Colombo Leadership Academy stamps footprint in Canada and North America

Colombo Leadership Academy, CLA Coaching Director and Chief Executive Officer Riaz Hassen addresses the launch in Canada

By Zahida Rizvi

The Colombo Leadership Academy, CLA Coaching - specialists for executive education and leadership coaching, has expanded its activities to Canada and North American regions to develop people with strong leadership abilities and have a long-lasting impact on their organisations. 

The newly incorporated company CLA Coaching & Consulting Inc in Canada recently launched its maiden event in Toronto where a large presence of corporate leaders were present.

Director and Chief Executive Officer Riaz Hassen said that Canada is the first country the organisation has launched by collaborating with strategic Canadian partners to coach senior- C level executives along with their customised 360 degree leadership profiling assessment tool and the CLA Great Manager Awards program. 

Over the years CLA has invested on its own technology platforms to offer customised leadership assessments that enables coaches around the world to map competencies that help to identify high performance leaders. The models help to make more strategic decisions on global talent management, succession planning and picking the right people for leadership roles.

The strategic alliances formed between Colombo Leadership Academy, One Hub Canada, Landed for Success Canada, The Think and Grow Rich Caribbean, Leadership Circle USA, Hofstede Insights, have been instrumental in making this endeavour to launch the coaching, employer branding and the awarding programs in Canada and North America

The CLA Coaching is committed to developing the next generation of leaders who have a strong foundation in all leadership faculties. This will help organisations grow faster by fostering high levels of self-awareness and the development of high-performance agile teams. 

“The company also launched its flagship awarding program  ‘The CLA Great Managers’ specially focused on executive coaching and leadership development domains and these nominees will be finally assessed by a diversified board of global governors  based on the qualifying criteria for the executives, assessed by their peers and deputies.  

“The domains of assessments include driving results, planning and execution, organisational alignment, coaching and developing team members, team engagement and leadership integrity,” Hassen said.

He further noted that the CLA Great Manager awarding program continues to focus on advancing the domains of managerial and leadership effectiveness of all nominated managers by offering thorough feedback and comments through deep-dive analytics and reports on the participating nominees who were not selected for the awards.

“The key takeaway is to recognise managers who are improving their people-based skills with holistic knowledge of what the organisation is trying to achieve.”

The CLA Great Manager Awards provide an opportunity for each organisation to examine its own managerial and leadership quotient and compare it to the best in the nation, finding overall strengths and potential improvement areas for the company's managerial pool benchmarking industry best practices.

The program helps to develop higher levels of involvement by fostering the development of stronger managers and the industry's manager community. The awards also serve the larger objective of evaluating the ecosystem that fosters excellent managers and best practices among a broader spectrum of organisations across the nation.

The Colombo Leadership Academy and CLA Great Manager Awards program assesses the nominees through a rigorous interviewing procedure before being chosen by an esteemed panel of global governors made up of leaders in the local and global business communities. 

Hassen further emphasised that Colombo Leadership Awards is looking to extend its business by providing executive coaching and leadership development interventions to up-and-coming senior executives in the Gulf region, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen.