The establishment of UTMLead, Centre for Academic Leadership in 2014 was to produce quality inbreed academic leaders for the strategic position in the faculties. Many literatures in research and practices have highlighted the importance of this inbred leadership for any organization and the higher education institution (HEI) is no exception. UTMLead has dedicated its strategic operation in training UTM academic leaders to courses that provide them the knowledge of management skills as well as generic skills. However, there are still gaps to the pool of successors who are selected but yet to gain the experience in decision making, managing people or resources. In 2020 UTMLead had successfully conducted a program called the Leadership Acceleration Program or also known as ACCER2020 that aimed to empower selected young academic talents in leadership with the balance of Emotional Quotients (EQ), Spiritual Quotient (SQ), the DNA of UTM. The program led by Assoc. Prof Dr Che Rozid from the Faculty of Science managed to attract 65 participants aged 40 and below, where the final round was down to 25 academic staff which in this program were called buddies. They were teamed up into five groups and each was given a theme as an assignment to be presented at the Leadership Symposium- LeadSymp2020 (https://utmlead.utm.my/leadsymp2020/) as their final pitch to UTM top management. Each group was guided by two mentors from CEO@faculty fellows (https://www.mohe.gov.my/en/focus/556-ceo-faculty-programme) who would assist their buddies regarding their assignment. Within this mentor-buddies program, buddies were also given task to organise Leadership talks and interviews with internal as well as external prominent leaders. The outcome of the program can be found at https://utmlead.utm.my/accer/