Development Solutions Consultancy

Leadership is the capacity to influence people through inspiration. This inspiration is generated by passion whose source is a value based vision. When you have passion, you can inspire people and when you inspire people, you can influence them. Just, what is passion and how is it related to leadership?

Passion is a compelling emotion or feeling that gives us energy. It so happens whenever we have passion, we seem to get this stamina that stays with us all the time and does not go away. We experience passion whenever we are enjoying what we are doing. When we become passionate about what we do, we strive to achieve what we desire. If our desire to lead people so that they can grow and become more by performing to their best, we begin to build influence with the people we work with. Continue reading...

For any organization, effective leadership and management are crucial for ensuring organizational success. Not only do these processes ensure that organizations focus on doing the right things but also on doing them right to the best advantage and impact on their customers.

Realizing this, the Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (TATO) commissioned us to conduct Leadership and Management Training for its members.

The prestigious umbrella organization, TATO, has a total of over 250 members who are either tour operators or tourist hotels. As tour operators are, in most cases, also tourist hotel operators, these constitute the majority of members with hotel operators per se constituting about ten percent. The training was developed for company executives and senior managers following identification of training needs conducted by TATO. Continue reading...

As part of the public service reforms, the government has been pushing, with little success for over a decade, the implementation of an open employee performance appraisal system. Despite efforts to have the system implemented by government ministries and parastatal organizations, there is hardly any public organization that has fully implemented it, which can stand up as an example to be emulated. This failure begs the obvious question: why has implementation not taken root despite the talk? To answer this question it is important to understand that an employee performance appraisal is just a cog in a wheel; in order for it to succeed, there are other supporting systems that ought to be put in place too.

There are two key supporting systems or pre-requisites for the effective implementation of an open and objective employee performance appraisal system that have not been fully met under the current implementation environment. It is virtually impossible to implement the current employee performance appraisal system if these pre-requisites are not met. The first pre-requisite is the institutionalization of work planning at the individual employee level. Continue reading...

Attitude is an inward feeling, that’s expressed by outward behavior. Attitude can also be defined as the composite of an individual’s thoughts, feelings and actions. Attitude is therefore about, how a person is and that overflows into how he acts. If you study the lives of many successful people to determine what qualities made them successful, it will be clear to you that they all have strong attitudinal qualities. Many people have well developed skills, but their attitude hinders them from successfully talking on great opportunities.

Our attitude is therefore the primary force that will determine whether we succeed or fail. This simple but important knowledge seems to be absent in our educational systems and as a result, most people are hindered from moving forward towards higher and more significant achievements. Good attitudes among a team do not guarantee a team’s success, but bad attitudes guarantee its failure. Continue reading...

A Scheme of Service is a document used in the management of staff seniority, promotion, career progression and remuneration in public organizations in Tanzania. It stipulates the career path of an employee by outlining progression within a job position and between related job positions within an organization. Each job position is divided typically into three grades whereby an employee moves up to the next grade on the basis of completing a number of years; often three years. For example a job of Accountant may have three job positions namely Accountant (iii), (ii) and (i) with (iii) being the lowest. Each grade represents a senior position with a higher salary scale. An employee is promoted from Accountant (iii) to Accountant (ii) upon completion of three years in grade (iii) and so on. As progression between grades is fairly automatic the key criterion for promotion is age on the job. In this way the Scheme of Service has served to strengthen rewarding employees based on age on the job rather than performance.

It ought to be mentioned that the three grades in a job position are exactly the same in job content. Since promotion is, by definition, moving up to a higher level of duties and responsibilities, promotion between grades does not meet this essential promotion criterion. Continue reading...

Successful people are good time managers; in fact, they understand that time management is really life management. Time management is self-discipline in action. The purpose of managing your time well is to enhance and improve the quality of your life. The most important things in a person’s life are their health, their peace of mind and their relationships. Life is all about managing your time well so that you can do the things that are most important to you. This means that, it is very important to know what our values and priorities are.

The best way to start is by developing goals and getting clear on what we want to accomplish. It’s been found that, the top 1% of all successful people have very clear written goals. Having done that, we then prioritize our goals and develop the necessary action plans to achieve them. The next step is to prioritize the developed action plans. We utilize such aids as the Pareto Principle in ensuring our effectiveness. Continue reading...

The late author and teacher Napoleon Hill spent 20 years studying the lives of 500 very successful men and women in the early 1900’s. Most of these men and women were millionaires. He found out that success can be outlined in a simple formula that anyone would be able to understand and follow if they choose to. “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve”, is one of Hill’s famous expressions.

Hill was absolutely right for in today’s world it is clear that people who have limiting beliefs, hardly tap into their potential which leads them to take mediocre actions and ultimately getting mediocre results. Once they see their mediocre results, their limiting beliefs become even more strengthened, they tap much less into their potential which leads them to taking further poor actions and they keep on getting poor results. This failure cycle continues unless their limiting beliefs are changed. Continue reading...

According to the Tanzania Development Vision 2025 (TDV2025), Tanzania will be characterized by five key attributes come 2025. They are: high quality of livelihood; peace, stability and unity; good governance; a well-educated and learning society; and a competitive economy capable of producing sustainable growth and shared benefits. With respect to a well-educated and learning society the vision envisages, “a nation whose people are ingrained with a developmental mindset and competitive spirit. These attributes are driven by education and knowledge and are critical in enabling the nation effectively utilize knowledge in mobilizing domestic resources for the provision of people’s basic needs …”

While education is provided in schools and colleges in the form of information, learning implies a continuing process of inquiry, answers and further inquiry that goes on in the course of our lives. Through this process knowledge which never existed before is created. Unlike information which is available knowledge that can be retrieved from somewhere, knowledge is required information that is not currently available as such has to be created or generated. Continue reading...

To move from where we are to where we want to be in our careers requires us to take different sets of actions. Change is our own personal responsibility. We only got one life to live so we have to get over ourselves and make it count. Most people get stuck and they keep doing things the same way because that’s how they’ve been told to do. When change has to happen there is always fear.

We are always afraid to try something new, we are afraid that we might make the first big mistake and be pointed out for it. The reality is that people who don’t do anything automatically loose. Now when you take action you may make some mistakes, in fact chances are that you probably will at some point but bear in mind the richness in experience you will now possess that will aid greatly in your coming future endeavors. Continue reading...

The use of data and information is still limited in Tanzanian public organizations. It is not uncommon to see organizations prepare strategic plans without the aid of data and information. Obviously, strategic plans prepared in this way are not strictly strategic and consequently they do not impact the organizations. Long term effects of poor data and information usage leads to non–responsive management resulting into poor organizational performance and even total organizational collapse. Glaring evidence of this is from the public business enterprises formed in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies but which collapsed and had to be privatized twenty or so years later because they could not respond to their changing business environments.

It may well be argued that even currently there are some public institutions which exist only because they are legal entities and not because their services are demanded by those who benefit from them. They simply survive because of supply based funding. Such organizations have, unknowingly, lost relevance to their customers a long time ago. But why is it that public organizations do not use data and information during strategic planning and the normal management process? Continue reading...