How MDF Asia assisted Care Cambodia in attracting an EC grants

CARE Cambodia has been active to work through and with NGOs, CSOs and CBOs to improve the accountability and transparency of service delivery by the sub-national government in Cambodia. CARE Cambodia has attracted a grant from the European Commission for this purpose. The European Commission in Cambodia is supporting the Government of Cambodia with strengthening sub-national democratic development processes. The EC works together with the National Committee for Democratic Development (NCDD) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to strengthen the democratic accountability of the sub-national government. The European Commission had issued a Call for Proposals to financially support alliances of NGOs and CSOs who could implement the “Social Accountability Framework (SAF)”, which is a government adopted approach for promoting “democratic development processes” through capacity building projects for community groups. These projects would lead communities to become more aware and more vocal about the timely and efficient delivery of government services by the Government authorities in Cambodia.

CARE Cambodia invited MDF to assist with the preparation of the concept note and full proposal to be submitted to the European Commission. To do so, MDF organized a mini-workshop with the CARE staff to clarify the logical framework, and worked with CARE staff to draft the final submission. CARE was awarded the contract.

Similarly, CARE Cambodia was also active in strengthening the labor rights of female construction workers in Cambodia. With CARE taking a lead and coordinating an alliance / technical working group composed of 2 CSOs (CWPD, LSCW) and the Trade Union, the project purpose is to improve the working conditions on construction sites, as well as raise awareness among female construction workers on their rights and enhance their voice through advocacy on their rights, and seeking access to increased protection and better working conditions at the workplace.

Due to the success of the previous assignment with CARE, MDF was again requested to facilitate and draft the submission of the proposal to the European Commission. After a series of meetings between the Cambodian CSOs and the Trade Union, CARE and MDF consensus was reached on the details of collaboration and partnership. The logical framework, and the full proposal were drafted and submitted, leading to the 2nd award from the EC to CARE in 2015.

MDF is actively supporting NGOs and CSOs with drafting proposals for submission to the European Commission. Koen Toonen, Director MDF Asia Vietnam regional branch office, has successfully supported and drafted proposals for submission to the European Commission. He works closely with colleagues at the MDF Brussels office, which are fully up to date on the policies and approaches by the EC.

Want to know more? 

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Author Name: Koen Toonen Director/Senior Trainer & Consultant at MDF Asia Vietnam Office

Contact our expert at MDF and let us help you! Mr. Toonen has delivered workshops on “Successful EC proposal writing” to various clients. He worked for over 22 years with various United Nations agencies, and is driven by helping communities and community based organisations thrive, through direct support to these communities and (local) governments. He helps organisations, projects, programmes and advocacy initiatives in finding sustainable solutions. He has worked extensively on rural development and local governance issues, also in (post-)conflict areas, and has specifically focused on poverty – environment linkages, and advocated for mainstreaming environmental management issues into development planning processes.

Intercultural Communication: High Cultures vs Low Cultures

It is generally acknowledged that people from different cultures communicate in ways that often lead to misunderstandings (Nishimura et al, 2014). The differences can be on many levels of communication, starting with the language. But underneath the language are a whole set of (cultural) norms and values that direct our behavior and influence the way we communicate more than we are aware of. We all work in an environment with many different nationalities or sub cultures, and we work intensively with them. How do these differences affect our cooperation and communication and in that sense, what effect do they have on the effectiveness and performance of our organization? Let us share some examples we encountered in our work.

A Western (German) manager delegated work to his Vietnamese staff. After a certain amount of time, he wondered if the delegated work was delivered. He approached his staff and heard that nothing had happened. He was quite upset and asked us what to do.

One of the Indonesian managers we coach, delegated some work to his Dutch staff. Immediately after this staff member sent out an email to all his colleagues, telling them that he was in charge of the project and that any kind of communication about the project, should go via him. This certainly wasn’t the intention of the Indonesian manager, he was still in charge.

There are many examples and many ways to look at these differences and I guess you all have some experiences with this. You can imagine these two situations are not conducive to a productive and pleasant working environment. Edward Hall (1976) suggested the categorization of cultures into high context (HC) versus low context (LC) cultures in order to understand their basic differences in communication style and cultural issues.

High Context Cultures
In HC cultures, communication style is influenced by the closeness of human relationships, well-structured social hierarchy, and strong behavioral norms (Kim et al., 1998. 512). In a high context (HC) culture, internal meaning is usually embedded deep in the information, so not everything is explicitly stated in writing or when spoken. In an HC culture, the listener is expected to be able to read “between the lines", to understand the unsaid, thanks to his or her background knowledge.

In an HC culture, people tend to speak one after another in a linear way, so the speaker is seldom interrupted. Communication is indirect, ambiguous, harmonious, reserved and understated. In an HC culture, greater confidence is placed in the nonverbal aspects of communication than the verbal aspects (Hall, 1976).

Low Context Cultures
In an LC culture, meanings are explicitly stated through language. People communicating usually expect explanations when something remains unclear. As Hall (1976) explains, most information is expected to be in the transmitted message in order to make up for what is missing in the context (both internal and external). An LC culture is characterized by direct and linear communication and by the constant and sometimes never-ending use of words. Communication is direct, precise, dramatic, open, and based on feelings or true intentions.

Going back to our examples from before, German and Dutch cultures are considered to be low context cultures, whereas Vietnam and Indonesia are seen as high context cultures. The misunderstanding between the colleagues in the examples above can be explained by this insight. How do you transform misunderstandings into inspiring working relationships? How do you actually use the differences and go one step higher in the cooperation? Here are some tips:

1. Expect that someone else thinks differently and may have other values (this can also apply to people from your own culture). 
2. Check understanding by summarizing what the other says and asking for clarification before you draw conclusions (in a polite, ‘non-violent’ way). 
3. Accept that you may have a different role than you are used to playing. Managers from a low context society could find it difficult to be a hierarchical manager and managers from a high context culture may encounter confrontations with Western staff. Adapt your (management) behavior to what is most effective (realizing your goals and maintaining a good relationship). 
4. Consult colleagues from the other culture with whom you have a good relationship as an intermediate or adviser. 
5. Always be critical of your own ‘truths’ and know that these come from your (personal and cultural) values and beliefs. 

If you want to learn more about other cultures and how you can increase cooperation and communication or if you simply want to improve your intercultural management skills, please don’t hesitate to contact us at MDF Asia (mdfpi@mdf.nl).

Author Name; Silvia van der Cammen (Senior Management Consultant at MDF Asia Indonesia Office)

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Ms. Van der Cammen has over 25 years of experience in different roles working in Asia, Africa and Europe. She is driven by involving and connecting stakeholders with different backgrounds and from other cultures in the process of finding the best solutions in any given situation. Her qualities and experience are in the field of leading and inspiring others to reach their desired goals together with a team. She is highly communicative and ‘involving’ and believes that in our inter-connected world, being able to effectively communicate with others of different cultures and backgrounds is one of the key factors to success. She is analytical and visionary as well as result-oriented and has proven to be a creative force and leader within a team.

Corporate Sustainability Strategies and Governance: What is it? Why do we need it? How do we monitor it?

By: Bart van Halteren, MDF Regional Director for Southeast Asia

Starting from 2013, MDF Pacific-Indonesia (MDFPI) has worked closely with Mars Global to address the sustainability of the company. Mars Global is one of the world’s largest food companies and is the world’s third largest cocoa buyer and represents the familiar brands of chocolate such as Snickers and M&M. MDF PI assisted Mars and 10 other large cocoa buying companies, such as Nestlé, Hershey, Cargill, etc., to design a cocoa sustainability framework and metrics monitoring system called Cocoa Action and also designed Mars’ M&E system to ensure that the management of the program is able to take strategic decisions and actions on the sustainable production of cocoa. Additionally, MDFPI was also commissioned to develop a better M&E system for Mars to better understand the effects of its corporate sustainability initiatives world-wide. Corporate sustainability is a hot topic that continues to garner focus as development initiatives across the globe place more emphasis on the issue of sustainability. So what exactly is a Corporate Sustainability Strategy – why do we need it and how do we monitor it?

