Hosted by John Jeffcock, CEO of Winmark and author of The Suite Spot
The Suite Spot interview with Atif Hasan
What is the career path to becoming a Chief Finance Officer? What are the challenges of moving between cultures and countries, and what mindset to you need to succeed?
In this episode of The Suite Spot, we talk with Global Chief Finance Officer Atif Hasan about his international career in finance including working for a FTSE10 multinational.
We hear about the people and events which influenced Atif, as well as his advice for those who aspire to international executive leadership roles.
Atif offers several fascinating insights for those climbing the leadership ladder, including:
- Being adaptable and open-minded is essential to enjoy the opportunities of working in different cultures
- Even when you reach the top of your career you need to be open to learning and know how to learn
- Don’t be afraid to let go of your ego and ask for help if you don’t understand something.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS AND CAREER ADVICE FROM:
Atif Hasan, Global CFO at August Leadership. Previously in international finance roles at Nestle and British American Tobacco plc
TRANSCRIPT
John Jeffcock (JJ): Welcome to the Winmark Suite Spot interview series where we explore how to reach lead and deliver a C-Suite role. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Atif Hassan, Group CFO of August. Welcome Atif.
Atif Hasan (AH): Good morning, or rather good afternoon! Thank you, I’m excited to be on this call and I look forward to having an interesting conversation.
JJ: Can I start by asking, when you were a child what did you want to be?
AH: That’s always an interesting conversation starter. I would say that what I wanted to be as a child was probably influenced by who was around me as a family. So, my father was working for Pakistan Airlines and we were essentially globetrotting literally from a very, very early age. So I went to Sri Lanka at the age of six months and then I had a couple of uncles who were working in the armed forces. One was a pilot and one was a submarine commander. So what I really wanted to be was actually to be associated with the aviation industry, be a pilot or something like that. Now that sounds very cliched, but that’s what I wanted to be.
JJ: And when you left University had you changed your mind by then or were you still quite keen to to become a pilot or aviator?
AH: Well, I think I tried to get into the Air Force. I didn’t succeed so I went down the path of doing chemical engineering, and I found that very interesting. I was pretty good at it as well. And then actually I had two career changes. I qualified as an engineer, but then I went on to do my MBA because I did not frankly find it any longer exciting, although I thought it was very creative to be a chemical engineer, but I didn’t see a career in there. And I went to do an MBA.
At the start of my career I had a choice between getting into finance or supply chain actually. The head of supply chain in BAT Pakistan tried very hard to convince me and I actually had to wiggle my way out of it because I found finance, the way it was being done in BAT, to be closer to what I thought I would be good at. I found it to be more exciting. I wanted to do finance – not accounting, finance. I didn’t know what accounting was. I took my first accounting lesson in my MBA school in the second quarter of my first year, so that’s how my accounting career started. Little did I know that I would be doing the things that I’m doing right now.
JJ: I think engineers generally make good accountants because they’re used to dealing with data and numbers and stresses and that kind of thing. But before we go, could you summarise your career in one minute. Can you do that?
AH: Of course. If I encapsulate my career in one minute, I would start with where I joined as a finance management trainee at British American Tobacco. I got trained up in three or four key areas. I started off in control and audit – it was a process-based audit, very different from what at that time was considered to be audit roles. I had a very good grounding in that.
And then I spent time in Financial Planning and was extremely lucky to be involved in Treasury management at BAT. I did some restructuring of the balance sheet and refinancing of the company which was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And that carried me through to Germany when I continued my role in Treasury. That added to me as a professional because I got to understand the whole perspective of how treasury supports the business.
Then my career as a business partner started. When I came back to Pakistan, I became a commercial partner managing a factory, managing the marketing function and then on to the Financial Controller role. I went to become a CFO for a public limited company in Sri Lanka and then I continued to grow in a regional role when I went to South Korea, I did a cluster role. And then I left BAT to do a very different role in Iraq, which was a turnaround for a Nestle joint venture. And now what I’m doing is a CFO role for a scale up for a platform services organization. I’ve been C-level for the last 12 years.
