WEFOCO Tailor's Sustainable Development Project
Follow up post from my previous deployment in Shianda, Kenya.
After the Step 4 of the sustainable development project, the tailors started implementing their first action plan. However, a lot of questions came up day by day.
So we decided to answer and work on the questions as we were going.
We talked about finance, marketing and market analysis, targets, budgeting, team roles, sponsors, customer care, team building, holistic meetings on their link with Wefoco and Mondo...
At the end of my 6 months deployment, the tailors and I knew I was coming back for 6 more months of work with them on the same project. So we made an action plan for the 2 months I would be back home in Belgium - April and May 2021.
When I came back to Kenya in June 2021, the tailors had been working with their new team for 2 months. They were in a conflictuel atmosphere and the members were fearing each other and weren't comfortable communicating their issues.
It was a difficult welcome back situation for me. After consulting my mentor, some tailors and the WEFOCO director, I decided to invite all the tailors to an individual evaluation of the last 2 months so I could understand what has been going on in my absence and most importantly so I could have every tailor's sincere thoughts and concerns.
After conducting the individual evaluations, which worked really well, we had the first team meeting since my return. I gave them the positive feedback of the individual evaluations and told them that they have raised some challenges that the team needs to solve in order to improve the team spirit.
We started by talking about the Four agreements of positive communication and all agreed to try to follow them as much as possible.
After that, I introduced to them an evaluation method called the Community Score Card. It is about scoring topics concerning a specific subject, giving concrete examples and finding solutions to the things that can/should be improved based on their scoring. It is an easy and visual method of evaluation and solution planning. The scores were done anonymously to avoid discomfort.
The exercise worked well for the tailors even though they started confronting each other at the same time. Which led us to not being able to finish it completely. We will review this Score Card in a team meeting in the following weeks to see if there are improvements or changes to their scores, acknowledge their success and update their challenges.
Another thing that was done in order to solve conflict resolution was to use an outside source to talk to them with a neutral angle.
My mentor Evelyne is a tailor as well as a tailoring teacher in the village's polytechnique. She has been introduced to the team several times in the last six months. She is a very good communicator and mediator.
She came twice to talk to the tailors about assertiveness, behavior and personality differences, team spirit...
She used cooked/raw eggs and cold/warm water bottles to express some of these concepts which were very creative and visual and spoke to the tailors.
Esther, the WEFOCO director, also came another day to reinforce the challenge and importance of togetherness and team spirit in a community business.
From my experience in this field and culture, I see it is primordial to repeat things several times for people to accept and use the news ideas and concepts throughout a project. It is also very important to use local figures as communicators so that the people can identify with them and look up to people they truly relate to.
In addition to this, the tailors have been meeting weekly to discuss any issues, clear miscommunications, be transparent with their records, money stock, material stock renewal and so on. This was one of their proposed solutions during the Score Card evaluation and it has been primordial for the team growth.
In only two months, the tailors and I have seen changes in the team spirit and they are more comfortable to communicate.
But of course, these things take time to be truly solved as it is also a behavioral change. A team will naturally have regular conflicts to be solved, which is why I am working on giving them more tools to deal with that in the future. I am also trying to make them responsible for organizing these team meetings and have them without me so it isn't associated with my presence on the project and can last for long after I will be gone.
Let's see how this conflict resolution topic evolves in the next months.
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