Inspirational ability is at the heart of our search for the winner of the 2011 Director Lifetime Achievement Award

Maintaining morale and encouraging high performance is an important part of any leadership role. It's made a lot easier if a leader is able to inspire people, both inside and outside the company. Last year's winner of the Director Lifetime Achievement Award, Sir Terry Leahy, spent a defining era at Tesco doing just that. His parting gift to the company he led for 14 years was stability. "In the same way you don't want to be the last pope, you don't want to be the last CEO of a company," he told Director. "Success is about handing over a better company than the one you inherited."

That inspirational ability and dedication to the cause is at the heart of our search for the 2011 winner of the Director Lifetime Achievement Award, part of the national final to the IoD's Director of the Year Awards.

The winner will have spent an entire career inspiring those around them, bringing about positive change, both commercially and socially. But they might not be a big media star or "celebrity leader", this award is also open to the quietly inspirational, those who go about their job without always playing to the media gallery.

Nominations for last year's award ranged from the obvious to the more considered. Naturally there were mentions for the likes of Sir Richard Branson and Sir James Dyson, but there were also suggestions that we should honour Sir Adrian Cadbury, seen by his supporters as the father of modern corporate governance. Other suggestions included the Eden Project's Tim Smit and Apple boss Steve Jobs. Alongside calls to honour recent retail legends, such as Sir Stuart Rose and Leahy, we also received nominations for an older retail giant, the man who kick-started Tesco's rise from pile-it-high bargain retailer to its current dominance, Lord MacLaurin. 

To send us your nomination for the Director Lifetime Achievement Award, click here.

The Lifetime Achievement Award will be announced at the Director of the Year Awards UK Final lunch on 23 September at the Lancaster London Hotel. For more information on the awards lunch, click here

For more information on the Director of the Year Awards UK Final, visit www.iod.com/doya