Celebrating Nuru Ethiopia Leadership Team Success in 2014

What an amazing year. Looking back on everything that the team has worked through last year, we have had some incredible achievements. First of all, to speak broadly about the entire Nuru team, leadership development has been quickly on the rise. Having already created their programs and organizing the yearly rollout of activities, managers are swiftly growing into their leadership roles and ensuring all program activities are executed on time and in the most effective manner. Managers have quickly harnessed and developed effective project management skills and team members now look to them not just as managers, but as mentors. And Nuru Ethiopia team members are rapidly increasing their capacity and growing as development professionals.

Feedback has become a very important part of the Nuru Ethiopia work culture. Teams not only share freely and openly between each other in order to encourage professional development, but team members have also carried this culture into their personal lives and relationships with friends and family members. An open culture of feedback has proven not only helpful for working relationships, but also fostering the kind of thoughtful and productive atmosphere for all. Feedback is one of the most powerful tools that all Nuru team members identify with and practice on a daily basis. We can attribute much of the leadership development, thus far, to being transparent and sincere in our daily activities.

Regarding the Leadership team specifically, we’ve seen big achievements in facilitation skills, time management and teamwork to achieve an intended goal. Of course, we always believed that team members in the Leadership team had these skills latent. Now, however, having practiced, received targeted and honest feedback, and learned about the finer points of project management, their capacity has immensely improved. Leadership Training Officers have become seasoned and proficient facilitators who understand both all elements involved in creating trainings and also how to manage the dynamic contributions from diverse groups of participants. Team members can also now manage a training room accordingly to how much time they have allotted for each exercise, to accomplish goals and reach a shared understanding of objectives. And the coordination and delegation of independent tasks between team members has vastly improved, such that now all team members trust and rely on each other to ensure that our set targets are accomplished.

Also, we’ve seen a huge step in the right direction for one of our key focuses this past year: taking initiative. The Leadership team discussed this topic at the end of 2013, highlighting it as one of the major areas for improvement that would contribute to overall goal achievement and leadership development. Team members have analyzed and discussed the benefits of taking initiative to solve problems and complete tasks. The results of which can now be seen in our ability to quickly resolve programmatic issues and triumph over difficulties. All in all, we’ve seen some awesome progress, a fantastic year for leadership development, and we are looking forward to a new year and new challenges.