Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is dedicated to providing leadership, financial, evaluation, and consultative resources to the development challenges of Central and South American countries. IDB teams chart the challenges, craft change strategy, deploy financial resources, build in-country alliances, deliver and evaluate interventions. The IDB teams must coherently and cohesively decide service standards and parameters as well as jointly interpret the ongoing field impact results that drive further reinvestment decisions. IDB asked TAGA to evaluate its team process effectiveness, facilitate greater cross-departmental collaboration, and navigate it through an annual strategic review and planning.

Challenge | Opportunity
Much of Central America and South America stands in need of comprehensive development. Leadership, housing, education, healthcare, natural resource leveraging, roads and infrastructure, telecommunications –all these and more deserve some developmental attention. Without leadership solutions, leadership replacement pipelines, change strategies, resources, and collective resolve, these areas of the world continue to remain marginally developed.

Solution
TAGA conducted diagnostic interviews and focus groups with IDB leaders and staff prior to observing some selected IDB teams in deliberation. Findings prompted detailed coaching sessions with selected leaders to confront past, cross-departmental perceptions and dysfunctional practices. TAGA coaching interventions contributed to the healing of some leadership rifts prior to the start up of formal strategic planning and team-building work. In the course of initial service, TAGA noted that IDB staff typically spoke Spanish or French and, of course, English as business affairs required. TAGA immediately deployed consultant support in the form of TAGA Associates who spoke Spanish, French, and English well. Client rapport soared. Team-building and strategic retreats afforded TAGA consultants countless opportunities to talk, play, and problem-solve with client members in their native tongue –fluidly and fluently, without calling explicit attention to the TAGA customer-centric, diversity-conscious philosophy.

Results
IDB healed organizational disconnects, re-charged team energy, discovered new cross-departmental synergies, and designed more precise, mutually-owned strategic plans. A culturally diverse, language-proficient TAGA consultant team helped IDB prepare itself to build a better Latino world. Invest or spiral towards less. IDB needed, amid enormous challenges, to protect collective time to rethink, to regroup, to reinvest in its own core focus and strategic outlook. IDB chose to ask for help. TAGA answered the call.