Modern Karema Musiimenta is the Uganda country director for STiR Education, an International NGO. Photo | Edgar R Batte
Leadership. Modern Karema Musiimenta is the Uganda country director for STiR Education, an International NGO. He sits on the board of the Regional Education & Learning Initiative (RELI Africa), a regional body bringing together education civil society organisations in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania working on education quality and equity. He also chairs several boards as well as a leadership and governance consultant.
What traits do you look out for when hiring?
Attitude. When you report to work, have the right attitude. Does the work you do align with your personal values? Then skillset. Do you have the skills required to do the job? Most of our work needs programme officers and their main role is stakeholder engagement, training and coaching. I believe that skills can be learnt, but having the attitude to learn to grow in the role is key. So, to me, the two big catches are 70 percent attitude and 30 percent skills.
I never believe in knowledge. You can move from engineering and start teaching or be a teacher trainer as long as you have the can-do attitude and growth mindset. I am a social scientist by training, but I know a lot about pedagogy, teacher-training and curriculum reforms now because I invested a lot in learning about teaching and pedagogy. So, have the right attitude and other things will be added unto you.
How can a leader’s traits or style influence the culture of an organisation?
I will answer that question from mainly the leadership and governance angle. My first lesson would be the spirit of leadership. When you see people, they do what their leader is doing. The leader sets the pace, the tone of voice, the dresscode of the entity he or she manages. That is why some people in the education space say, ‘Show me the headteacher and I will show you their school’. If you find a leader who is laid back, you will find the staff laid back. If you find a heavy-lifting leader, what people call the autocrat, you will find that is the culture of the organisation.
You do not have to come to STiR; you just need to see and observe me for an hour, and you will know the culture at STiR.
The best way to know the leader is to observe how people interact, communicate, move, and all that. My other catch on this leadership and organisational culture work is that as a leader, when you enter a room, and people keep quiet and start working, just know that you are not effective as a leader. This is because that means that for them to work, you have to be in the room. That is not sustainable. I do a lot of leadership and governance consultancy.
One of my lessons from interacting with different organisations is that you are more effective as a leader where work is done with or without your physical presence in the room. I think that is a good reflection point for all leaders. Are your staff working because you are physically present, or because they understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, and so do not need you to execute their individual roles.
To me, the more irrelevant a leader is for things to happen in the organisation, the more effective they are as leaders. The inverse learning is, if you are sick for a day and you are still getting phone calls on how to run organisational business, you are very ineffective in your leadership journey.
Who has anchored your career to mould you into the leader you have become?
At NSSF, it was Chandi Jamwa and Richard Byarugaba, and the two are for totally different reasons. Jamwa was coming from the consultancy side; having been a consultant at PWC, and so he came in and transformed NSSF from a traditional government parastatal to an entity run based on New Public Management principles such as target-based work.
Before he came in, NSSF was a government parastatal by all definitions. So, I learned from him the ability to turn things around and make everybody work towards achieving some target.
He was a human resource-centered person, and he was always looking out for staff and their welfare, ensuring people were happy. In comes Byarugaba, who was the total opposite of Jamwa. With a finance and banking background, his mindset was cash inflow and outflow bring in as much as possible and let out as little as possible. It was during his tenure that we started hearing of NSSF as a financial organisation-we always thought of it as a pension and benefits organisation. I loved his ability to make decisions, knowing that they would be hard, but good for the financial health of the organisation. He communicated with them and turned around the organisation financially.
At Job Connect, the founder, Doreen Mwesigye could move into a room, seal a deal, and get a contract signed. She is good at pitching business ideas, getting contracts, managing them and also, hiring the right people for the right jobs.
At Educate!, the former managing director, Hawah Nabbuye, was good at getting results from people. Here, at STiR Education, my boss, Jenny Willmot, is an easy to-go-to person. You can comfortably go to her with your problems and there is no boss-junior feeling. She has set a culture where people are comfortable and are human beings-free to get to her when things fail, when they make mistakes. So clearly, I am a mixture of different leadership styles depending on what is required, based on the different learnings I have got from other senior leaders I have observed and worked with.
How have you inculcated the leadership nuggets into the workplace?
As a leadership team, we have training and capacity development sessions for staff, facilitated by both internal and external facilitators. That is very important because at the end of the day, it is those sessions where people learn what they do not know, but also, we as the leadership team influence organisational culture.
We have a system of needs assessment where we find out what the issues or gaps are, and then find either internal or external trainers who build the capacity of the team in a specific area.
We also bring in external speakers. It might not be a training issue; it could be something related to mental health or etiquette, so we get somebody who comes in to have a talk about that topic.
The other month, we got somebody from Parliament to talk about etiquette because you cannot be dealing with stakeholders, and you do not have etiquette.
I run a consultancy firm called M enta Leadership Academy that is building the capacity of mainly local NGOs in Uganda, partly because I believe I have been favoured to work and get exposure from mainly International NGOs, and yet I have interacted with most local organisations and they lack a number of things, such as financial management policies and processes, programme strategy, people-management or a specific gap for which I design training needs.
If there was one person, dead or alive you would invite for a cup of tea who would it be?
Minister of Education Janet Museveni. She has a passion for education but after several years of running the ministry, some challenges are still so persistent, yet if only she had fixed them in year one or term one of her time as a minister, she would have sailed through.
The question of children’s mental health, especially in urban centres, where children are picked from their homes at 4.30am and they go back home late in the evening needs to be sorted. Clearly, as a minister who has power and authority, but is also the mother of the nation in her capacity as First Lady, that should be prioritised. You need a system where children are required to be at school at 8 or 9am. What is so urgent that a child in baby class is going to do at school at 5am?
With simple communication, school vans could stop carrying children at that time. The State can enforce that. The question of teacher quality right from the training side - you still have teachers who are coming from colleges and universities but are really not of good quality. If the teacher is not good quality, clearly, they are not going to create a learner who is good quality, and that issue is key. Can I as a parent trust that a teacher trained from any university or teacher training institute has the same quality?
Then, the question of teacher deployment. You still have the “good teachers” in Kampala and the urban centres. What is the plan for improving rural education? If the good ones are being kept for the Gayazas and Budos, the “poor quality teachers” are sent to the rural schools. There has to be a system for the deployment of teachers so that the ‘giants’ in the education space are not holding onto the very good ones.
When you are not working, how do you relax?
When I am not working, I am with my family, or reading a leadership book, at church, or in the village dealing with improving my school and other neighbouring schools, because they are very much affected by all the challenges affecting rural schools in this country.
