The journey that placed IDM on industry-driven mission

Institute for Development (IDM) Regional Director and Chief Executive, ,Richard Malikongwa reflects on his journey as he prepares to hand over the baton to Eswatini national following his six years with the institution. The Regional Director position rotates around the three founding countries of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini.  He acknowledges that this has been a journey underpinned by the quest to make IDM an institution focused on responding to the needs of the ever changing industry. 
 
IDM Regional Director post was your first in an academic institution. How important was the past experience acquired from other industries, in ensuring successful transformation of IDM?
Richard Malikongwa: The diversity that I got from other industries helped me to land smoothly into my current portfolio. Because of the diversity of people that I have interfaced and interacted with, their different backgrounds, different work ethics and  the diverse business acumens, assisted me in the quest for business transformation. My previous roles exposed me to a holistic approach to different business areas such as change management; culture change, people management, high performance cultre, risk management and stakeholder management amongst others.  I adapted quickly to the environment, understanding the core business of an academic institution, and how to how to work with the team to turn it around. I am grateful to leave IDM at its best performing form.
 
You came into IDM leadership during a time when tertiary education was booming in Botswana. What strategies did you put in place to ensure that IDM remained relevant?
Richard Malikongwa: The landscape was quite competitive at the time, even now. There were many changes in the educational sector. There were many entrepreneurial educationist hence IDM needed to survive and had no alternative thereof. When I came on board, we first as a team looked at our strategy, and crafted our strategy map, and predominately using the balanced scorecard, because I realized that this is what people were familiar with. We focused on the four pillars; Learning and Growth, Internal Processes, Customers and Financial performance. Under Learning & Gowth, we built an organizational capability where we ensured that we have the right people with the right skills and competencies. We needed to transform the organisation and manage change, at the same time build a high performing culture. Our Internal Processes had to be optimized to align to customer expectations. For us to survive, we optimized our technological infrastructure. We also improved our corporate governance to remain relevant in the industry. In the customer space, we realized the need to know who they are; we had to provide innovative product offerings that respond to the customer needs; as well as enhance our corporate brand. Finally, we needed to stay afloat financially by ensuring that we have alternative revenue streams, at the same time managing costs.  
 
Share with us the milestones, challenges during the delivery of the 5 Year strategy
Richard Malikongwa: Competition was creeping in; we were having private institutions which were moving at a very fast pace. We had issues around funding because we had fewer students, we were not able to attract students because there was perception that we werean institution that was on downward trend and henceforth not many people wanted to associate with the brand. We had challenges around our infrastructure as compared to other government institutions. We also had challenges of attracting the best in terms of our faculty, as they preferred other institutions. We had a challenge relating to absorption of our graduates into the market, as there was delink between the institution and the market. Our brand was perceived to be weak and a dying brand, and all these factors compounded together were besieging the institution. In terms of our strategy map we said; what is our competitive strategy, what is it that put IDM at more competitive edge than other institutions. We had to focus on our competitive strategy and exploit it; we had to look at our growth strategy and how do we had to grow IDM. We looked also at our organisational culture and defined it. We also looked at our marketing strategy and how do we needed to brand IDM. Our public relations strategy had to linked with our marketing strategy to enhance our brand visibility. Today IDM is a household name. It is a “go to” institution.  We changed our student value proposition to make it experiential. We also reviewed our employee value proposition to interface with that of students. As you may know we have full time students, working students who study part-time, we have students on block release, we looked at all these and enhanced customer experience.
We also had to optimize on digital technology to ensure accessibility and convenience. As you know we are an institute, there are expectations from the regulators; we had to ensure that there is quality in the product offering. We also had to look at funding and sustainability in terms of investment strategy from finance perspective. We had to say what do we do to ensure that we survive as an institution, the little money that we get how do we diversify investment to support us in dark and rainy days. We also looked at sustainability, how do we sustain ourselves and be less dependent from government. If you look at IDM model, we do not receive funding for our recurrent budget at our three campuses of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini. We depend largely on governments for funding through scholarships, but for salaries and development we are on our own. In Botswana, we have become the envy of many such that government wondered why other institutions do not follow the IDM model. Government said, if IDM was able to do it without funding, why other institutions can’t do the same. We also looked at our organisation how we are structured; how we optimize the relationship, as you know we are tripartite of Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini hence we had to look at how optimize the structure for the benefit all the campus. We also have to look at our leadership competencies index to say what kind of skills do we need at IDM to take the institutions forward. We did what we call the blue ocean strategy and gone through uncharted waters to ensuring that IDM becomes a high performing institution through that strategy. It might seem like it was a lot, but a lot of things were running concurrently. It was quite a hectic journey but we succeeded. We have increased net profitability, increased student enrollments, attracted top talent and increased our brand visibility.
 
You have a background in HR; please tell us how important was human capital in ensuring that IDM reach its goals?
RM: Human capital is at the centre of everything we do at IDM; we being an education and training provider, focusing on education, training, research and consultancy, we depend on the quality of human capital in our organisation. We deliberately invested in the development of our staff. There was a number staff pursing their post graduate studies just to ensure that they cope with the transformation.  We brought in specialized skills from the industry to make sure the training is more practical as opposed to being theoretical. We have engagements with industry to improve on the quality of our human capital to ensure that we are able to deliver. We have been able to take our staff through change management so that at all level we were signing from the same hymn book. We put huge investment in other non-academic areas to ensure that our support staff is also at par with direction the institution want to take. Our tagline has always been “Take care of IDM, IDM will take care of you” hence our human development budget has gone up to recognise that. Our staff members have been recognized in various forums, internationally and locally for the exceptional skills and attributes that they bring to assignments given to them. We have invested a lot in our people with the expectation that there will be return on investment. We had to look at our leadership competencies as we needed a strong leadership to take the institution to the next level.