010

by Mike Stimson, CCL Coach

It was nearly 40 years ago that I had worked for two years in a small town in South Eastern Ethiopia, so it was a great delight to be amongst the party of CCL coaches who gathered in Addis Ababa in November.  I have to admit that my excitement was tinged by a fear that I would be disappointed.  How wrong I was! There were still beggars, though many fewer and no elephantiasis on display as there had been then; there were still shouts of ‘ferengi’, but no longer crowds of children following us in amazement. Unfortunately, the beautiful smell of eucalyptus that used to waft across the city had disappeared with the deforestation of the slopes of the mountains that surround Addis, and make it so attractively situated. The shops still offered a bewildering array of local handicraft and the coffee was, as then, uniformly excellent. But what was striking was how vibrant the city appeared, with half completed hotel and office buildings rising everywhere, new businesses appearing daily and a confidence amongst the commercial people we met socially that, despite some government mistrust, they would prosper. Gradually, Amharic words came back and an evening visit to a restaurant reminded me not just of the bitingly sour flavours of the local food, injera and wat, but of the wonderful ululation and dancing that can be heard and seen in all parts of Ethiopia. Above all, there was a sense of purpose, of a country going places and being sure of its own ability to survive in the changing world. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘profitability’ were words that cropped up throughout our stay.

It wasn’t just the city that seemed to be thriving. CCL has a strong team there under the leadership of Steadman Harrison. He and his colleagues not only made sure that we were looked after during the day and entertained in the evenings, but also gave us the chance to contribute to discussions with Non Governmental Organisations, with CCL about where it might be going in its work in East Africa and to meet other training consultancy companies. The opportunities seem to be endless: the limitations only the amount of work each person could undertake and getting the right entry to the UN organisations. A personal highlight was to meet some local coaches at the regular meeting that Steadman arranges. It was humbling to hear how one particular voluntary organisation was working across Ethiopia with about 5000 young people, who had left school without jobs or the possibility of further education, to release their creative entrepreneurial spirit.

I am still haunted by the background Steadman gave me on a Senior Coach/Trainer on this project. When at school this person, then an adolescent, had lost interest in learning and had begun to play around in every lesson. His mother, who was working hard carrying bundles of wood to keep him in school, was distressed to be taken aside one day by the teacher and told ‘Don’t waste your money on keeping your son at school, he only causes trouble’. The following day the boy was told by his mother that he would not be going to school. Instead he would be accompanying her in her work. They walked the seven kilometres to the forest and the boy helped his mother collect sticks. He then walked back with her to the market and watched as she sold her bundle of wood for the equivalent of two dollars. ‘OK, I understand the sacrifices you are making for me mother’ he said. ‘Oh, no you don’t ‘, was the answer and his mother then forced him to do the same journey over again, as she would do every day to keep them alive and him in school. With tears falling down his face, he vowed to alter his whole approach and ensure he valued his mother’s sacrifice. The final comment was ‘That is why I now coach others.’

Appropriately, one of the local coaches to whom I was talking confided he was going to open a bakery the following week, whilst still continuing to coach. And that seemed just one more example of the initiatives that I witnessed on the streets of Addis, and that I heard about over lunch and after session from the microfinance experts on the workshop.

Ethiopia, someone remarked, is the Belgium of Africa and like Belgium it has a considerable intergovernmental presence – here, the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity. Indeed, our coaching was in the United Nations walled encampment in a training centre that resembled a large modern hotel, complete with central well, security checks ad infinitum and numerous lunch rooms. The occasion for our coaching was a conference and training session organised by Capital Plus Exchange who are a non -profit organisation ‘committed to poverty reduction through unleashing the potential of small micro-entrepreneurs through access to finance.’  They had brought together under the umbrella of the Small Business Banking network a large number of bankers and experts from the small business finance sector to hold a CEO and Leaders Roundtable. Participation was predominantly pan-African, with some representatives from India, Pakistan, Mongolia, the Philippines, the UK and the USA. This was to be followed by four days of training of which CCL was doing a two and a half day programme on leadership including, and our reason for being there, a coaching session of ninety minutes with each participant.

I had three coachees, and the first thing that struck me was how much more flexible we needed to be than on a typical LDP programme. For one of my participants I had an almost complete set of information, though noticeably no feedback on the 360 from the manager of the coachee. The second participant had sent in a bio only. For the third I had nothing except a name. All were involved in the microfinance industry  – one from the largest national bank  in Kenya, another from Tanzania and, most intriguing of all, a Kenyan business man who with his expatriate partner had borrowed some money from a bank and now had branches lending to small businesses in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda and was thinking of expanding elsewhere. He, incidentally, had only come for the one day conference but had got so involved he had signed up on the spot for the rest of the programme.

