Suhail Al Kharsah works as an Enterprise Agile Coach in the Central Transformation Office of Pharma International. He boasts a remarkable career spanning over 22 years within multinational organizations. Over this period, Suhail has held a series of leadership roles, steadily accumulating greater responsibilities both globally and locally. Throughout his extensive journey, Suhail’s experience has evolved significantly. Beginning with a solid foundation in sales and marketing leadership, he expanded his skill set to encompass human resource management, leadership development, as well as enterprise and executive-level coaching. With a background in pharmacy and an MBA from Strathclyde Business School, Suhail also holds various certifications in coaching and leadership development from renowned global institutes.
Suhail attended the 7th Leadership Summit hosted by Bangladesh Brand Forum, as a Keynote Speaker. On the occasion, he spoke with Bangladesh Brand Forum about his experience, organizational leadership and his views regarding leadership in the age of artificial intelligence.
BBF: With a career spanning over 22 years, how has your experience in sales, marketing, human resource management, and coaching shaped your perspective on leadership?
Suhail Al Kharsah: Now more than ever, I am convinced that leadership is extremely crucial for the development of humanity. During my career, I have worked with brilliant leaders who enabled me to become a better person. They challenged me with different perspectives. They supported me a lot and catalysed my career journey. I admire leaders I worked with because of their ability to see something I was not seeing in myself. I invite every leader to share with their team and think about them – how can they unlock the potential of the people they are working with to be the best version of themselves instead of how to keep them in cacoons where they cannot grow.
BBF: The theme of this year’s Leadership Summit is “Navigating the Next Frontier: Transforming Organisations for the Future”. According to you, what will be the key principles essential for achieving future organisations’ goals in the next decade?
As a coach, I work with leaders in different senior positions in different parts of the world. I ask them, “What are the future competencies they want to develop now that will help them grow even better leaders?”. I always tell leaders to reflect on the journey they want to create for their organisation, the people surrounding them, and how they can make that journey exciting. The fundamental principles here would come from making your people understand the purpose – where you are going with them and why you want to go there. Explaining the “why” once is not enough; this is one point I always reflect on with the leaders I work with. If we tell people the purpose and they know it, they will act on it – this is not the reality. Knowing the purpose, insisting upon it, and embracing the purpose with the team make the journey interesting. Looking at the journey itself is an extremely important opportunity because sometimes people want to change their purpose, going through a difficult period full of challenges. We hope for something good to happen at the end. But this is not the right way to make a journey, especially when discussing a decade-long journey. It is all about embracing the journey with good purpose, making people enjoy it while moving forward, and not talking about it from an evolutionary perspective. The things that I have learned about organisations while moving forward is that they are never in static situations. As humans, we want things that work for us all the time because it gives us stability and safety. In reality, things have never been even with our current challenges.
BBF: As an Enterprise Agile Coach, how do you navigate enterprise-level and executive coaching complexities in a dynamic business environment?
As an Enterprise Agile Coach, I interact with leaders in different senior organisational positions. In the beginning, it was a little challenging because I used to think, “He is a leader with a high-ranking position. I have to conduct myself differently with them,” and I was not successful when I thought about it from that perspective. Then I started to think that the person in front of me was a human being with emotions, needs, empathy, and occasionally facing difficulties and challenges. When people come to you for coaching sessions, they have certain problems; you need to embrace those difficulties and ask them good questions, like “What do you value as a human being?” It will be shocking for them to talk about what they value, and then you can start connecting them. Whenever we are successful at making that connection, magic will happen to the person because something will change in the person’s mindset, and it will help them embrace and approach the problem from different perspectives. In the coaching world, you do not need to provide the answer; you need to unlock the people’s potential to find the solution themselves.
BBF: As a leader, how do you envision the role of technology, AI and sustainability in shaping the future of organisations?
Being from the old generation, I feel scared when I talk about this new digital way of life. I felt concerned when one of the speakers during Leadership Summit 2023 said that your phone would analyse your emotions and start dealing with you according to that. For me, this is an unknown area. As human beings, we tend not to like things disconnected from our awareness. I do my best to make myself more knowledgeable in this practice because digitalisation will happen regardless of how I or anyone else feels about it. On the other hand, many people are concerned that AI will take jobs or some opportunities away. My invitation would be to learn how to make yourself stronger and faster, seemingly with the advancement of AI and technology. It would be best not to look at digitisation as a threat. Instead, we should look at this from an opportunity and learning perspective.
