ICLIF Expert Hosts Talk and Two-day Executive Education Program on Leadership at Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government

Dubai-UAE: 7 December, 2013 - A special lecture on the importance of being a leader rather than a conventional boss was delivered at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government (MBRSG), a premier institution for research and education in public policy in the Arab world, to senior level executives and officials from leading organisations across the UAE.

Titled ‘Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Leadership and Growth', the lecture was delivered by Rajeev Peshawaria, CEO, the ICLIF Leadership and Governance Centre and author of ‘Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders'. The session focused on the essence of leadership where he stressed on how real leaders garner enough energy to cling on to their dreams in order to create a better future despite the feedback and resistance.  Such leadership energy (the staying power in the face of formidable resistance) is what separates a leader from everyone else.  

Peshawaria said: “It remains an unfortunate truth that there are too many bosses, but too few leaders. Individuals that wish to make the transition from boss to leader must as a first step understand the difference between truly leading and holding a position of power. The first step is to have total clarity of your purpose and values.  If one has thought deeply and carefully about the better future (purpose) one wants to create, and about the principles they will live by while doing so, the journey of leadership has then begun.

“In the effort to develop authentic leaders, formulaic, text bookish management models and copy-cat role-plays should be avoided. To turn bosses into leaders, we must rethink the approach to leadership development”, Peshawaria said. 

Peshawaria also delivered a two-day executive education course titled ‘Leadership for Sustainable Growth'. Held from 24 - 25 November, the course provided the chance to find answers to questions about the current performance of each participant's organization, why some senior management teams are able to drive long term sustainable success and why some leaders persevere in the face of the toughest situations and achieve the best possible results while others cannot.
 
Aisha Al Shamsi, Executive Education Manager at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government, said: “We are happy to bring ICLIF's expertise to our senior and mid -level leaders to help refine their leadership skills. The overwhelming response to the course and lecture has been inspiring to us at MBRSG. It is this enthusiasm to excel among the people of the UAE in all spheres of life that inspires the country to sustain its leadership status on the global platform.”

In cooperation with ICLIF, MBRSG aims to organize yet another session of “Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders” in March 2014. In addition, the attendees will be introduced to a powerful framework to discover their innate leadership energy. Avoiding theoretical management models or standard role plays, the course will provide proprietary content based on ICLIF's leading-edge research that can be instantly implemented at the workplace for achieving tangible improvement in organizational performance.

ICLIF programs and lectures were conducted at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government as an outcome of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between the two organizations in July 2013. The agreement was inked to strengthen mutual collaboration in delivering executive education programs to the public and private sectors of the wider Middle East and more specifically in UAE.