Welcoming the Liberia NCD team
“I’m an introvert, surrounded by extroverts,” chuckles Dr Anthony Tucker, Director of the Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD) division in the Liberia Ministry of Health. It is a light-hearted moment during the exercise on team member strengths and differences on Day 2 of the team’s onboarding workshop with AMP Health in Monrovia in January 2022 – work supported by a grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust. But the moment also conveys an important message about preferred working styles, which is not lost on the astute medical doctor-turned administrator tasked with marshalling the country’s response to NCDs such as Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers.
After the exercise Dr Tucker shares with his team that, as an introvert who likes to make decisions only when he has all the facts, he now understands why he sometimes gets frustrated with his team, many of whom are extroverts with a more exploratory problem-solving style. Dr Tucker offers to be more patient, but in return he asks the team to do more research and planning before bringing a project or decision to him for his input. It is a key moment.
Luckily for Dr Tucker, he is not the only methodical planner in the room. His team’s new AMP Health Management Partner, Ande Hyeroba, also prefers a more considered decision-making style. Hyeroba will be embedded with the team for the next two years as a thinking partner, coach, and facilitator, to build team and personal effectiveness. The AMP model and Hyeroba are new to Dr Tucker and his team, so much of the focus of the three-day workshop is on introducing the AMP management partner model.
AMP are displaying their commitment to in-country support with a five-person delegation. Tendo Kiribakka, AMP’s Deputy Director for Country Support, and Country Support Manager Rihlat Said Mohamed explain to Dr Tucker’s team how AMP partners with government health teams to help them achieve their goals. Chief Learning Officer Klara Michal and Senior Learning Expert Rhys Johnstone are there to model AMP’s experiential learning style and facilitate sessions with the team on personal awareness, team effectiveness, planning, and prioritisation.
The workshop is also an opportunity for the Management Partner and the rest of the AMP team to understand the Liberia NCD team. Dr Tucker articulates the team’s mission and explains the context in which they work, the challenges that they face and their aspirations for the future. Now it is the turn of the AMP team to nod heads as they appreciate the importance of NCD team and the resource challenges they face. The workshop gets a boost when Deputy Minister of Health and Chief Medical Officer, Dr Francis Kateh, addresses the session. Dr Kateh underlines the importance of capacity building in the health department and the importance of tackling diseases such as diabetes in Liberia – and endorses the AMP model of a capacity building partnership.
The payoff of the workshop is felt immediately: the week after the session Dr Tucker decides to make some changes to how the team work together. In return for the team gathering more information before approaching him, he will allow room for spontaneous feedback in meetings and brief cross-office chats with colleagues will be encouraged, to cater for the extroverts on the team.
Another almost instant impact of the onboarding workshop is that the team is using the prioritisation technique modelled in the workshop to conduct their annual planning meeting, in which each co-ordinator presents what they consider the most critical activities for 2022.
The investment in establishing ways of working together has also paid off: Hyeroba reports that in the weeks following the onboarding workshop, team members have approached him for coaching on report writing, goal setting, and planning, rather than asking him to do this work himself – providing him with an opportunity to support the team in building skills that they can immediately put into practice.