At the Home of FIFA in Zurich this week, 34 female leaders, including two from the Oceania football community, continued their leadership journey.
The FIFA Female Leadership Development Programme, delivered with THNK (the School of Creative Leadership) was launched in 2015. The aim of the FIFA Women’s Football Development Department, was to identify, support and develop strong female leaders in football, globally.
The programme runs over nine months, including three group workshops (two of which are held in Zurich at FIFA’s headquarters) and takes participants through extensive fieldwork. A mentor and a leadership coach support the participants along the way, with the three key pillars of learning: Leading self; Leading others; Leading the organisation.
The second module of the second edition (2016/2017) of the FIFA Female Leadership Development Programme concluded this week. It included sessions on Leadership Assessment, workshops focused on Marketing, Events, Competitions, and Corporate Engagement and Strategic Partnerships, and featured three individual sessions with FIFA Management.
Representing Oceania are Adelaide Tuivailala of Tonga and Julia King from Vanuatu.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino, FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samoura, and FIFA Deputy Secretary General Zvonimir Boban each visited the group, sharing their own leadership experiences with the participants, as well as taking part in very frank question and answer sessions.
President Infantino informed the participants that, alongside the Secretary General, he is committed to increasing diversity at FIFA, and strengthening FIFA and football, by ensuring women play a key role. The creation of a Women’s Football Division at FIFA will help support the implementation of tailor-made initiatives, also aimed at accelerating women’s football development globally.
Each of the 34 participants will now continue to develop personal ‘Accelerator’ projects, designed to put the learnings from the programme, ultimately into practice at their respective Federation, or inside FIFA itself.
In FIFA’s 2014 Women’s Football Survey, only eight per cent of executive committee members at member association level were found to be female. This programme will help increase, together with FIFA’s reforms that endorse greater diversity and female representation, that number of women globally.
The graduation ceremony will be in Amsterdam in early 2017, and we will be there again to bring you more on this innovative programme.
Story courtesy of FIFA. For more on the world game visit www.fifa.com