“What was interesting about working in all these countries? It was the fact that I was never encumbered by a perspective in terms of how things should be because every time you went out your perspective and your context changed. So I never felt constrained by how things should be and I think that helped me a lot. I think that's something that a lot of people who go outside of where they live, that's what they're constrained by, usually about how things should be as about as opposed to how things can be.”
JJ: Obviously you’ve worked in many countries and those countries are in different levels of development as well. That’s a very interesting mix, isn’t it?
AH: My first role in engineering was from Turkey. By the time I started my career I’d already spent half my life outside the country which I was born in. But what was interesting about working in all these countries?
It was the fact that I was never encumbered by a perspective in terms of how things should be because every time you went out your perspective and your context changed. So I never felt constrained by how things should be and I think that helped me a lot. I think that’s something that a lot of people who go outside of where they live for a personal life outside, that’s what they’re constrained by, usually on how things should be as about as opposed to how things can be.
And secondly, it’s all about your nature as well, whether you’re adaptable to change or not. And I found that I perhaps had been conditioned to adapting to change for a bit. So that was interesting. That was something that helped in doing that and I found I never had a difficulty in going into any other. Yes, they were challenges, I did something wrong, but then I learned. But I always find it fascinating to be able to learn a new cultures and learn new cultural environments, professional environments. I always found it to be an interesting challenge rather than a debilitating challenge.
JJ: It’s a very good point that. I was listening to someone earlier today that was saying tha3t 90% of our thoughts are repetitive. And so do you think that one of the advantages of having a very international career is you become less repetitive, you become in a way yourself more diverse?
AH: 100% – you yourself become more diverse if you choose to be. I’ve seen experts that have gone out and come back and it hasn’t changed them one bit. They just come back with the same preconceived notions about where they went and they come back the same. Perhaps they can eat more dishes than they used to do, but otherwise nothing.
So you learn to expect different things. Personally, I’m fascinated and I like to absorb new ways, new cultures, new languages. I’ve spoken 5-6 languages in varying degrees of fluency in my professional career. It is something that I enjoy doing. So coming back to what you said, yes, things are less repetitive. Sometimes it’s not how you deal with people, it’s how you deal with your environment, how you deal with challenges, h how you choose your cultural assimilation to enable you to do your job? It is extremely important.
JJ: The different countries you have worked in must have very different values and ethical frameworks? And so how do you manage when you’re being tested?
AH: Every country has different sets of values. I can relate through my first transition in a professional setting from Pakistan going to Germany. The good thing was that I already had formed the way of working myself. I like to do something in an organized manner. I had a beginning and the finish. I relied less on relationship, more in process. Whereas in Pakistan you would rely a lot on relationships and process is less focused, but when you go to Germany everything is process oriented, there is a way to do things. So that’s what I found very different.
JJ: Have there been key moments in your career or decisions that you’ve made that have been particularly important?
AH: One decision was when I chose to finance as opposed to supply chain. That basically made sure that I had one direction that was going. So that was one thing and the reason why I did that was because I felt my mindset was more attuned to supporting and building as opposed to operate and repeat?
The other one was having the opportunity to do treasury. A completely different role in terms of finance. The other one was my first C-level posting in Sri Lanka. I had some wins and I had some losses in terms of professional development, so that was a very important turning around in that one where I felt I delivered well on the C-level interaction and C-Suite support. But maybe not so well with my team. So that was a very important turning point for me as to how you deal with teams.
So that was one. And then when I worked in Iraq. When you land there, you are essentially in a professional battle zone. Things don’t work as you expect them to work. You have to deal with things on a day-to-day basis and that taught me the value of frameworks, processes and workforce or engaged teams. If you know more about your team, you can get more out of them and there’s no better way to do that.
John you’ve just been in Dubai? There’s no better school to do that than in that part of the world, where one to one engagement and one to one understanding of each other is paramount as opposed to process and support.
JJ: And have you ever had a mentor or guide or someone particularly useful in terms a steering your direction?