The need for a “business case”: Defining Corporate Sustainability (CS) and CS Governance

"Sustainability is the capability of an organisation to transparently manage it responsibilities for environmental stewardship, social well-being and economic prosperity over the long term while being accountable to its stakeholders".

ISO 26000 refers to Corporate Sustainability (CS) as a balanced approach of organisations to address economic, social and environmental issues in a way that aims to benefit people, communities and society (ISO, 2010). Sustainability does not simply mean a set of “do-good and feel-good initiatives” but it needs to be structurally integrated into the organisation's way of working and its value system. However, it is important to note that the objectives of creating a CS strategy should not only be related to fulfilling social objectives but it should also help to differentiate a company from its competitors and create a Unique Selling Point (USP) that might benefit the company itself. On the other hand, you have organisational governance for sustainability, which is the system by which an organisation makes and implements decisions in pursuit of its sustainability objectives.

Why are so many larger corporations embracing Corporate Sustainability?

The old fashioned practice of “naming and shaming” still pushes these larger corporations towards sustainability strategies. However, how sustainable are these types of “forced” sustainability strategies? These sustainability strategies only address the corporations’ responsibilities and not the benefits to the company and as such are not very sustainable at all; hence the change in name from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to Corporate Sustainability (CS). A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group and MIT confirmed that 67% of surveyed companies believe that a CS strategy is necessary to be competitive and an overwhelming majority of companies who have a CS strategy identified profit as a result.

The ‘Social License to Operate’ is not only for corporations

CS strategies and their successful implementation hinge on the ‘social license to operate’. What does a ‘social license to operate’ mean? As many companies discover, working with large, well-known international NGOs does not automatically create a social license to operate (winning the legitimacy, credibility and trust of stakeholders). A social license exists when the activities of an organisation, company or project have the ongoing approval of the local community and other identified stakeholders. Earning and maintaining this social license relies greatly on the establishment of good relationships with all stakeholders. The license can be tested through stakeholder engagement strategies such as: joint vision and mission setting, identifying stakeholders, drafting a materiality index (where stakeholders identify “material” issues) and making conscious choices of which strategies will contribute to the triple bottom line of the company (environmental stewardship, social well-being and economic prosperity).

The need to measure, monitor and report

Assessing organisational impact(s), often called ‘the organisation’s footprint’ (not only used for environmental assessments), can be done using various concepts and tools specifically designed for CS such as: Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) and Sustainability Impact Assessments. Many organisations are now trying to align their sustainability goals with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their measuring tools. In order to obtain support, transparency and accountability are key; including reporting on the results of the assessments, often using performance indicators. Many companies are now using the Global Reporting Initiative’s (GRI4) format for sustainability reporting. The GRI4 reporting format has been greatly improved and in the future will assist organisations in “integrated reporting”, which renders separate sustainability reporting obsolete. Essentially, the aforementioned is exactly what sustainability is all about: structural integration into the organisations’ way of working and value system.

Sustainability metrics measuring and monitoring of progress: the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Many organisations working on CS strategies for the first time focus on defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) first. The question is: ‘key’ to whom and for what? Simply put, monitoring means conducting regular activities that will answer the question of whether we are on track to achieve our objectives. This means that companies will need to first identify their sustainability objectives both internally (within organisation) and externally (stakeholders). Central to sustainability is not achieving external (PR-related) targets and ‘KPI's’ only, but making sure that the day-to-day operations are sustainable and geared towards supporting the sustainability process. To monitor this, Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI's) are the most frequently used tools in this context. The correct selection, formulation, review and interpretation of lead and lag indicators (lagging indicators measure results and leading indicators measure efforts made) are crucial for a successful sustainability performance monitoring system. Only after this whole set of indicators have been defined, both for operational as well as management review purposes, ‘key’ performance indicators can be selected by the various levels of managers.

Of course, these are only the first steps in a long but important process of developing and successfully implementing a corporate sustainability strategy.

