Leadership for personal gain

To succeed in today’s competitive and rapidly changing leadership positions, you need to adopt change and embrace new leadership styles. In order to maximise adaptability and resourcefulness, today's emerging leaders need to have an authentic awareness of themselves and their capacity to influence others in a mutually beneficial manner.

This opening session highlights the 4 key ingredients to enabling leadership.

Viewpoint one: Knowledge and training
Knowledge and education is significant in learning and developing the right career path. Corporate and support organisations provide knowledge centres and programs to enhance employee’s skill sets.
• What does the Gulf education system have to focus on specific programs developing and enhancing the role of women?
• What role do corporates play in increasing the participation of women in areas less explored by women such as engineering, pilot, semi conductors etc?

Viewpoint two: Government and associations
The government is extremely important in developing the women community and ultimately encouraging women to take up leadership roles in business and society.
• What are the government departments doing to hire and encourage more women to take up new roles and responsibilities?
• 90% of the support by micro credit finance initiatives is provided to women. Where is this leading to?

Viewpoint three: Social
Support from social groups including family, friends and peers is vital in all means of business and personal life. It provides one of our key pillars to the success in leadership.
• Women have now been actively enrolling themselves in associations and networking groups. Discuss the benefits of right networking and the online social groups.
• These social groups provide influential support encouraging active and passionate guides to business success. Address how family and friends provide this support?

Viewpoint four: Personality
It is the motivation, determination and positive attitude that drives one towards taking up new roles and more responsibilities.  Other attributes such as perseverance, networking, dedication and being honest about oneself is extremely important to developing a positive attitude.
• What personality traits will make you a successful leader?
• How does one’s personality impact the other support mechanisms?
• Tips on successful working relationships with your boss, colleagues, family and friends.

Personal gain is often seen as selfish, however it is important to address the positive aspects of what “is in it for me”. Without it, no organisation or individual can truly embrace a future leader style. Identify your style and understand what the personal implications of becoming a leader will give with your future leadership opportunities:

Viewpoint one: Increased knowledge
Many successful leaders are driven by their thirst for learning. The pool of knowledge is infinite. It is important to understand the true value of learning a new subject or industry.

Viewpoint two: Financial gain
Financially a leader understands the value of a dollar or a Dirham and is focused to ensure that it is used for many facets of their developing lifestyle. Whether this is family, friends or investment in business, all future leaders look to financial stability and investment opportunities. How can you make the most of your financial situation?

Viewpoint three: Prestige and recognition
Prestige and recognition are appealing ingredients to a successful and confident leader. How far does a leader need to go to earn this and how far is too far in seeking the “fame” factor?

Viewpoint four: New opportunity
True leadership lies where the drivers above are well-balanced and respected. Knowledge, finance and recognition together cater to the basic needs of a successful leader. This viewpoint addresses how recognising opportunity leads to many more personal gains. Are you open to opportunity all around you?

This session will address key ways of approaching career path development by reflecting on the different facilitators laying the leadership foundations. Many hopeful and successful leaders have a willingness to learn when presented with new challenges and responsibility.

Viewpoint one: Top management
How current top management embraced opportunity. What life lessons they learnt and how you can learn from their setbacks and successes? How did this then become applicable to their organisation in nurturing new leaders?

Viewpoint two: Departmental heads
Often responsible for executing succession planning while themselves trying to climb the proverbial ladder, departmental heads and senior managers highlight their experience in balancing their team’s growth while enable their own ascension.

Viewpoint three: Social Groups and associations
Active social groups are integral to all future leaders. We focus on the personal gain that these relationships offer while tackling the integration of personal relationships within a corporate environment.

This session will discuss how education at whatever level can contribute in the growth of a woman leader. Basic needs should be accessible to all, no matter what gender, race or nationality they belong to. The challenge is to provide the right education that makes you a better person and a success in life, no matter your creed, colour or ethnicity.

Viewpoint one: International bodies
The challenges faced in the education of the female gender in different parts of the world are varied. Is it financial, cultural or gender related? What are the international organisations doing to meet these challenges?

Viewpoint two: NGOs
What role does an NGO play in making education accessible to all? What are the main challenges in the Middle East education sector that women face?

Viewpoint three: Educational institutions and corporates
The right to be educated has now become a basic need and should be provided to all; however there have been obstacles in achieving this. What are the educational institutes and corporates doing to address this obstacle?

Viewpoint four: Government authorities
The government sets the framework within which all other organisations perform. We highlight the how key organisations have been promoting education as an integral necessity to all.

