Executive Performance

It takes 4 Ugandans… On 1st July 2010, the then Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki officially launched the East African Common Market Protocol, which opened the way for the free movement of labour, capital, goods and services within the East African Community (EAC). The EAC is an intergovernmental organization comprising five countries: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. With the advent of the free movement of labour, perception of the productivity of labour becomes a significant factor because employers in competitive sectors tend to opt for the human resource they perceive to be best value for money. There has been a perception that productivity of Ugandans at the workplace is relatively low compared to other countries in the EAC . Considering that Uganda is part of the EAC, there is a danger that Ugandans will lose out on top corporate assignments. My involvement with top private and non-governmental organizations over the past 20 years reveals that increasingly, non-Ugandans are running a number of big organizations in Uganda. Indeed, using the list of organizations in the study I carried out as an example, 9 out of the 17 organizations (53%) are headed by non-Ugandans. The organizations represented are a cross-section of the top employers in Uganda. Surely if 50% of top private and international non-government organizations prefer non-Ugandan top executives, there is a problem. In neighbouring countries, a similar sample would show more nationals occupying the top jobs. Corporate organizations in Uganda choose to face the extra cost, and administration burden, of hiring expatriates because expatriates are perceived to perform better than Ugandans. Indeed, this problem has also been recognized at the National level (National Planning Authority 2010) and is specifically addressed under the plans for mass capacity and skills development and, the improvement of performance management systems in the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP outlines a range of strategies, mainly targeting rural masses, to uplift capacity and skills development of different categories of people that are the priority for the national government, such as: the unemployed youth, women and people with disabilities. However, in the NDPs published so far, there are no interventions specifically directed at improving productivity and performance of corporate executives within the private sector and Non-Government establishments. These strategic documents (the NDPs) have so far not included coaching as an intervention for low productivity or any other of the listed challenges. However, at a global level executive coaching has been observed to be an effective performance enhancement intervention for leaders , although it is little known among Ugandan corporate executives and policy makers. FACING THE REALITY A common citation among many motivational speakers in Uganda is “It takes 4 Ugandans to do what 1 Kenyan can do”. There have been heated debates in many circles especially where some Ugandans are coming up in defence of their work ethic. This view or assumption has found intrigue in many spheres in Uganda. Some of the Top Managers that I have worked with have that general view that Ugandans are poor performers. Ugandans are considered to be the laziest people in East Africa with the lowest labour productivity in terms of its value-added per worker . In fact, the World Economic Forum (2014) ranks Uganda’s labour productivity in position number 126 out of 144 countries. Further, in Table 1, I give a comparative ranking to position Uganda’s productivity within the East African region. Table 1: Labour Market Efficiency—Pay and Productivity Ranking Country Value Rank/144 Kenya 4.1 56 Rwanda 4.0 68 Tanzania 3.3 122 Uganda 3.2 126 As shown in Table 1, compared to other countries within the East African Region, Uganda has the lowest labour productivity. The Government of Uganda also acknowledges that: ‘Addressing labour productivity and opportunity remains a major challenge for the Ministry [Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development] and the Government as a whole’ It is important to note that the level or quality of performance in Uganda is, among other things, informed by the work ethics, which is rooted in the cultural environment in which Ugandans are socialized. In fact, the World Economic Forum lists ‘poor work ethic in the national labour force’ as number seven (out of sixteen) of the most problematic factors for doing business in Uganda (and business is usually about productivity ). The poor work ethic in both private and public sectors have a historical trace from the 1960s: “Uganda has witnessed persistent poor employee performance in public organizations since mid-60s, which researchers attribute to the 1966/67 crisis and the political turmoil of the early 70s up to mid-80s. Despite government’s effort to avert the crisis by introducing reforms to improve employee performance, the situation has not improved”. [Emphasis mine] From the point of view of individual employers in the Ugandan labour market, one expatriate client complained: ‘I have tried all the rules in the book to get my executives to deliver results and nothing seems to work’. Another client, a Ugandan, from a Higher Education Institution had turned down an opportunity to be promoted to senior management level within her department before I met her in a coaching session. She told me that: ‘people do not want to perform and I do not know how I can make them perform. It is so difficult to change their attitudes towards work; they want to be paid for work not done’. Performance at the work