There are certain organizations requiring leaders who can reconcile diverse views, maintain long-term performance, and connect with the power of resilience. That is the context within which Salimatou Balde’s story and success reside—grounded in a strong sense of purpose, a multicultural perspective, and human-centered practices that are helping shape a more resilient model of leadership for the 21st century.

Pioneering Identity Based Leadership in Global Contexts

Salimatou is a living demonstration of multiculturalism, resilience, and transformational leadership. Her journey spans multiple continents, languages, and professions, to global institutions and social movements. Whether supporting empowerment within the UN FAO or pioneering visionary leadership initiatives, Salimatou’s unwavering motto is to build identity, foster inclusion, and empower people to rise—individually and collectively.

Multileveled Lives: Seeds of Multicultural Identity

Salimatou’s own life is as multileveled as her career. Raised in a bicultural, bilingual home, she experienced the richness and complexity of living between African and European roots, developing a deep respect for linguistic flexibility, cultural understanding, and the power of education.

From an early age, she also learned resilience, navigating chronic illness during her school years, which became a catalyst for her belief that adversity shapes maturity and strength. Salimatou’ dedication to service and learning began at 17, volunteering and campaigning for SDG 4 – Quality Education for All, and working closely with marginalized communities. This values-based path, shaped by the belief that adversity can fuel profound transformation, naturally led her into talent development roles with international organizations, where she continues to draw on life lessons to help people and organizations reach their potential.

Core Values: Walking a Leaderful, Inclusive Philosophy

What drives Salimatou? Five core values are the foundation of her way and decision-making:

• Impact: ensuring her work creates meaningful results for the people and organizations she serves.
• Purpose: aligning professional work with a deeper sense of mission.
• Innovation: breaking barriers and adapting to complex multicultural contexts.
• Inclusion: making sure every voice is heard and integrated in teams and partnerships.
• Bravery: taking thoughtful risks and learning to embrace vulnerability to enable authentic conversations and change.

At the United Nations’ FAO: Supporting Global Change

Salimatou’s experience with the United Nations demonstrate her ability to design and lead initiatives with global reach while staying sensitive to cultural and organizational realities. With programmes in three languages and more than one continent, she has overseen projects that cut boundaries and bring people together.

Her portfolio consists of:

• Managing trilingual capacity development program design and implementation with global reach, to facilitate culture fit and knowledge transfer.
• Overseeing regional and local team collaboration in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, through conscious intersection of organisational goals, local nuances and co-created solutions.
• Providing emotional safety and mainstreaming wellbeing within learning and development programmes.

The Genesis of gifted: Redefining Leadership and Transformation

gifted™ coaching and training model is grounded in a blend of research and real-world application, and was born from lived experience and global, multicultural practice. It empowers leaders to reconnect with identity, confidence and strength, and equips individuals and teams with the key capabilities for inclusive, long-lasting resilience, which proves to be particularly relevant in diverse organizational environments.

The gifted™ Model: Identity as the Pillar of Confidence and Resilience

At its core, gifted™ is a science-informed framework built from real-life experience and extensive research. Through it, Salimatou seeks to go beyond the familiar concept of “psychological safety” and focus instead on the deeper principle of identity: the “inner essence” she sees as the birthplace of authenticity, strength, and holistic alignment.

The most powerful aspects of the gifted™ model:

• Encouraging leaders to understand their own and others’ identities beyond work roles and official title.
• Developing customized but adaptable strategies that foster authentic conversations, relationships and stronger teams.
• Arming individuals and teams with resilient communication skills to build trust and performance in multicultural, high-pressure settings.

Through her work, Salimatou focuses on root-level transformation so that her clients learn to draw their own life narratives into purpose, leadership and impact within their organizations.

Organizational Development Milestones: Visibility, Innovation, and Change

Salimatou’s work is reflected in tangible milestones that showcase the evolution of her identity-based approach to leadership and organizational development:

1. Publication of “Shard. – Wounds to Warrior”

The release of her first book, an actual life-inspired novel of resilience, sparked discussion in media and institutions about personal hardships and vulnerability as strength. The book achieved best seller status in brief time spans, opening more ground for her coaching model and for reaching individuals desiring meaningful change.

