To whom it may concern:
This correspondence constitutes as a letter of recommendation as a result of the work Ms. Tazim Elkington performed for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Program Office based in Kenya. Ms. Elkington ‘s outstanding performance as a professional facilitator and organizational development expert was instrumental in improving the teamwork, internal group dynamics and results orientation of the twenty-one staff members.
To provide background and context USAID Kenya is a strategic U. S. foreign policy priority in the Horn of Africa. It is the seventh largest recipient of U.S . foreign assistance in the world and the largest recipient of USAID assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa. USA ID/Kenya manages a robust development assistance program totaling $476 million in fiscal year (FY) 2011. Kenya is a focus country for Presidential and Agency Initiatives: Feed the Future, Global Health, and Global Climate Change. Development assistance operations are led by Team Leaders for Economic Growth, Health, Education and Youth, and Democracy. There are 174 mission staff, 13 5 of which are Kenyans; the rest are Americans.
The Program Office includes a staff of 21 organized in three teams: budget and planning; performance management; and communications and outreach. The Program Office oversees Mission compliance with Agency guidelines for strategic and operational planning and reporting, mission-wide budget allocations and Congressional requests, and performance monitoring. It ensures effective communication of development results to Kenyan stakeholders and Washington policy makers. It plays a lead role in promoting and monitoring and serves as backstop support to every technical office.
Ms. Elkington quickly grasped the complexity of the functions of the Program Office and immediately built a positive rapport with staff. She conducted on-line surveys, structured interviews, then, based on her findings, recommended that consensus be built on the agenda for the five day retreat. She led a one and a half day planning session where negative group dynamics emerged that she addressed creatively and with the right aplomb and tact. She then planned the five day retreat, managed leadership’s expectations, and then executed a process during the five day retreat that caused a dramatic transformation in interpersonal communications, accountability and performance of the Program Office.
One month on, the agreements and consequences she was able to get our office staff to hammer out and agree upon have improved the service delivery of our office to the entire USAID/Kenya mission and transformed the atmosphere of the office into a positive work place where staff feel more comfortable being themselves and more productive by working together more effectively.
In our evaluation of Ms. Elkington’s support to the Kenya Program Office, all of our staff agreed that her unorthodox methodology and its mixture of sound psychology, sociology, anthropology and organizational development were just the right elixir to inject high performance principles into our team.
I highly recommend her for the most challenging of circumstances and appreciate her very human touch in linking performance to personal transformation. She is a change agent who can effectively gauge expectations of her clients, then exceed them.
Sincerely,
Mark Meassick
Supervisor Program Officer