Author

Bart Van Halteren is the MDF Regional Director for Southeast Asia. Mr Van Halteren is driven by finding management solutions for a better world, assisting governments, private sector companies and CSO's to find sustainable solutions. With over 18 years of experience in most countries in Asia, Africa and Europe, he is highly experienced in program planning techniques, project and program management, monitoring and monitoring systems design, program evaluations and institutional/ organisational development, strategic planning, change management, as well as facilitating strategy design and organisation analysis and assessment for governments, CSO's, UN organisations and private sector companies working for sustainable growth and development.

Want to know more? Contact our experts at MDF and let us help you

MDF Asia Training & Consultancy
Email us: mdfasia@mdf.nl
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Innovative Leadership; Creating space for growth and stimulating continuous change initiatives

"We used to write this down by saying, 'move fast and break things.' And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff you are not moving fast enough.

"I think there's probably something in that for other entrepreneurs to learn which is that making mistakes is okay. At the end of the day, the goal of building something is to build something, not to not make mistakes."

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, Facebook, from a 2010 interview with Business Insider

Innovative leadership is a risky business. It demands that you let go of tightly held beliefs about how leaders lead and move into an uncertain space where anarchy is anticipated and encouraged. It takes a bold leader with a strong vision and even stronger magnetism to achieve this and still thrive. Traditionally, strategic planning was an annual event in which the progress of the organisation was mapped out against a 10 year plan. Today 10 days is a long time in business. Technology no longer drives business but is a servant to the whims of a techno savvy workforce and client base. Social media has moved beyond the bounds of Facebook as a platform for global conscience and unbounded transaction. We need to redefine leadership in ways that make sense in the new world order. 

We live in interesting times.

Innovation requires a different kind of leadership and the kinds of leadership that the world needs today are fundamentally innovative. The issues that present themselves in terms of declining natural resources, changing climates, breaking down of barriers; political, geographical, gender-related, ethnic, social and technological, requires us to continually ‘break things’ and remake them in a different form.

The kind of leadership in which innovation thrives is one that embraces change, holds spaces for risk-taking and encourages big crazy leaps of faith. An innovative leader is a bold and often courageous leader, which is (slightly) different from a blind fold, though to the uninitiated the difference is not always apparent. An Innovative Leader is well-informed about a lot of things. What she doesn’t know, she hires someone to find out and tell her, or else she improvises. Improvisation is a critical skill of the innovative leader. Each day she sees as an opportunity to do things better.



“Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do”
Steve Jobs, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc.

Innovative Leaders create spaces for innovation, they allow others to experiment, to try things out for themselves and build their own skills and confidences. If necessity is the mother of invention, chaos is the mother of innovation; a problem needing to be solved, a crisis, a disaster. An Innovative Leader may at times be intentionally mischievous, create chaos, and shake things up a little, to get the best out of people and situations.

So what types of people make innovative leaders? Can anyone be an innovative leader? To be innovative, it is essential that you are flexible and open. Flexibility is the ability to shift your position, to adapt or to deconstruct completely in order to reform yourself into something more conducive.

Author name: Ineke Pitts

Official bio: Ineke is a highly experienced business consultant with over 25 years of international experience, predominantly in Business Strategy, Human Resources Management and Project Management. Ineke is also a specialist in Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks, has a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration and Development from Paisley University Scotland, is a Licensed Master Practitioner of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming Society and is currently studying for her Doctorate in Organisational Change with Middlesex University, UK. Ineke joined MDF South Asia as Branch Director and Senior Consultant in 2009, having been principal of her own management consultancy in the region for the last 10 years. She backstops a great many of MDF South Asia projects often working in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India and Nepal as well as Sri Lanka. Ineke is ultimately responsible for the quality and consistency of all services delivered from the South Asia office and is also a senior resource person for MDF worldwide. A British National, Ineke derives great pleasure from combining her vocation for developing people, with an abiding passion for adventure, nature, fun and creativity, having previously spent three years searching for endangered carnivorous plants deep in the jungles of Asia.

MDF Asia Training & Consultancy
Contact us: +94 112 673636
Email us: mdfasia@mdf.nl
Visit us: www.mdf.nl/mdf-asia