Modelling better business

Sustain Leadership Consultancy provides leadership strategy to firms along with guiding startups in the quest for success. Hanane Benkhallouk, Executive Director, explains how

Tell us about Sustain Leadership.

Sustain Leadership is a boutique strategy, leadership, transformation and innovation consulting firm. We engage and align stakeholders to create measurable and impactful business strategies that solve organisational problems, maximise profits, and contribute to sustainability goals.

As a solution partner, we have embraced a lean and agile business model. The idea behind our approach is simple: we believe that the best and most successful businesses are both human-centred and long-sighted. A business's culture isn't defined by its product or services, but by the people who innovate, imagine, and create for its sake. At Sustain Leadership, we aim to align a business' aims and goals with practical strategies, sustainable processes, and innovative mentalities. 

I have been interested in Sustain Leadership's core goal of helping clients achieve their true potential for years. I have a strong belief in the saying: 'We don't build a business, we build people and people build the business'. 

However, the idea of setting up Sustain Leadership officially was triggered after my experience at Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, where some of the studies I was involved in, showed the need for new business models and organisational solutions. Sustain Leadership came to life to engineer change in business and society. 

What, in your experience, is the largest gap between leader and employee? How do you propose to bridge that gap? 

A leaders' job is to build more leaders not followers, and the simplest way to do so is by role modelling the behaviours they want to see in their employees. People hear what you tell them, but also observe what you do, so the most credible leadership model in my view, is being the change, you want to see in people. We encourage leaders to show empathy and vulnerability which builds trust. Trust will always remain the most important value that can bridge the gap between leaders and their employees. We work with organisations to help them build human-centric business models and work environments.  

How do you evaluate and study a startup's profile and give them the best course of action?