Leadership Development Services

Leadership Development ServicesAt The World Bank Institute

THE World Bank

Leading for ResultsIt takes good leadership to achieve lasting results in the drive to reduce poverty and im prove lives. Political decision-makers face daunting challenges as they strive to deliver on their promises and meet their citizens’ expectations for improved services and expanded opportunities. The challenge of leading for results is acutely felt in fragile and conflict-affected states, where the

population’s needs are urgent, but where government capacity to deliver critical programs is badly eroded. Leadership is equally critical for newly-elected regimes, or for any government attempting large-scale reform efforts, such as decentralization.

In Monterrey, Marrakech, and Paris, the international community embraced the principles of country ownership and accountability for results. It is increasingly apparent that these principles require greater attention to strengthening the commitment and capacities of political leaders, who must be able to set goals and priorities, to mobilize consensus and to engage and inspire their governments to implement changes and deliver on their promises.

Responding to a Global Need: WBI’s Leadership Development Services

Leadership Development Services, offered by WBI’s Global Programs Unit, includes two key components. At the country level, WBI sets up incubator projects through which countries gain experience in managing development programs toward specific results. Lessons from those experiences can be applied to broader reform efforts in those countries and can inform leadership development programs globally. The second component is

a Global Leadership Initiative, a far-reaching research project that takes stock of leadership development efforts worldwide.

WBI’s support at the country level engages top-level government policymakers in changing the ways that priorities are set, problems are solved, and decisions are made. The change in leadership models translates to more effective operational teams, capable of delivering measurable results.

The program aims to expand knowledge across three dimensions, all crucial to effective leadership:

Vision: The capacity to engage constituencies in setting priorities, to identify risks and opportunities in achieving agreed-to outcomes, and to motivate others to work to achieve the desired changes.

Effectiveness: The capacity to diagnose underlying problems, prioritize among competing challenges, find solutions, mobilize stakeholders and achieve measurable results.

Accountability: A commitment to the common good, and a willingness to champion relationships that increase transparency, voice and participation, and inspire trust in institutions.

When a country requests WBI leadership support, a Bank team works with local partners to organize two components:

High-level consultations provide a venue for bringing together teams across government with political leaders to establish specific performance targets, and to agree on their respective roles

“Change and

transformation

means a fundamental

break from the past,

formulating a new

vision based upon

new concepts and

structures.”

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President, Liberia

in achieving them. These sessions are designed to strengthen the capacity for adaptive leadership, where officials must fashion solutions to unforeseen problems, by both drawing on past experience and by tailoring innovative approaches to the specific challenges at hand.

The Rapid Results Approach equips operational teams with a proven methodology for diagnosing institutional barriers to

progress and empowering teams to find innovative solutions.

Leadership teams engage in learning by doing and draw lessons from the experience of achieving short term goals, in line with strategic priorities. This feedback informs future implementation and policy. As a leadership intervention, the RRA, used in countries around the world, has helped leaders to engage operational teams in government to achieve tangible results in as little as 100 days.

This approach offers two important advantages: At the operational level, more effective approaches to problem-solving are adopted; at the policy level, the exercise exposes institutional constraints that need to be addressed. In the experience of Morocco, projects managed under the Rapid Results Approach were three times as likely to achieve their intended results as those that weren’t.

Leaders who participate in WBI’s program acquire tools for setting priorities, diagnosing institutional constraints, sustaining an orientation toward results, and holding key actors at all levels accountable. This approach can be tailored to a variety of country contexts.

Combining Country Work and Global ResearchThe program draws on country-level interventions, as well as research and global partnerships, to strengthen leadership development.

Country WorkWBI’s leadership support varies according to the needs of particular countries. Where successful, this leverages greater effectiveness across sectors and throughout a country’s development agenda.

In Madagascar, WBI Leadership Development Services were part of a larger effort, incorporating a broad-based Bank assistance strategy, which supported the new government in a transformation process that is credited with turning around a complex and ineffective bureaucracy. The transition laid the foundation for a period of accelerated growth in Madagascar, along with improved services to the population.

“Technical problems can be solved with technical solutions. But on the other hand, there is a kind of problem we call ‘adaptive problems,’ and almost every problem you encounter as a minister or as a government or as a president is an

adaptive problem.”

Haja Razafinjatovo,Finance Minister, Madagascar

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

RRA projects Non-RRAprojects

Not launched

Achieved 5%:29%

Achieved 30%:59%

Achieved 60%:99%

Fully achieved

Morocco Improves Outcomes with the Rapid Results Approach

THE World Bank

In Burundi, a multi-sector leadership program brought a new results orientation to a cross-section of programs within the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy. Among the concrete outcomes was a breakthrough in delivering textbooks to schools in support of universal primary education. For the first time ever, textbooks arrived in time for the first day of school. This RRA pilot was eventually scaled up across the country. In Liberia, the leadership program focused on the budget process, and the need

for executive and legislative branches of government to adapt entirely new approaches.

In Morocco, the leadership effort targets the country’s National Human Development Initiative, a multi-faceted program designed to attack poverty, social vulnerability and exclusion. WBI is introducing new leadership roles of vision and effectiveness at the sub-national and local levels, as well as new participative processes, and greater accountability.

Partnership and ResearchThe Global Leadership Initiative (GLI), a research project underway at WBI, is documenting good practice and lessons from experience in providing capacity development to high-level political leadership. The project, supported by a working group of donors, including UNDP, CIDA, DfID, the French Foreign Ministry and the World Bank, explores how donor organizations and others have designed and delivered leadership development interventions to support high level decision-makers in their efforts to drive change and achieve results. Research focuses on the types of approaches being used to support political leadership in relation to the organizational/operational levels of government and civil society in pursuit of development outcomes.

This study aims to raise the profile of leadership development work on the global agenda: bringing together leaders and leadership development practitioners around shared interests, strengthening the impact of leadership development interventions, and mobilizing new resources in support of further engagement around good leadership.

Following a 2007 World Bank-led Capacity Day devoted to leadership issues, WBI convened a forum to explore how leadership development services can improve development results. Delegations form Africa, Asia, and the Middle East produced case studies documenting experiences with the Rapid Results Approach as a tool for accelerating institutional change.

WBI, through its Leadership Development Services, is expanding this knowledge base, through research and country work to build a better understanding of how leadership development services can support effective and accountable government in a variety of countries.

Visit our website at: www.worldbank.org/capacity/leadershipLeadership Development ServicesGlobal Programs Unit (WBIGP)World Bank InstituteWorld Bank Group1818 H St NW, Washington, DCTel: 202.473.4636, Fax: 202.522.1492Contact Cia Sjetnan at: csjetnan@worldbank.org

“You always judge a

leader by who is left

after the person is

gone—what sort of

network of leaders

has developed?

That’s where

institutions are

important.”

Peter Senge, author, management expert