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Shahid Majeed: Helping young professionals around the globe

  • Written by: Tess Sanders Lazarus


After growing up in a poor village in Pakistan, Shahid Majeed developed a deep passion for creating change and inspiring others to become the world’s future leaders.

 

According to Shahid Majeed, owner and founder of E-LEAD Global Centre of Excellence for Leadership, Engagement and Development (E-LEAD), “having a tough start to life shouldn’t hold anyone back when building a career and being a leader in the future.”

 

“After going through my own hardships earlier in life, I want to inspire and motivate the younger generations to follow their passion to pave their own futures,” Shahid added.

 

“My dream has always been to launch my own business to create highly experiential and effective programs for future and emerging leaders.

 

“I didn’t have any financial or people resources when I decided to launch my business.

 

“To pursue this dream of mine I had to leave a salaried position of over 12 years and start E-LEAD from scratch.   It was very challenging to convince people to buy into my passion and vision when I was only one person.

 

“I had to manage everything we achieved by leading from the front, inspiring and motivating people to be engaged with my passions.”

 

By building a strong sense of community and interconnectivity between the members of E-LEAD community, Shahid is paving the way for leadership programs across the globe.

 

“It is really important that the youth are supported and assisted when it comes to striving and achieving their best,” Shahid added.

 

“Helping them grow and flourish from the early stages of their professional lives will only lead to positive outcomes. Leadership development should not be limited to those who can afford it.  It should be available to all people across all sectors of our society.  Money, access and power should not dictate who accesses leadership development opportunities. Everyone is capable of becoming a great leader if given the opportunity to learn, be mentored and appropriately supported.

 

“Throughout my career I have founded and established a large number of leadership initiatives from scratch, including the inaugural International Leadership Development Program (I-LEAD) that brought together 13 of the world’s leading business schools from six continents to Australia including Wharton, Kellogg, MIT Sloan (USA), INSEAD (France), London Business School and Cass Business School (UK), Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), IE Business School (Spain), NUS Business School (Singapore), Wits Business School (South Africa), Universidad de Chile Business School (Chile), Auckland Business School (New Zealand) and UNSW Business School (Australia)”.

 

Shahid also founded the inaugural Graduate Student Association at the UNSW Business School, which was selected as the best club of the year within just the second year of foundation.

 

“Having worked for over 15 years for other organisations, I decided to take the plunge to launch a global leadership centre to make my dream into a reality.”

 

Drawing inspiration from the leading universities and business schools all around the world such as Yale, Harvard and Wharton, E-LEAD Global is continuously developing dynamic and contemporary experiential leadership programs.

 

“We are constantly thinking creatively to develop and launch new and vibrant initiatives,” Shahid said.

 

“In 2018, E-LEAD is launching a residential experiential leadership program (LeaderAction) for early career professionals, a graduate recruitment immersion and training program (GRIT) for university students along with a corporate partnership program to secure corporate sponsorship for E-LEAD programs.

 

“E-LEAD is devoted to developing and enhancing the capabilities, aspirations and impact of future and emerging leaders for active global leadership.

 

“All of our programs develop excellence in people through employing a holistic life-cycle approach by blending together experiential leadership learning and development with electronic engagement.

 

“Seeing E-LEAD become a distinctive centre of excellence in experiential leadership development for future and emerging leaders is where I see E-LEAD heading.”

 

www.e-lead.com.au

Startup Stepping Stones - 5 Tips on Making Your New Venture More Competitive

  • Written by: News Feature Team


Starting a new business? You’re not alone. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), there are 2.17 actively trading businesses in Australia, with an increase of 2.4% from June 2015. As it stands, you need to be doing plenty to make sure you’re standing out - both online and in the marketplace you’re working in.

 

It’s difficult, but certainly not impossible, to make an impact as a new business, and we’ve got a few key tips here to make sure you can make your new venture that much more competitive. Let’s take a look.


Provide maximum value

 

One of the biggest reasons why a customer will come back again (and will tell their friends about you) is because your business provides more value than the next one. You need to find what it is about your product that offers value and then capitalise on this with a strong message to your customers.

 

Say you are a real estate search engine who offer a daily list of the best listings for a certain area, customised based on a customer search. You need to be leveraging data scraping to firstly provide this up-to-date information, and you then need to be delivering the information in an easy-to-read and digest format.

 

Whether it’s an email, a customer portal or a link to your site - figure out what your customers want and then give exactly that to them.

 

Offer exceptional customer service

 

Every single customer needs to be treated with time, respect and care. People have a lot of options these days; they can pick and choose from a huge range of providers and can quite easily walk away if the service isn’t up to scratch.

 

Don’t give people a reason to walk away from you - give them a reason to stay. Whether it’s follow-up feedback, a free gift for shopping with you or something else special, make sure you offer exceptional customer service every time.

 

Admit it when you make a mistake

 

So, we’ll start by stating the obvious: no one is perfect! However, if you take the time to admit any mistakes that you make you’ll find that people are pretty quick to forgive, especially if you offer some kind of incentive for the experience.

 

If people have left some negative feedback about you online, then own it. Get in touch with the person, talk to them - and most importantly, learn from the experience. If you handle the experience well, the takeaway can actually be that your customers think more highly of you.

Be honest about what you offer

 

If you are a new business offering a drop-shipping product then you need to let your customers know that there is going to be a pretty hefty wait for the first roll out of your products. If you are clean about what you provide from the get-go then people aren’t going to get mad when things take a little longer. They’ll expect the wait and won’t get mad.

 

Plus, if your customers catch you lying about something that you offer you can bet they’ll tell others about it - and it usually won’t be pretty.

 

Offer a guarantee

 

People love to know that what they’re paying for is watertight.

If you have the kind of products where you can offer some kind of guarantee you should. Especially as a new business. It’s important that you take the time to build a reputation as a trusted business, because that’s one of the key reasons why people will keep coming back to you time and time again: trust.

 

It’s not easy to stand out, but with the right commitment and dedication to your customers and an ongoing focus on doing the right thing in business you’ll get to where you want to be.

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