Normal expectations of the managerial context had to be set in abeyance. The lady who had completed the forms fully had mentioned she had direct reports numbering 130. ‘Obviously some mistake,’ I thought and explored what she meant by management structures.  ‘I really do have 130 direct reports,’ said my coachee, ‘We expanded so rapidly I just had to take on that responsibility. However we are discussing putting in 16 regional managers who might then report to me but they keep leaving to join the multi national banks.’

Assumptions, too, about coaching had to be reconsidered. Africa is a high power culture where managers are expected to tell their subordinates what the answers are and anybody who does not do this can be regarded as weak within the organisation. Hence the message that the coach would help the individual to come to their own conclusions and the benefits of so doing may need to be reinforced more firmly than usual.

The following morning I was lucky enough to be asked by the trainers to run a short session on telephone coaching – what it was and what the participants might expect from it and how they might prepare.  The questions flowed thick and fast, not just on telephone coaching but on coaching generally and what was clear was how skeptical a small number of the leaders were about facilitative coaching. And yet, where else would you get feedback like the following heartfelt comment from one of my coachees, ‘When I said my prayers this morning I thanked God for our conversation yesterday’.

My personal conclusions and thoughts on coaching in this particular African context were as follows:

1.    Flexibility is vital, as instanced above.

2.    Given the high power context in which many of the leaders operate ,we may need to do more preparatory work on what coaching is and why leaders find it useful than we would do elsewhere

3.    The other thing that became apparent in the training sessions that I watched, and it reinforced something I had learnt when training in Africa, participants are much less inhibited than we in Europe would be about acting things out. This is good for role-playing in coaching and we might need to think about how we can do more of this.

4.    ‘We don’t give feedback in Africa’ remarked one of the participants, and went on to illustrate how many leaders felt their role was not to build but to denigrate.

5.    I am intrigued by the importance of storytelling and the use of proverbs in African culture. Time and again during the training sessions I noted people using stories and proverbs to reinforce a point. Hence my framing quotes at the top and bottom of this article.

6.    Telephone coaching

Only one of my coachees looks likely to take up the offer of two telephone coaching sessions. Despite several   e-mails, and some discussion on when it might take place, neither of the others have taken advantage of it. And I understand from other coaches they have had the same disappointing experience. I think, as well as preparing leaders for coaching,   we need to do more on how useful telephone coaching is. Perhaps we need to investigate whether there are any practical considerations, of which we are not aware, that inhibit telephone coaching?

7.    Storytelling

Given the importance of storytelling in African culture, I wonder if we might experiment with using some in our coaching. It would have to be not prescriptive but what I would call ‘Interpretive storytelling’. We would need to phrase our stories carefully but the coachee might interpret as they wish in relation to their problem.

I heard the story below on the workshop and, although it is more powerful in its oral version, thought that it had relevance to leadership and coaching, interpret it as you will.

The Story of the Beggar and the Businessman

Every day a businessman passed a beggar sitting on a box at the end of a commercial street in the heart of the city. He gradually got to know the beggar, and realised that though he was able bodied he was quite content to sit there all day asking passers-by for money. When asked how long he had been doing it, he replied that it had been for thirty years since the previous beggar had suddenly died. He added that he felt he was very lucky to inherit this particular area, as it produced a good regular income.   ‘Why sit on a box’ the businessman asked,’ if you can walk?’ ‘This box was given to me by the previous occupant and I need to sit on it to mark my area,’ was the firm reply. The business man found himself worrying day and night about his beggar. One sleepless night he became convinced that there was something in the box, but on the following day, no matter how hard he tried, could not persuade the beggar to open it. Eventually one morning when his frustration go the better of him, he pushed the man to one side and tore open the box, where carefully hidden inside they found to their amazement all the gold the previous beggar had collected over the many years he had been begging. ‘If only I had looked inside,’ was the final comment.

For me that story sums up my feeling about the conference and many of the people I met. They were discovering their power and were energetically pushing in all directions to do so. Above all, I felt privileged that with the other coaches we may have helped to move all of us, not just the participants, in the direction of this Mozambican proverb –

‘If you want to run quickly run alone, if you want to run further run together’.

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