CELA Approach to Leadership

The eightfold path to leadership: eight factors that distinguish CELA’s approach

1. CELA’s commitment to its participants is long-term. It recognizes that leadership training cannot make someone a leader overnight - it is merely the beginning of a process, whose ultimate success can only be gauged after years.

2. CELA’s networking concept is exceptionally broad-based. It seeks to enrich indigenous leaders by introducing them into select global networks to draw on the best worldwide knowledge and support.

3. The CELA Academy is designed for the participants to spend hours together with the 20 facilitators and spouses through breakout sessions, exercises and planned, social interaction as well as hundreds of impromptu exchanges over meals [see Box]. This opportunity for young leaders to engage in real interaction with mature, successful leaders provides on-the-spot mentoring as well as access to their networks and years of follow-on leadership and personal development interaction.

4. CELA multiplies the impact of its leadership development work through a training-the-trainers approach. It aims to develop not only transformational leaders, but a cadre of trained professionals who can serve to inspire and mentor colleagues in their own countries.

5. While most organizations target only one sector (or one gender) for their leadership development work, CELA’s approach is cross-sectoral. By bringing together people from government, business, media, NGOs and civil society, equal numbers of women and men, CELA encourages social partnerships and makes for a vibrant mix that is greater than the sum of its parts.

6. CELA’s approach is also multi-level, targeting both national and local leaders, and thus opening the way for exchanges on issues of shared concern. In this way, the gap between center and the peripheries is lessened, and motivated leaders on both levels can work towards the achievement of common goals.

7. The recruiting effort for CELA is highly intensive and conducted in the field, while a Selection Committee carefully focuses on individuals' sense of their own ambitions and modes of operation in their own environments.

8. Crucial to CELA’s philosophy of leadership is that engagement with the region must be a two-way street. Accepting international differences in understanding, management, priorities and governance, Western and Asian decision-makers have much to learn from their counterparts in Central Eurasia.