AH: My first manager when I joined BAT. That one person has been very defining in terms of how I worked as a finance person and how I manage my career. I first met with him when I was a 24 and I still meet him with him when I’m 50 years old! The career lessons have changed, but they’ve also not changed, so that also shows what he taught me or mentored me about, how far reaching it was.
So that was one person and there was another manager that I had in Iraq. It was a very tough relationship, I had a very difficult relationship with him, but I felt that I learned a great deal about managing complexity and uncertainty. A completely different viewpoint, completely different. You will not find this in the developed part of the world. So I wouldn’t say life changing, but it was life enhancing. This is how you deal with things, what adversity can help you with or what adversity can teach you – moving forward rather than paralysing you.
I’ve also thought are there people who have mentored me without me knowing. Friends who I thought were great at managing things and I always had a chat with them. They were mentoring me without even mentoring me, so that also happened.
It’s very important to have a mentor or a guide along the way, even though you don’t call them that. A sounding board, somebody who can help you contextualize, give you a broad direction or advice for that matter. You may not take that advice, but somebody who can free frame things for you is very important.
JJ: I never asked are you married or do you have a partner that you’ve been taking around the world with you? This has a big family impact.
AH: Yes I’m married. I have three boys. I got married in 2010 in the middle of my international career so they went along with me to most places except Iraq, where it was not a family station and I could not take them with me. It is very important to have a stable married life or a stable partner because they are a very important source of support when you are in an international career. You’re doing everything in partnership, there is no one taker and one giver. Everything is being done in partnership. You cannot do it on your own. When you see the success or failure of any international transition or international career, you’ll find consistently that they are able to have consistency on that front. So I’ve been fortunate to have that as well. I’ve got three boys and my first boy was born in Sri Lanka and two of my boys were born right after when I was in the regional role and one was born while I was in Korea.
JJ: Have you ever had a crisis moment in your career?
AH: Several! So, there are two types of crises that you can face. You can face a crisis when the company is in crisis, and then you have to manage it. And the other crisis is when you are in crisis. They’re not too different in how you deal with, but of course there are key differences as well.
I was in a crisis moment from a company perspective when I was doing Treasury and that required me to think differently. You forget about what you’ve learned and how to do things in the last 3, 4, 5 years, and then you see the situation is different. How would you do it differently? Fortunately I had a good person to look up to, a German general manager. His name was Gottfried Toma, he basically up-ended the way we do things in BAT Pakistan. And I found good inspiration from that. So I had a good reflection, you know you can do that.
So that was one. I would draw on my instinct of build development, never take a template and assume it’s going to work later. The other career crisis moments were where I was finding myself failing at doing what I was supposed to be doing. And that happened once in Pakistan and once in Sri Lanka, and once in Iraq where I thought to myself “do I really have the skill to do this?” You know, the impostor syndrome? Am I really capable of doing it? I think I’m in the wrong position – they’ve just promoted me way out of my depth?
But I always found that you could pull yourself out of it and in two ways. One, do the basic important things well, which means you need to know what they are first. Secondly engage and leverage the people around you. I didn’t say team, the people around you could be your team, could be your peers. Tell them that you are in crisis. Tell them how you want their help and make sure that you’re putting your foot forward as well so that your intent is clear so that you’re not piggybacking on them.
“You have to let go of your ego a little bit because people tend to assume “oh I've made it. What the hell do I have to learn?”. I found that out when I went into Iraq. Whatever I learned in my 20 years in corporate life in a FTSE top ten company in six countries, it was worth nothing. Unless I chose to learn. The other thing is that you should know how to learn. You have to know how to add on to yourself. And if you cannot do that, forget it.”
JJ: You strike me as someone who likes to continue learning through life. So how do you do that. How do you continue to develop yourself?
AH: That is a very important question for anybody who has had a long career or who wants to have a long career. You’ve got to start with the assumption that you have to learn or continuously learn. If you haven’t got that thought process well set in your mind then you’ll have a problem. So I’ve got that very clearly. I like to learn new things. And for that you have to let go of your ego a little bit because people tend to assume “oh I’ve made it. What the hell do I have to learn?”. I found that out when I went into Iraq. Whatever I learned in my 20 years in corporate life in a FTSE top 10 company in six countries, it was worth nothing. Unless I chose to learn.
