To all those who seriously want to”cut the crap and seriously qet down to the business of success”

This letter is to recommend Tazim Elkington- The Indian Black Butterfly as the best “paradigm shifter” in the business that I know of. Persistent, bold, jolly and candid yet extremely insightful and perceptive, she has a unique and extremely effective approach to working with individuals, teams and businesses to help them push past the challenges or inhibitions that prevent them from achieving the success they are destined for.

We (The directors of Planning Interiors Ltd) engaged her late last year to help us deal with the challenges we were facing with our working relationship as a leadership team. We were definitely not on the same page. We were not aligned in objective or direction and thiswas adversely affecting productivity and cohesiveness in the company. To be honest, some of us were a bit sceptical at first but I am grateful to her for her persistence as we had been in discussions with her for a while about what value her unconventional talents could add to our company.

We agreed with the leadership adage that any meaningful change in a team or organization must start with its leaders as they are the ones who must set the example for the rest of their team can follow. We therefore submitted to a process orchestrated by Tazim that was intensely interactive yet incisive and results-focused that culminated in a powerful 3 day workshop in Naivasha which she facilitated. The outcome was a dramatic turnaround for us as a directors’ team as we covered much more ground than we expected. Thanks to Tazim’s bold yet strategic “cut to the chase, deal with the heart of the matter” style, we emerged from the retreat with a new, deeper understanding of each other as individuals as well as a more unified, aligned approach to the task ahead of us in our quest to revitalise our company and steer it to the next level.

There is obviously lots we still need to do to reach our company goals but thanks to Tazim we have now established a better, more cohesive and accountable foundation as a leadership team. This has also renewed our enthusiasm and commitment to doing what it takes to realise the immense potential Planning Interiors Ltd. has.

Yours sincerely

Eugene Ngugi

30″ September, 2015

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Dear Madam / Sir,

RE: RECOMMENDATION – MS. TAZIM ELKINGTON

In today’s highly competitive business environment, companies are searching for effective ways to grow their organization to ensure continued success. With this in mind, dusitO2 hotel contracted the services of Ms. Tazim Elkington to conduct a training for
our key management at a retreat at Enashipai Resort Naivasha.

The two day training involved both team work and personal experience exercises. With the innovative training methodologies offered during the training the managers grew to appreciate each other’s qualities and needs in our working environment. With this I expect the managers at Dusit02 to now be more productive and effective in their duties. The training also focused on managers learning to employ results driven methods for creating new standards of excellence. Similarly the key points addressed will not only help individuals excel at work but also help them in their personal lives away from work.

Ms. Elkington has a vast experience in dealing with different corporate companies and is knowledgeable in people skills. She has traveled far and wide and there is no one else more professional to work with diverse cultures and professions.

Yours Faithfully,

Michael Metaxas

General Manager

Dusit02 hotel, Kenya

June 14th 2016

To Whom it May Concern

Reference letter for Tazim Elkington

This is to confirm that we hired the services of Tazim Elkington to re-design a Life Skills manual for our CAP Youth employability programs. The work also included providing a training of trainers course for a selected group of our program facilitators and other staff who will be using the manual. Tazim carried out both tasks with efficiency and professionalism. The results of her work so far have been very good and we are looking forward to working with her in future as we expand the range and depth of our youth employability training and support nationally.

We have found Tazim to be extremely knowledgeable and competent as a writer, trainer and facilitator. She brings to her work a wealth of skills and experience gained over many years across the World and a sensitivity to individual, group and cultural backgrounds and situations that make it very easy for beneficiaries to respond positively to her input. I would highly recommend Tazim Elkington’s Services to organizations and companies seeking
unconventional effective and innovative ways to enhance or create new programs, strengthen leadership and management teams, create enriched and honest communication, discuss and have challenging conversations and most of all develop a value-based way of life.

Please feel free to email or call me for any further information.

Yours sincerely
Ndungu Kahihu
Executive Director
CAP Youth Empowerment Institute

To whom it may concern:

Tazim Elkington management workshop

Luca Safari Ltd. manages Campi ya Kanzi, a boutique eco-lodge in Kuku Group Ranch, Chyulu hills, Kenya. We have engaged Tazim Elkington to do a management workshop for Campi ya Kanzi.The workshop lasted two days and it was attended by our heads of departments.

We found Ms. Elkington work impressive and well beyond our expectations. The two days’ workshop has proven most useful not just for all heads of departments but also to the top managers, including the managing directors.

We recommend with no hesitation Tazim Elkington, her work is impressive and extremely productive.

Feel free to contact me for any further question.

Sincerely,
Luca Belpietro
Managing Director
Luca Safari Ltd

October 7, 2015
To Whom It May Concern:

LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION FOR MS.TAZIM ELKINGTON

I am writing this letter to give my highest possible recommendation for Ms.Tazim Elkington. I know Ms.Elkington through the work she did with myself in a set goal to realign and repattern our company, Gh4hub Ghana Limited for success based on a shift of operation style and processes. I met Ms.Elkington first in 2012 in Kenya during a training that was organized for a former company I worked with. Her methodology of training brought out the best in me and gave me a new dimension of how to be a very high performer starting with myself.
In view of this experience with Ms.Tazim, when we setup Gh4hub Ghana Limited 2 years ago, we had a unique problem of unable to close deals and maximizing employee productivity, I immediately recalled the fantastic training I received from Tazim and decided to fly over to Kenya for a 3 days intensive Senior Management training to get a clear direction on how to change things within our organization to achieve not only high revenues but also to build a team that delivers to customers without excuses.