Some believe that women are oppressed by their religion. It is true that Middle East women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality. However inequality is not necessarily linked to religion. We discuss the key factors that enable ex-pats and local women to develop and become the next generation leader.

Viewpoint one: Local cultural traditions
The family, the country, the religions all play a part in opening women to leadership opportunities. Tradition through evolution is becoming important to development of women in society and business.

Viewpoint two: Muslim and non Muslim society
Understanding the difference between Muslim and non Muslim religion enables organisations, individuals and government bodies to create the ultimate in positive forward thinking strategy for women leadership initiatives.

Viewpoint three: The role of wealth and class
Money, Money, Money. It’s important, but its not necessarily the base building blocks to female success. This viewpoint overcomes the stigma attached to successful leadership coming from porting family money into business. We aim to understand why Arab family businesses do succeed and what we can learn from this.

Converting personal leadership gain to corporate gain

The WIL Forum day two is designed to persuade the next generation of influential women to succeed as individuals, team leaders, and organisational visionaries. Therefore identifying and enhancing skills critical to success and advancement at your workplace.

Female leaders are on the increase, from diversified industries, ranging from traditional clothing industries through to the high tech world of semiconductors. This panel addresses the key points of harnessing women intelligence within the corporation and measuring performance on gender-related issues – with respect to four carefully selected industries including media and marketing, retail and service, public sector and technology. We present questions with an aim of comparing different industry goals and focus on recognition, development and execution of these female executives.

Viewpoint one: Natural ability
It is said that men have a more analytical mind, women are considered to be more creative. Is this the case and how can different biological traits be utilised by an organisation?

Viewpoint two: The art of negotiation
Personality traits in communication and negotiation are key in the growth of any business. How do female employees perform with these traits?

Viewpoint three: Increased efficiency
Are women better at multi-tasking? What do the panelists have to say about managing work-life balance and ultimately the multitasking environment that an organisation demands?

Viewpoint four: Recognition
Promoting women in business has become an important goal for most country level authorities and local/international corporations. What does an organisation get out of recognition and how can this be used for corporate and employee gain.

Viewpoint five: Perception of glass ceilings
Many women today are convinced that gender equality in the workplace exists. It should be every organisations goal to understand what creates this perception and we can shatter the boundaries that burden women aspiring to leadership?

In this session we investigate why organisations are investing so much time and money in training their women employees. By utilising many key components to create the ultimate effective working environment you will enable success and leadership vision. We discuss why you should put such plans in place and why you should join in on those plans too.

Viewpoint one: Training
Effective training programs are not one-offs, they require as much dedication to the program as does the organisations dedication to the employee. We discuss mentorship, training and networking programs.

Viewpoint two: Motivation
Motivation is not just about remuneration financially; it is about enabling work life balance, cultivating talent and giving opportunities at the right time.

Viewpoint three: Support
Organisations provide financial support to their employees to enrol in leadership programs and attend networking sessions to enhance their skills. Do organisations also provide other non-financial support with initiatives for working mums, crèche facility etc. What other effective and proven support mechanisms can an organisation/individual implement?

The government has laid foundations and initiated programs to develop the women community of their country. This has convinced corporations to accept CSR principals and contribute to a better future for the country and corporation. In this session, we will discuss what corporations are doing to contribute to this goal, why is it important and what can the government entities provide to encourage this contribution?

Viewpoint one: Corporate perspective
Corporations address CSR as a tangible drive to economic success and invest in developing the women community by supporting programs aimed at enhancing their skills and growth strategies. This investment includes financial and knowledge support. How would this help the corporation in the long run?

Viewpoint two: Political perspective
Government entities and local authorities gain recognition globally for gender balance and opportunities available to both gender through FDI programs. Hence from a political perspective it is crucial to devise strategies and initiatives. What can government entities do to attract more contribution from the other sectors? How can they incentivise corporations?

Viewpoint three: Social perspective
How are the social groups contributing to achieving equal opportunities for the women community in the business? What role do associations and women committees play in this?

Viewpoint four: Individual women’s perspective
Women leaders generally are passionate about sharing their experiences, challenges and secrets of how they reached their goals. These women usually form social groups and contribute to the development programs to inspire other women and make success accessible to them. What is the next step to spreading inspirational leadership?

A favourite discussion amongst any aspiring leader, we ask the questions: Are you born a leader? Or do you learn it?
 
This session guarantees thought provoking discussion and an intense but satisfactory end to the WIL summit.