Assignment brief  

Select a significant change leadership challenge you have experience of. Undertake Parts A,  B, C and D, detailed below, using the integration of your learning from within and across all  four parts of the Leadership and Change module:  

∙ Leadership  

∙ Leadership culture, values and change  

∙ Change challenges and approaches  

∙ Enabling, enacting and embedding change  

Part A (suggested word count: 500)  

Describe the nature and scale of the change leadership challenge and the current and  potential impact on the organisation's internal and external environment.  

Part B (suggested word count: 1,250)  

Evaluate how effectively you think the organisation approached this change leadership  challenge, including the consideration of the diversity of people and values.  

Part C (suggested word count: 1,750)  

Following on from your evaluation:  

1. As chief executive of the organisation, describe how you would have approached  this particular challenge; the critical dilemmas you would have faced, how you  would have engaged with these dilemmas and the reasoning behind your  recommended choice of actions.  
2. Identify the critical generic factors any senior executive team would have to  consider in this situation, regardless of the type of organisation and its operating  context.  
3. Explain how you would evaluate the outcomes of your recommended approach. 

Part D (suggested word count: 500)  

Your concluding section should reflect on how learning from the module content has  impacted on your own practice as a change leader. This should include a commentary on  development of the core change leadership skills of teamworking plus communicating  with, and facilitation and coaching of, the people you need to influence and persuade.  

Please make appropriate links to your learning from the Personal Development module  and utilise evidence relevant to the behavioural skills and learning outcomes for leadership  and change.

Part A – Organisational Background, Leadership Challenge and Its Impact

This section outlines the organisational background of the APRM, the degree of leadership changes and its impact on the internal and external environments.

Founded in 2003, the APRM is a review instrument developed to assess the governance practices of African Union member countries on their voluntary accession (AU 2017). The major objective of the APRM is to ensure that its member countries adopt practices and policies that assist in the development of political stability, economic growth, sustainable development and regional integration through best practices and knowledge sharing.

One of the major issues encountered by the APRM is the vacancy for the CEO at the secretariat. It is reported that there is no permanent CEO appointed to the organisation since 2008(Abbnik et al. 2016, p 10). The last interim CEO held the position from June 2014 to early 2016. Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, who heads the NEPAD Policy Coordination Agency, became the acting CEO of APRM in 2014 for an expected six-month duration (Gruzd 2015). One of his main tasks was to recruit a permanent CEO. 

During the 22nd Summit of the Committee of Heads of State and Government Participating in the APR Forum which was held on 29 January 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the new CEO was announced as per the recommendations of the APRM Committee of Focal Points. The Forum approved the appointment of Professor Adebayo Olukoshi as the new CEO of the APRM Secretariat (NEPAD 2015). It is to be noted that the Summit was chaired by the Chairperson of the APR Forum with the attendance of Other Heads of State & Government (HOSG), including Ministers and senior Government representatives of countries who are members of the Forum attended the Summit.  Olukoshi was a respected Nigerian academic, who worked as the director of the UN African Institute for Economic Development and Planning in Dakar, Senegal, and formerly was executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).  But he repudiated the engagement, alleging that he was not informed before the announcement (Oropo 2016). It is reported that while Adebayo attended the screening for the job, the engagement failed due to disagreement on personal terms and conditions. This appointment of new CEO ended due to improper contract negotiation.

The interim CEO was forced to continue, whose main objectives were to assist and support the secretariat in developing management systems that would offer sufficient support to the new future CEO of the APRM. Dr Mayaki, the interim CEO informed the APRM employees that his decisions would be professional, transparent and coherent (APRM 2015). One of his noteworthy activities which decreased the employee morale was that he brought his team of experts from NEPAD, his home agency. He pulled together a team of senior NEPAD staff specialising in Corporate Service, HR, and Finance to support him and the APRM during its metamorphosis into an AU entity (Greve 2015). These advisors are not part of the guiding coalition but were temporarily loaned from NEPAD to support Dr. Mayaki. According to him, this team had extensive experience due to their involvement in a similar transition of NEPAD as an organ of the AU. Additionally, his advisers for governance and inter-institutional affairs were also part of the team to coordinate with the APRM transition. This created a sense of fear among employees that APRM would be entitled as a sister organisation of NEPAD when the existing employees of the APRM were fired. However, the APRM forum reinstated them to avoid panic among the employees.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)