Alastair Young

Alastair Young is the former Managing Partner of Dentons' Middle East business, Board and Executive Committee Member who is known for sharing his lived experience and insights on resilience, mental health, and leadership. In 2014, Alastair faced a serious period of burnout that led him to take four and a half months off work. From this experience, Alastair emerged stronger, reflecting deeply on mental wellbeing, both personally and professionally. Unusually, his return to work saw him then take on several significant  leadership roles, including positions on Dentons’ Board, its Executive Committee, and as Regional Managing Partner for the Dentons’ Middle East business.

Alastair’s story is not just one of overcoming adversity; it’s also about how mental resilience plays a critical role in leadership. He now speaks on the topic of resilient leadership and high-performance resilience, encouraging both individuals and teams to reflect on how they can improve their own personal resilience and how that, in turn, impacts their teams and the wider business. Alastair emphasizes that resilience is not built in response to a single event but through the continuous practice of small, realistic and achievable steps—a principle he now advocates. One of his favourite pieces of advice is "Think Big, Start Small, Act Now."

Reflecting on his years in law, Alastair highlights that whilst he enjoyed a successful personal practice, management and leadership were always his favorite aspects of the profession. Yet, he stresses that leadership and management are distinct: leadership is personal and service-oriented, while management is structural and focused on the organisation. Drawing on his military background in the British Army,he references the idea of serving to lead, and the idea that integrity is an essential in leadership—respect being more important than popularity, and integrity is hard-won but easily lost.

Alastair’s leadership approach also includes very practical advice: why it is important to start with multiple, small and achievable goals; the important connection between physical health and mental wellbeing and why mastering the art of effective delegation matters. He believes that high-quality effective time management is one of the keys to achieving top performance, reminding audiences that success in leadership is not achieved by setting unrealistic goals but rather from simply getting started and then continuously moving forward.

In his conversational talks, Alastair encourages active participation and questions from the audience, whether addressing senior management in discussions on the subject of resilient leadership or speaking to broader audiences about personal resilience in high-performance environments.