The other thing is that you should know how to learn. You have to know how to add on to yourself. And if you cannot do that, forget it.
And the third thing is to be never afraid to ask for help, but that’s part of your letting go of your ego. Don’t be afraid to ask if you don’t know. I sat down and you know I never had an accounting career. or accounting qualifications. And I remember a time when I was in a crisis situation where I actually called one of my team members, and I said “Sit down with me. Can we go through the accounting entries of this particular transaction because I don’t know how it is going into the SAP” And he looked at me and he says “You know, boss, are you OK? Are you asking me? Are you testing me?” “No, I’m not testing. I want to learn.”
You let yourself be vulnerable. So that’s how you are able to continuously learn.
JJ: How do you manage your network of contacts? Because you must have developed quite an extraordinary group of relationships over time, so how do you manage this network?
AH: To be very honest with you, it’s a bit of a challenge because obviously over the course of 27 years you meet, interact, form relationships with scores of people some of which you really want to continue to be in touch with. I won’t say you don’t have the time to do it, because I found out that you need to find the time to do the important things. You cannot make excuses that you don’t have the time for it, so the way I do it is that, and I’m not always successful, is find touch points and find engagement points, with people. Leverage your experiences together to keep your things fresh.
Be useful to them so that the conversations are always energizing. Don’t be selfish about the conversation. Be sincere about the conversation, which means that you never reach out to anybody when you need them. When you reach out to somebody be sincere about that effort and seek out opportunities to reconnect with somebody you haven’t seen. Think about the opportunity. Connect your interest with the other person’s interests. Now these things sound very mundane, but this is how I do it. People will tell you about more sophisticated methods of keeping records and keeping calling them with a calendar schedule. I think the underlying thing is be sincere in your engagement always and you will find that your contacts are useful.
JJ: And when you got your first C-Suite executive role, why do you think you were selected for that role?
AH: Well, I believe the reason why I was selected to be Finance director of a public limited company in Sri Lanka, a billion dollar turnover company and second largest cap in Sri Lanka, I believe the reason was my ability to engage across cultures and my ability to think ahead. Be commercial in my approach as opposed to being an accountant in approach. And I was told that I managed stakeholders well cross-functionally and that was demonstrated with my roles in Germany, when I was doing things, talking to banks, talking to different functions.
You know, I picked up golf just to make sure that I could engage with different people who I would have never had the chance to engage with. I did that out of a selfish purpose, perhaps, but it worked. There’s only so many ways you can engage with people, right? Not everybody drinks coffee or tea. Not everybody likes to have a chat over these things. Some people like to do it differently. And it’s only when you find common things with their, with their own passions and their own interest is when you can truly engage with people. As opposed to transaction engagement where I believe I you’ve got something that I need and I’ve got something that you need. So let’s have a chat. How hard is that relationship? Hardly.
JJ: If you reflect on your career, is there anything you would have done differently?
AH: Yes, certainly tons of things. If you let me go do it again, I would take a lot more chances. I will be a lot more. I would not second guess myself or self doubt. I’ll served out a lot less. There’s a lot more in an individual than one mixer out to be I would have done a lot of that more and I would be kinder.
JJ: And what advice would you give to your 25 year old self?
AH: I would go back and say: take more chances, don’t be afraid. The consequences of inaction are worse than consequences of action. Be kinder to people. Be more empathetic and try to understand their context a lot more. Be less result driven than I was before. Remember, this too shall pass. It’s not the end of things, and last but not the least, never stop learning. Always make time to learn something, whatever it is.
JJ: Thanks Atif. That’s a really interesting career and insights. I reflect back as I married an Austrian and I learned a lot through having an international marriage, different cultures and ways of communicating. It’s a steep learning curve. May I conclude by congratulating you on your bravery and your career.
AH: I don’t call myself very brave, but yes, if that’s what it looks like from outside, yes!
JJ: I’d just like to thank you very much for your time. That’ll be very useful to many people and we look forward to hearing from you again soon. Thank you.
AH: Thank you very much. Yes, thank you, John.
