It’s been a while since I’ve written about work here.
This is due in part to how much things have changed during my last position. From
month to month I was either in a new location or a new mindset. Now, in
retrospect, it’s much easier to give a coherent recap.
From January until July I continued my training by working
in the role of a Credit Supervisor at the branch level. I started in Chawama, one of our newest
branches at the time. The branch was a pleasant place to work, though the area
was rough during the rainy season. I supervised two different products and
enjoyed helping lay the foundation for how operations would be run there in the
future. After one month I was transferred to Matero branch where there was an
opportunity to cut my teeth on a challenging situation.
After a series of
issues in the past year, most of the staff had been replaced with new hires who
had inherited poorly performing portfolios and difficult clients from their predecessors. I
took over management of a team of five Loan Officers; one half of the Business
Loan cluster. It was a testing situation at first. I struggled to push
improvements on all fronts, from the types of clients we were funding, the
quality of the analyses being done, the monitoring of clients, and my own
people management skills. It took some time, but somewhere in April we started to
see progress. My Loan Officers were improving both individually and as a team,
and we were starting to make a real dent in the problems we had inherited. By
the time I was finishing my term as a supervisor, both my cluster and Matero
branch seemed to have turned a corner. The specter of the past was dissipating
and the new team was capable, confident and achieving results not seen here in
a long time. It gave me a great deal of satisfaction to be part of that transition and to
see the staff develop, some even receiving promotions.
So it was with great pleasure that, for my next assignment,
I had the opportunity to take over as Branch Manager of the same Matero
branch. A promotion for our previous Branch Manager opened up the position at
just the right time, and I couldn’t have been happier to continue working with
the same team to make this the best branch in FINCA Zambia. My first few weeks
in this new role have presented a whole new series of challenges and
opportunities, and I’m looking forward to learning and growing here in the
months ahead.
(Matero Branch)
