SABIC Young Leadership Council: A Voice for Today and Tomorrow

At SABIC our people are our most valuable asset. We invest in developing their talents to ensure effective growth and the realization of our global business strategy. The long-term success of our business is dependent on our younger colleagues, who represent the future leaders of our company. 

Through the SABIC Young Leadership Council (SYLC), we ensure these future leadership perspectives are heard today so that we can integrate them into our processes for tackling the challenges of tomorrow.

A vision for the future

The SYLC platform looks to empower our young future leaders through direct interaction with the CEO and Executive Leadership team, providing an opportunity to shape business decisions and drive organizational culture.

The Council encourages an elected group of young employees to share ‘JOLT’ ideas and recommendations that look to create greater agility in decision making and foster openness. Voices from all regions, business units, and levels of the organization are welcomed.

In 2022, the key topics for the SYLC continue to focus on our ongoing digital transformation journey, solutions for adapting to the future of work, and addressing issues that demand a sense of urgency, as highlighted in our employee survey. 

“One of our guiding principles within the SYLC is to ensure there is advocacy and the opportunity to speak for all our employees within the organization. Diversity of thought is key to addressing the challenges we face today and tomorrow.” - Shatha Al-Shammari – 2022 Chairperson of SYLC

A voice today - iENGAGE

To bring these ideas together and discuss how to move forward with them, in June 2021, the SYLC held a virtual event, iENGAGE. The launch of iENGAGE was inspired by our CEO who challenged the SYLC to shape its recommendations and actions on key areas of impact to the company. 

In tackling this challenge, the SYLC united young leaders from over 25 countries across the world to meet with SABIC senior executives in order to find bold solutions to the three key topic areas identified by the SYLC.

Through a gameshow, a more innovative way to engage with leaders, SABIC leaders shared how the organization was progressing with addressing these key issues and invited feedback from the SYLC on shaping future growth and success.

SYLC will be taking the feedforward from these and other engagements to present a recommended action plan to the CEO and Executive Committee during the first ever SYLC Conference in 2022.

“A key part of our work in the SYLC is to approach the challenges we face at SABIC differently. The gameshow broke down perceived barriers between older and younger generations at SABIC enabling us all to have a productive conversation about how we want our business to look moving forward.” - Anne Hélène Gélébart – 2022 SYLC Spokesperson

Always looking forward

A core tenet of the SYLC is ensuring all guidance provided to leadership is ‘feed-forward’ rather than ‘feedback’. This includes sharing their perspectives and key recommendations to a variety of SABIC’s functions throughout the year – including HR, Corporate Digitalization, T&I, Manufacturing and many more. The SYLC also plays an important role in debating key topics and sharing views during SABIC’s Year-End Meetings, which are the company’s flagship internal events that set the agenda for the year ahead.  

The counsel is always keen to support and stretch the organization’s already ambitious transformation goals, ensuring that the SABIC of tomorrow meets and exceeds the objectives set by the SABIC of today.