2. The launch of RISE+, RESTORE+, and RECLAIM+ corporate programmes

As leadership challenges become increasingly complex, Salimatou created three structured pathways of transformation in gifted:

• RISE+ for leaders seeking to regain clarity and direction.
• RESTORE+ for leaders seeking to restore inner strength and resilience.
• RECLAIM+ for leaders wishing to rebuild identity and purpose-driven leadership.
• These solutions are designed to propel organizational change in business and non-profit organizations and set the stage for the next generation of integrated leadership development.

Building Inclusivity: From Openness to Organizational Culture

Salimatou’s inclusive leadership style is at the heart of gifted and shapes the richness of every programme. She draws inspiration from Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and Google’s Aristotle Project, which reveal that teams perform best when everyone feels safe to contribute. She also integrates insights from Amy Cuddy on body language shaping identity, and Dr. Gabor Maté on trauma and its impact across all aspects of life.

Inclusion, in her view, rests on:

• Being naturally curious about the humans beyond their titles.
• Enabling multilingual dialogue and treating multiculturalism as the norm, not the exception—especially in global contexts like her former FAO settings where English, French, and Spanish converge.
• Ensuring every voice is heard, from UN leaders to marginalized communities she has supported through 14 years of volunteering.

Through never losing the focus of identity and open dialogue, Salimatou seeks to help leaders and organizations build cultures where everyone can fully contribute to the shared mission.

Balancing Organizational Aims with Social Responsibility

In working with gifted, Salimatou follows some organizational aims established to meet more universal needs. Of greatest concern, she is most eager to meet issues of belonging, wellbeing, and emotional safety.

Gifted programs are specifically crafted to:

• Reach leaders carrying weights and empower them to convert personal adversity into leadership strength.
• Fill the gap between organizational and individual development, creating environments where they coexist synergistically.
• Create a ripple effect—not just changing the individual but also their teams, organizations, and broader communities.

This emphasis on identity and impact is highly pertinent to the agenda of global leadership in the modern era.

Overcoming Challenges: The Gift of Resilience

Salimatou’s experience is shaped by adversity—from managing chronic illness while holding demanding roles to navigating non-linear career pathways in systems that often reward linearity. Instead of sidelining these experiences, she has used them to deepen her understanding of resilience.

Delivering results and building strong relationships have been her methods of overcoming such drawbacks.

Her message: resilience is not just bouncing back from adversity but the ability to return stronger and build from it.

Mentoring the Next Generation: Advice Born from Experience

Salimatou’s guidance to upcoming leaders is sensible and insightful:

• Take initiative and envision possibilities beyond your current role.
• Invest in difference, as diversity is often the root of empathy, insight, power and performance.
• Learn from adversity; what may seem like a setback can become a source of strength

She invites them to read identity-based resources like her book “Shard. – Wounds to Warrior”—to turn their identity into action and confidence.

Looking Forward: The Future of Leadership at gifted and Beyond

As Salimatou steps out of her FAO role and focuses fully on gifted and her corporate paths RISE+, RESTORE+, and RECLAIM+, her vision never wavers: to equip leaders and organizations with identity-based, holistic leadership capabilities, and expand the reach of resilience-based development globally.

Future objectives include:

• Scaling gifted as both a company and a methodology to support an integrated approach to leadership.
• Building integrated partnerships with senior and emerging leaders to deliver targeted journeys of confidence, identity, and impact.
• Publishing a second book to further explain the gifted™ model for application in multicultural organizations.

Legacy of Authenticity, Inclusion, and Transformation

In a world that is constantly changing, Salimatou’s life and work affirm the power of authenticity and resilience in, and beyond leadership. From the corridors of the United Nations to marginalized communities, her work ranges from strategy to sage humanity.

With each career and personal challenge Salimatou has encountered, she has strengthened a vision of leadership both rigorous and compassionate, always challenging what can be achieved in organizations and life.

Her story is less a tale of victory than an invitation: for leaders worldwide to unlock their own story, build powerful identities, and be the change their organizations and communities need.

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