PROJECTS
Alexis is adept at mapping out the ideal composition for new teams, ensuring desired skills & balance among team members by intentionally casting a wide net to capture diverse and untraditional candidates. When taking on an existing team, Alexis has made tough decisions about contract renewals, while bringing in younger, more dynamic, and/or non-traditional candidates to catalyze innovation. On leading her team, she gives direction through regularly scheduled check-ins with direct reports and focuses on follow-down management while ensuring an open-door policy, looking at where high performers can be promoted to management roles, and taking quick action when performance improvement is required.
Creating and leading international dream teams
Staffing diverse, multi-million-dollar projects in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Nepal
Alexis has built and institutionalized flatter reporting structures in hierarchical social settings. To ensure maximal performance within teams, Alexis restructured how performance improvement plans (PIPs) were executed, working with managers on drafting SMART PIPs to ensure that guidance being given to staff members was clear and measurable. Alexis also arranged unique soft skills professional development training for staff and supported regular team building and safe workplace initiatives.
This deliberate management approach has led to higher performing & cohesive teams with higher retention, happier employees, and less required oversight, producing better results for clients.
Change Management
Garnering buy-in & pivoting technical approach at the behest of the client
In one of her recent roles in Asia, Alexis and her project team were asked mid-course to pivot to a new technical direction through new strategy development, as well as staff training, re-skilling, and replacements to bring in more agri-business and markets expertise. With little runway, Alexis managed to strategically shift the project to a more holistic market-based approach. Alexis also scouted & employed multiple regional consultants to coach and mentor the team on elements of the local & broader Asia context.
With time, Alexis helped the project move from agricultural production-based programming to a more market-based, buyer-led model. Alexis brought in market experts to help support this shift and convince the client of what needed to be done differently and how to evaluate it for impact over time. As a result, more sustainable changes were made among the project’s private sector partners to get products to end markets. With this approach, Alexis was able to move this project into a more sustainable, efficient, and innovative model.
Crisis management
Managing and adapting during unprecedented change
Nepal was subject to one of the strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world in 2020. At that time, Alexis managed a large team of over 200 field staff across the country. Respecting the national and client restrictions that were in place, Alexis helped the team focus on what could be done to ensure that farmers were able to avail legal services from the project’s private sector partners.
Given these complicated circumstances, Alexis managed staff and supported them emotionally while also ensuring that they could be productive from home. During the COVID-19 lockdown, she instituted a first-of-its-kind virtual weekly all staff meeting for a team of more than 250 staff, which allowed her to better know teammates at all levels as well as for staff to integrate and share information.
Carefully nurtured relationships were what enabled Alexis and her team to cut through the bureaucracy of the crisis. During the lockdown, private sector enterprises were closed but due to the support given, project partners were able to work more efficiently and effectively with the government to receive permits for continuity of agri-extension services to farmers and local communities. After the crisis abated, a client partner commented, “We could’ve never done nearly as much during COVID-19 without Alexis’s leadership.”
