iLead Conference 2011
One hundred and forty future leaders from the top schools around the country gathered in Pretoria for 3 days of powerful leadership inspiration. Grade 11 learners were privileged to experience at the 2011 ‘iLead’ Conference, held at St Albans College in Pretoria 29 – 31 August 2011. Top Billing’s charismatic Dr Michael Mol and Talk Radio 702 DJ and journalist David O’Sullivan were on hand to be a part of this event.
Varsity College and St Albans College have collaborated to host and create this initiative to guide learners who are about to take up leadership positions within their schools. These learners will no doubt move on to being the leaders and captains of industry in their chosen careers, so it is important that they are equipped with the skills to do this in an inspired and informed way.
The conference was an intense mix of talks and workshop-based learning sessions and live scenarios.
Michael Mol spoke to the learners about strengths-based leadership - focusing on your own and others’ strengths and capitalising on these.
Eight different speakers gave their perspective on different aspects of leadership, such as that of the African context, self-leadership, courageous leadership and the challenges of leadership.
Learners were mixed up into groups from different schools and had to make the leap between listening to someone speak about a leadership concept, and putting it into action with a task, as well as show or discuss how they would implement the concept within their school.
One of the tasks was called ‘World Chef Conference’ – learners were given the task of finding ingredients and cooking a chicken – without the benefit of a kitchen to hand. Many fires later; gourmet chicken was enjoyed by all!
The feedback from the 140 boys and girls in attendance was that the learning curve was outstanding. Their dedicated participation in every talk and activity showed just how captivated and involved they were.
‘Varsity College is passionate about furthering and developing leadership skills amongst our youth, and this is one of the most tangible ways of doing this. Through developing leadership, we develop our youth beyond the classroom and into the world‘ says Simon Nicolson, Marketing Manager of Varsity College.