Rawalpindi - Speakers at a four-day training workshop on “Pathways to leadership” on Thursday stressed that leadership should be principle driven instead of personality driven. Leadership is all about principles, values and thoughts, they said.
The workshop was organised by Pir Mehr Ali Shah Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi’s Faculty of Social Sciences in collaboration with Renaissance Foundation for Social Innovation, Islamabad.
The speakers stressed for respecting the feelings of others, as, they said, every person had his or her own thoughts, views and had the right to expression.
The purpose of the workshop was to explore the emotions affecting social and religious harmony and nurture the abilities to understand others and develop tolerance to cope with leadership crises.
Dr Sarwat N Mirza, Vice Chancellor PMAS-AAUR, was the chief guest at the concluding session while renowned scholar Dr Khalid Zaheer, TV anchor and columnist Khurshid Nadeem, founding member School of Leadership Kamran Rizvi and PMAS-AAUR Dean Faculty of Social Sciences Dr Abdul Saboor were guest speakers at the training workshop which was attended by deans, directors and students of the social sciences.
The speakers said that truth should not be compromised in the name of personal biases. They said that Islam had its unique thinking system which produced positive leaders. It makes each culture natural as the beauty of Islam lies in its compatibility with other cultures of the world, they said.
The last session was interactive, based on the principles of leadership in the context of ownership, connection, sympathy and visionary approaches. Regardless of the differences, they focused on the diversified approaches and emphasised to adopt the principles of commonalities.
They also talked on soft elements of leadership and concluded that principle-centred leadership was need of the day rather than person-centred leadership.
Dr Sarwat N Mirza, the vice chancellor of the university, while sharing his experiences in life argued that interactive teaching was important for creating success stories in academic life. He said that there was much potential among the youth which should be capitalised in the right direction.
The vice chancellor expressed the hope that the training session would be helpful in enabling the audience to respect the feelings of others by accepting differences to create social and religious harmony.
He also promised to continue such trainings in other faculties of the university.
