Sylvia's Journal

At 6 AM the car park outside my window is teeming with people carrying small and big bundles. Taxis and small buses stand ready to take people wherever they want to go. It is Saturday morning and time to travel. I am told that much of this travel is to relatives far and wide to attend funerals and weddings, events for which people are spending more than they can afford and go deeply into debt.  William has told me about this disastrous social trend that drags middle class people below the poverty line. Apparently it is the Christians more than the Muslims who engage in this Ghanaian version of keeping up with the Joneses.

Like any gathering of people, it is also a good place to sell stuff or to preach; both are happening in a cacophony of voices, colors and sounds: it’s pure eye candy. I try to capture it on my small low performing camera. Where are my daughters with their equipment and skills when I need them?

William drove us back to Accra after the completion of the retreat, more or less on schedule. The HR director and the DG joined us at mid morning, something we had hoped but did not want to believe until we actually saw them. They arrived just when the participants, in self selected teams, had made commitments to take a small bite out of a series of huge challenges, observed during the visits we made earlier, in cross functional teams: one group took a bite out of the human resource challenge, another out of the resource management challenge, another sat down to tackle infrastructure challenges, a fourth team took on quality assurance and the fifth team decided to get their own house in order to improve the functioning of the national health insurance scheme. All challenges are enormous and represent nearly intractable tangles of interests, agendas, stakeholders, schemes, models, languages, and a history of piecemeal and failed attempts.

We call these leadership projects that give senior leaders a chance to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of those working at the operational level and improve their management and leadership skills. It is opportunity to show that they can make a difference for the levels below that keep pointing fingers at them. There is a tendency to want to take on everything at once and cover the entire country, in the process making the task so difficult that everyone gets paralyzed or feels so impotent that any action feels risky. This, I believe, is the cause of much of the inertia that we see and that people complain about.

I also believe that the inertia comes from not seeing it; everyone else does the same. I provoked the participants a few times on their passivity when their team members did not show up at agreed upon times. No one took action; no one called his or her team mates, even after dropping a few hints. People want to be congratulated on being on time themselves; when I told them it doesn’t count until their teams are complete there was this vacant look on their faces. It made me want to wave a large flag in front of them, shouting, ‘anybody home?’

They all say they want to change this habit they consider dysfunctional. But it is lodged deep in their cells.  It will take an enormous and sustained effort to dislodge it. As Mark Twain observes: “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs, a step at the time.” We did a lot of coaxing these last few days.

Many of my observations about senior leaders were confirmed by my friend Seth who is now high up in the ministry of education. He happened to be in the neighborhood of our hotel yesterday and we met in the hotel bar and talked about his new role and his past history with the regime that is in power again. Seth and I met at a conference in Zanzibar some 3 years ago and have stayed in touch. He will be one of my sounding boards for my theories about senior leaders, since he is one himself.

I am disobeying doctor’s orders and slept the entire night without my sling. I can’t stand it any longer. The physician’s assistant had told me some weeks ago that he usually lets patients take the sling off at night after four weeks. In two days it will be four weeks. I let my body guide me: the discomfort is less without the sling than with it.  I can move my shoulders in several directions without any pain.  I assume this means it is not frozen, something I was worried about.