Tazims first approach was to do a lot of work on myself as a leader who requires change and then be the change within a firm that quickly wants to make significant impact on the global mobile commerce space. We unearthed all the requirements of todays CEO and what is required for me to shift paradigms and get out of my comfort zone in order to create change.

Her massive experience in corporate organizations helped me to have a completely new view of operations within successful organizations. We did a complete analysis of each member of our current team and we discovered we needed to change roles in most departments if we are going to be effective and successful. This has been the biggest change our team needed which has contributed to a sudden improvement in our delivery to clients.

The final parts of our 3 days training focused on internal operations from finance to business. Tazims wealth of information on operating profitably by making the right financial decisions and also increasing sales through effective techniques that are unique to Tazims methodologies has made us more focused and realistic with respect to our revenue targets.
Our team is more efficient at providing clearer information to clients during sales and this has translated to new warm leads that will be converted to full deals and revenue.

The level of professionalism that our team now displays are as a result of recommendations made by Tazim.

Other areas we covered included the need to have solid time management practices, operational structures and processes that will ensure responsibility, accountability and commitment on deliverables to team and the customer in the long run.

The team is completely happy with the new direction and paradigm that Tazim presented to us and are sincerely grateful to have such a precious gem sharing with us wealth of knowledge and experience that transforms lives and businesses.

In summary, Ms.Tazim Elkington is clearly the best trainer I have worked with in the last 3 years. I would very much like any organization considering a total paradigm shift and a quest to increase revenue and employee productivity to take full advantage of her training and the gems therein. I give her my highest recommendation.

Sincerely,
Isaac Sanni-Thomas
Chief Executive Officer

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

September 27, 2012

Dear Ms. Elkington:

I will like to express my sincere appreciation for the excellent facilitation that you provided the Program Development and Analysis (PDA) team at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Nairobi, Kenya during September 4-6,2012. As a newcomer to the PDA team I welcomed the opportunity to participate in the retreat, which you facilitated. I am extremely grateful to have benefitted from the work which you did previously with other team members, the results of which are palpable. I was very impressed with the time you took to get to know me and to solicit my input prior to the retreat; this approach increased my confidence in the value of the undertaking ahead.

The retreat itself proved to be an invaluable introduction to the PDA staff members. In addition, it afforded an opportunity to rapidly gel up to speed for those staff members who had not attended one or both of the two prior sessions that you facilitated. As a vehicle for handling the significant change occasioned by the departure of the previous director and the introduction of a new one, I believe it succeeded beyond anything that I would have imagined. In particular, I admired your skill in getting everyone to open up and to speak relatively freely and unencumbered. Thus, I was able to learn quite a bit about the new staff. Furthermore, your approach allowed me to expansively express my values and convey my style of working.

In the three weeks that have followed the retreat, I have been pleased with PDA’s working relationships as well as what I perceive lo be a much improved atmosphere compared to when I first arrived. I believe that there is greater trust, more information sharing and a growing sense of unity among staff members. I hope that this can be maintained and nurtured. Your final report will be our roadmap to ensure that we keep our commitments and remain on track to become a high performing team.

Thank you very much for your services.

Sincerely,

Mervyn Farroe
Supervisory Program Officer

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
 

11th February 2014

REFERENCE LETTER FOR TAZIM ELKINGTON
FilmAid is a development and humanitarian communications organization that harnesses the power and influence of film and media to combat critical social issues by creating multimedia content designed to inform, inspire and empower. FilmAid uses strategic and integrated approach to distribution including broadcasts, mobile cinema, workshops, community based screenings and digital media and works with communities to catalyze and drive social change.
Over the past years, need for FilmAid’s programs both in its humanitarian operation in the refugee camps and its development operation grew therefore necessitating an increase in programs, staff and other resources. With this growth was the demand to review FilmAid’s structure, staff capacity, operational procedures and adopt a common value system and culture.
From September 2013, FilmAid engaged Tazim therefore to help FilmAid’s top
management to create this desired common value system and culture, professional work environment and performance culture.
Using customized questionnaires, observation and interaction with staff, she tailored a leadership training for the FilmAid team. Through the series of training workshops, Taz was able to get the team to break down their old belief and value systems, and through her presence and deep engagement with the process, she has had an enormous impact on the whole team and today;
1. Departments are well integrated and work in harmony and with synergy through building healthy relationships with their teams
2. We have simplified systems and procedures and created integrated methodologies as necessary
3. Staff have realized their potential and are honest about their strengths and shortfalls and are now very articulate and live a holistic and well understood value based life
4. Staff now communicate effectively and they are able to confront conflict and resolve any differences amicably
5. All staff embrace time management, planning, decision making and accountability in day to day execution of their work
6. All staff have re-committed to FilmAid’s mission since they now understand the role they play as leaders and the fact that they had to look at who they are and change in order influence their teams and grow as individuals and as drivers of FilmAid’s mission Taz is very unique, brilliant and she is what an organization needs to model 21st
century leaders, create a desired work culture and FilmAid has benefited greatly from Taz’s
straight forwardness, and understanding of the human person and FilmAid highly recommends her.

Do not hesitate to contact me in the address below in case you have any questions.

Sincerely,
…………………….. Stella Suge, Country Director
w: +254 (0) 20 235 7454 |c: +254 (0) 722 540 543 | e: ssuge@filmaid.org