INTERNATIONAL business development and communication consultation, Guyanese Sandra Baptiste, recently, conducted a one-day workshop themed ‘Leadership Excellence, Inspiring and Motivating your Team for Peak Performance’.

It was sponsored by the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) at Regency Suites Hotel, in Hadfield Street, Georgetown.
Addressing participants at the forum, last Thursday, Baptiste said mastering leadership techniques first requires a commitment to become a transformational leader who understands and practices collaboration, team building and effective communication.
According to her, leadership by example is the key to creating a cohesive workforce of people who share and participate in an institution’s forward trajectory.
She posited that leadership development programmes have been proven to boost employee morale and improve productivity through faster generation of new ideas.
Excellent leadership techniques equip both seasoned and new leaders with the skills to face their challenges with greater confidence from an enhanced knowledge base, Baptiste asserted.
She said new techniques will enhance the people skills of those who took part in the seminar and teach them to become nurturing leaders, able to build and sustain winning teams.
On the benefits of a good leader, Baptiste said leadership is definitely not about having power and authority over one’s followers or subordinates nor is having power about trying to be super-human. On the contrary, it is to be well-grounded and able to motivate change and bring people together to work as teams.
She said one of the great benefits of a good leader is delegation, emphasising that the essence of delegation lies in the art of learning how to get the whole team involved in the various tasks that are required to help a company move forward.
She said that is also very important to developing one’s own leadership skills.

Ms. Baptiste is a home-grown expert in international marketing, performance management and Customer Relations practices. She is the Founder and Chief Executive Consultant of CARIGOLD Associates, a group of Guyanese professionals currently involved in training and consulting in North America and across the Caribbean. In the recent past she managed projects for the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (World Bank). She was the Communications Consultant for several other projects with the European Union’s Caribbean Office and the Caribbean Export Development Agency (CEDA) that is currently organising a series of programmes for the GMSA and other local BSO’s and NGO’s. Ms. Baptiste has also served in Canada as Public Relations Chair and Executive Board Member of the Ontario Chapter of the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO).