A Culture of Performance
Turning strategy into measurable results through stronger executive performance.
A national programme to embed performance management across a federal regulator
Client Context
The client is a federal regulatory agency operating within Nigeria's federal civil service, a system that has been working to institutionalise a modern Performance Management System as one of the priority interventions in the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation's own reform strategy, first set out in the Federal Civil Service Strategy and Implementation Plan 2017–2020 and carried forward in its successor, the 2021–2025 plan. That reform has moved the public service away from the long-standing Annual Performance Evaluation Report toward a Balanced Scorecard–based model, extending accountability to both organisational and individual performance across government.
For individual agencies, that shift is not abstract policy, it is a specific Ministerial Deliverable they are required to implement and report against: to operationalise the Personnel Performance Management System and demonstrate real progress through measurable indicators, officers trained on performance management, staff with clear performance objectives, and staff receiving regular performance reviews. The agency's Directorate Cadre, officers at Grade Level 15–17, sit at exactly the level where that national reform either becomes disciplined day-to-day practice or stays a policy document senior leadership alone engages with.
The Challenge
Translating a national reform mandate into practice inside a single agency is a different problem from designing the mandate itself. The agency's own KPI framework already specified the outcomes it needed to show: a trained cadre, clear objectives, and regular reviews. What it lacked was a way to deliver against that mandate at the scale its Directorate Cadre actually required, across a large, multi-city workforce, in a way that reflected genuine capability gaps rather than a generic curriculum, and in a way officers would still be using once the programme itself had ended.
Our Approach
We approached the assignment as an institutional capability build in direct service of a specific government reform mandate, not a generic training delivery exercise. Two decisions shaped the approach before a single cohort began.
The first was how organisational need would be assessed. We anchored the programme directly against the agency's own existing Ministerial Deliverable, to implement its Personnel Performance Management System, and the specific indicators attached to it. Building the programme to serve those exact, government-mandated metrics meant the case for the programme, and the evidence of its delivery, could be made in language the agency's own oversight structures, and by extension the wider federal reform architecture, already recognised.
The second was how individual-level need would be assessed. This was gathered during a consultative working session with teams from the agency's own Training Unit, who understood where performance-planning capability was genuinely thin, as well as with individual participants, cohort by cohort.
The Solution
We designed and delivered an 11-cohort national training programme, built around our Concinnity Unique Learning Experience (CULE) framework rather than a generic course adapted to fit. Delivery ran across three cities, Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, over five weeks, with cohort sizes set deliberately for genuine facilitation quality rather than pushed toward volume.
The solution was designed to extend beyond the physical training days themselves. A digital Learning Hub gave participants a place to continue engaging with programme material after each cohort closed. The full design, the CULE framework, the cohort structure, and the Learning Hub, was also built as a repeatable asset the agency can redeploy for future cadres or refresher cycles, rather than a one-off intervention.
The Results
291
Directorate Cadre officers trained across 11 cohorts nationwide.
The programme reached senior officers across the agency's full Grade Level 15–17 tier nationwide, giving the agency a common language for performance planning running through an entire layer of its leadership structure. Delivery was completed against a signed national timeline, across three cities in five weeks.
Because the programme was built directly against the agency's Ministerial Deliverable to implement its Personnel Performance Management System, its completion represents a documented, delivery-dated contribution toward a specific outcome the agency must report against government, and toward the broader federal civil service reform now replacing the old evaluation system nationwide.
The Value Delivered
Beyond the immediate training numbers, the engagement left the agency with three durable assets: a Directorate Cadre equipped with shared tools and a shared language for performance planning that map directly onto the government's own Balanced Scorecard reform; a repeatable programme design it can run again for future cohorts without rebuilding it from scratch; and a completed, evidenced contribution toward a Ministerial Deliverable it was already accountable for reporting against government.
