How to build a great team through leadership

“Transformational leadership is about the ability to build the capacity of your team, inspire and influence a shared vision toward a desired goal,” says Dr Ramsey Lyimo, one of the facilitators at Danida Fellowship Centre’s Transformational Leadership learning programme at MS TCDC in Tanzania.   

By Catherine Mossi

The global development landscape is facing interlinked human, political and systemic challenges that demand more than technical solutions. These complexities call for leadership that is inclusive, adaptive and transformative.

The Transformational Leadership learning programme is one of MS TCDC’s standard learning programmes offered through Danida Fellowship Centre to partners of Denmark in the Global South. It equips development practitioners with a mindset and tools to lead inclusive, sustainable change.

The learning programme has run for more than eight years and in June 2025, it brought together 14 Danida fellows from Ghana, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia at MS TCDC in Arusha, Tanzania.

For two weeks, the fellows explored how transformational leadership differs from transactional or authority-based approaches. They discovered that leadership is not about position but about vision, influence and service. This shift in mindset is especially vital in the development sector where leaders must navigate diverse stakeholders, limited resources and complex social realities.

The participants also explored what makes leadership truly transformational: the ability to inspire trust, communicate vision and mobilise people around a purpose.

As Dr Ramsey Lyimo, one of the facilitators, said,

“Transformational leadership is about the ability to build the capacity of your team, inspire and influence a shared vision toward a desired goal.”

In seeing leadership as a vehicle for furthering equality and justice, the programme also addressed the rethinking of power and privilege in order to emphasise inclusivity and participation, as guided by feminist leadership approaches.

“As a leader, I have learnt that the core values of any organisation help to shape their ethics,” said Ms Faustina Asamoah from Ghana.

Among the ways to bring people together around a shared purpose, communication emerges as a central strategic tool by utilising storytelling to create understanding and lead change. Stories can show how the qualities of empathy and self-awareness enable conflict resolution, motivation and trust, all of which are essential in community-centred development.

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