Addressing the members of the Sri Lanka Branch of Chartered Management Institute at their 9th Annual General Meeting, Ms Gill Westaway - Country Director of British Council said that a leader's task was not to spell out to people what to do but to let them perform and surprise the leader with their results, once they are explained what the ultimate objectives are.

Ms Westaway indicated that as the leader of the team at the British Council in Colombo she was able to overcome many challenges in performing her duties, by re-engineering the processes and allocating resources for partnership development and said that they strengthened the relationships with their Indian counterparts with whom they worked more as partners than as competitors.

She explained that though the British Council is mainly seen as an English language training centre, they are involved in many other activities including entrepreneurship development, individual mentorship programmes etc. She stressed on the importance of good leadership for inspiring fellow staff members by encouraging ideas to emanate from them and making them autonomous while also paying attention to their individual needs.

Mr Keethi Jayaweera was elected as the new President of CMI Sri Lanka branch taking over the leadership role from Col Faiz ur Rahman. A new Executive Committee was elected for the administrative year 2010/11 with Ms Siromi Wickremasinghe being appointed as the 1st Vice President and Mr Rohitha Mendis as the 2nd Vice President. Mr Sunimal Weerasooriya took over the duties as Treasurer for the ensuing year while Mr Varuna Ratnaweera was re-elected as the Secretary.

Addressing the members after his appointment as President of the SL branch, Mr Keethi Jayaweera requested greater involvement of all members in CMI's activities and paid a glowing tribute to 3 stalwarts of the branch, Mr Fayaz Saleem, Mr Sunil Deheragoda and Mr V Satyendra for their invaluable contributions for the success of the Branch over the last decade.

As traditionally done at the Annual General Meetings of CMI Sri Lanka Branch, Special Recognition Certificates were presented by the Chief Guest to members who had completed 25 years of continuous membership and this year's recipients were Major W M Weerasooriya, Mr Monte Holsinger, Capt Suranjan de Silva, Mr Armyn Wirasinha, Mr N P De A Samaranayake, Mr Malin de Mel and Mr Sunil S Deheragoda.