As part of strengthening its broader Customs Capacity Building agenda, the WCO in partnership with the Seychelles Revenue Commission (SRC) organized a Leadership and Management Development (LMD) Workshop from 2 until 13 February 2015. All 18 directors and managers of the Customs division of SRC, plus two directors from Domestic Tax and Central Services, attended the Workshop. The overall objective of the two week interactive workshop was to strengthen senior management capacities to lead and drive reforms within SRC’s Customs modernization agenda.

With the whole management team participating in the workshop, the workshop also contributed largely to teambuilding, common understanding and mutual responsibility for SRC’s results as a whole. Or, as one of the participants put it, "It brings the management team closer to be able to work with each other".

Throughout the workshop many of the current and future challenges of the SRC were discussed, related to a wide range of topics such as how to deploy a leadership attitude in managing change, visioning, strategic management, negotiations, people management and strategic and personal communications. The workshop reinforced working on a stronger and more visible position of the Customs division within SRC, managing more strategically and developed new and shared strategic objectives to support these developments.

For many of the participants the workshop turned out to be not only insightful and practical on organizational level, but a real first step towards a positive change in their individual leadership and management approaches. Areas of individual positive growth identified included self-awareness, personal leadership, managing strategically and influencing internal and external stakeholders.

In a clear and personal talk with all participants the Commissioner General of SRC, Mrs. Georgette Pillay, expressed the importance of self-awareness, reflection and honest feedback as important elements of Leadership, and invited all participants to put their new acquired knowledge and experiences into practice to not only improve the Customs division, but also be an example for the other divisions of SRC.

The event was funded with the generous support of the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. For more information on the WCO Leadership and Management Development Programme, please contact Capacity.Building@wcoomd.org.