From the Laptop of the RD

May 31, 2010 in Uncategorized

Dear all

I can’t believe its a whole 4 weeks since I last wrote to you – many thanks to all of you that gave me feedback on this way of communicating with RC staff.

I do hope that you looked at ways in which you can get your views across. I hope also that you have used your performance reviews to listen to feeback from your line manager and discuss how we can support you better in the year ahead. Your objectives are a way to map out your work priorities for the next year and are important in being able to review your progress over that year – please do spend some time getting your objectives right – also make sure you have an objective which focuses gender and women’s righs. I attach my objectives here for your information.

 SI Objectives 1011 FINAL

The last few weeks have been a challenge for all of us in different ways – thank you all for your flexibility and support – the RC managed to carry on its work (pay staff, do performance reviews etc) whilst we worked from home. We have been thinking about how, with the Thailand Country Programme, how we can continue to address issues of poverty and inequality here in Thailand. We are also continuing to develop contingency plans so that we are ready if there are problems in the future (lets hope not) and we will be discussing them with you soon.

The BRMT had an awayday this week – we have one every 6 months and its a day to review progress on plans, reflect on our successes and sort out any problems and challenges – we do this away from the office so that we can just focus on our work and spend time working together as a team – we find it very useful and I would encourage other teams to do this at least once a year – discuss it with your line manager – I am sure there is money in the budget for this! Anyway, we talked about support to country programmes, how we spend our budget in the RC (what we spend on ourselves and what we spend on support to programmes), what we think are regional programmes – its great to have the time to work on these issues together. If you want to know more about what we discussed please ask your line manager.

At the end of the day we took some time out to consider what inspires us. As leaders we look to many sources for inspiration – to give us ideas, motivate us and remind us why we do what we do – I found it very interesting to hear who and what inspires BRMT members;

The communities we support

The programmes we have helped to develop and the people who have been involved

People we meet

 

What we learn about ourselves

Music and those who make it

Our family, friends….

BRMT shared personal reflections and experiences – why not ask them who inspires them? They certainly inspired me!

Have a great month – I am going to Oxford on 11th June to attend a Leadership course at Oxford University’s Said Business School for 3 whole weeks (I am so looking forward to this as its been part of my PDP for the last 2 years and I couldn’t attend last year because of the emergency responses) and then I will attend the Programme Leadership Team meeting (so more about that next time) – so I will leave you in the capable hands of BRMT members!

Sarah

 

 

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