Islamic banking professionals travel on leadership programme

Manama, Nov. 26 (BNA): 37 professionals from Islamic banking industry traveled to Hong Kong and Toronto to participate in an intensive 17-day leadership programme. Conceptualized by the Waqf Fund and designed and delivered by the Ivey Business School exclusively for the Waqf Fund member institutions, the programme aimed at grooming the next generation of C-suite executives in the Islamic banking industry. The participants worked through real life case studies focused around leadership, strategy and ethics. They also had the opportunity to understand the China business and governance model, and the reasons behind the stability exhibited by the Canadian banking model in the global financial crisis. The Waqf Fund, which has been instrumental in enhancing the standards of Islamic finance training, education and research in Bahrain, arranged for this training programme in response to market demand for high impact leadership training for Bahraini nationals. Khalid Hamad, the Chairman of the Waqf Fund stated: "In our evaluation of the quality of human resources the Waqf Fund board determined that the top management in the Islamic finance industry generally needed improvement in three areas – leadership skills, strategic thinking and big picture understanding, and a deeper recognition and understanding of ethical considerations in business. We decided that the middle management of Islamic banks should be groomed through this programme in order to prepare them to successfully lead the industry in the future." The Waqf Fund board selected Ivey Business School to design and deliver the programme due to its rich case study base (second largest after Harvard), its presence in Asia as well as North America and the quality of faculty it committed to deliver the programme content. The feedback from the participants as well as their institutions about the programme has been overwhelmingly positive. A participant expressed his feelings in these words: "In terms of learning, this is by far one of the best programmes I've attended. I think the Ivey team from Hong Kong to Toronto did a very good job in connecting all the points from global level strategy, to business level strategy and down to unit level strategy. I personally learned a lot about China in Hong Kong and learned a lot about leadership, including my own personality strengths and weaknesses, as well as getting a sense of how difficult it is to make leadership decisions without a single correct answer." The Waqf Fund is in discussion with its member institutions and the participants on what next steps should be taken to continue the journey of leadership improvement. In his meeting with the participants Mr. Khalid Hamad emphasized the need to take ownership of their own career growth and learning. He said that the leadership programme was just a beginning of a lifelong journey of learning, application on the job, improvisation and sharing the learning with others. The Waqf Fund has been operating in Bahrain since 2006 and has 21 member institutions. Over the years it has launched several ground breaking initiatives for its member institutions, their employees and the broader Islamic finance industry with the aim to develop the human resources engaged in Islamic finance. The Waqf Fund operates under a Board of Trustees which is chaired by Mr. Khalid Hamad, Executive Director of Banking Supervision, Central Bank of Bahrain.