Interviewer: Mariham Magdy
“Focus more on the book of business than the book of HR, and seek the “best fit” rather than the “best practice”. HR is more of a contingent science and profession than most of the HR practitioners think…”
Ahmad Youssef
1- HR Revolution Middle East: Would you share with us how did you shift your career from engineering to HR, and how engineering helps you as an HR professional?
Ahmad Youssef: It is a mix of risk taking, passion to try new things, lack of interest in the engineering career in Egypt and HR seemed to be a more intriguing idea.
The engineering background with all the logic and searches for whys involved formed an unusual HR perspective that was recognized and encouraged by the HR leaders in my company and my views were much appreciated. I was offered an HR job in the communication department after few months from my hire date as a networks engineer in my company.
In general, good HR practitioners should always question a lot of things, why & how things go around in a specific way and in a specific context: Are we satisfied with the performance level? And how can we improve it efficiently? And actually these are basic competencies for an engineer.
2- HR Revolution Middle East: Ahmed, you are really known as one of the most professional in your field although you’re younger than your experience & professionalism, to whom and to what do you owe your excellence?
Ahmad Youssef: Awww, I am surprised, but I will take this as a compliment, because I am assured that I still have a lot to learn and I am lucky that I meet people every day that inspire me and show me that I need to add more to my experience. I owe a lot to the engineering background here, but most importantly the organization culture where I’ve raised in as a professional. The trust and value based culture were always there around me and always reflected by my leaders. Trust culture means that people offer each other spontaneous support without narrowing it to the calculation of the cost or anticipating any short-term reciprocation; they communicate honestly and freely; they share knowledge and grant access to information. I was told to just put my thoughts and efforts and we will support you in every possible way, I was given my space and my sometimes radical perspectives were recognized. I needed nothing more really to hit my highest motivational levels and being able to oversee more diverse responsibilities.
In a parallel context, I was happy to have the chance to get to know the owners of an HR practical learning and consultancy platform named “Real Hands On”. We felt very aligned as we share the same concerns about how to develop and promote the strategic contribution of the HR role by providing practical and hands on HR education that is based on solid academic and scientific bases. I am glad to finally meet an HR specialized education provider with this mission in Egypt and we are working together towards the achievement of such mission. This allowed me to pursue my passion of transferring a blend of technical, practical and academic HR/business knowledge rendered to address our specific HR and organizational problems within the business context of Egypt and the Middle East at large.
3- HR Revolution Middle East: The HR field in Egypt is receiving every day professionals from different educational disciplines & backgrounds, how do you think this boosts the HR profession in general?
Ahmad Youssef: I am always a fan of diversity, not just “surface level attributes diversity” concerning apparent physical attributes like sex, age, ethnicity, etc. but rather “deep level attributes diversity” concerning personality, values, educational/functional background, etc. that proved consistent implication on creativity and innovation. On the other side I am distressed with the saying that “HR is the jobless job, or anyone can work in HR”. Diverse educational disciplines and background could benefit the HR field by adding more perspectives but without possessing the qualifying knowledge these perspectives may take us where we don’t want to be.
4- HR Revolution Middle East: What advice would you give to HR professionals to strengthen their positions as business partners & contribute in the business decision making process?
Ahmad Youssef: Focus more on the book of business than the book of HR, and seek the “best fit” rather than the “best practice”. HR is more of a contingent science and profession than most of the HR practitioners think. The understanding of the business strategy, model, process, culture and structure are the fundamental competencies for a good business partner, these are commonly known as “business acumen” and “organizational savvy” in any competencies dictionary. It is also more tangible field than many people think it is, so there should not be any unanswered question in any good HR practitioner’s head. For the core HR knowledge it is good to understand every function in the HR, what it intends to achieve to the business, how it is deeply connected to all the other HR functions, where it begins and where it should end and why. This is how to be good, but in order to be great, HR professionals should know how to tweak and customize all these HR practices and functions to best support the achievement of their business strategies, and believe me; strategy is the organization finger print, no any two on the planet share the same strategy, so are the fittings of HR functions in the organization.
For example, although we may share the same HR book, we will implement totally different HR practices if you were working in an organization that adopt a “differentiation” strategy and I work in another adopting “cost leadership” strategy, although both of our practices are coming from the same understanding of the same book.
Unfortunately there are HR professionals that apply the same practices regardless to its congruence to the organization strategy and they lose a big ground on the strategic table where critical strategies and decisions are discussed because they fail to convince the table with any valuable contribution to such strategies.
5- HR Revolution Middle East: From your point of view, which were the most aggressive challenges faced by the HR professionals in Egypt, during the past 7 years? Were we able to face it the right way?
Ahmad Youssef: For sure a lot of us, our understandings, our practices and the quality of our crises management were exposed to a tough test around the revolution, the time of the political unrest, loose security and frequent strikes. It sent us a harsh signals and revelation on how good we thought we were at “people management” as many call it, I prefer “influencing people”. I know organizations where people didn’t strike at all, but rather stood for their organization’s benefits, search for those, there must me a plenty of good leaders there and HR leaders in specific. Others organizations were shocked with voluminous lessons to learn, others are still striking and others went to complete business shut down.
The more we brace the psychological contract over the formal contact between organization and its people the more we can expect from people in the toughest time.
6- HR Revolution Middle East: What are the secret tips you might give to junior HR professionals to consolidate their understanding & practice of their mission?
Ahmad Youssef: Take off the police-man suite, act and behave like the rightness guardian, that balance people rights and the organization benefits. Being emotional and being human is two totally different things, emotional is unprofessional and unfair, human is ethical and fair. Seek business knowledge from the experts, they enjoy telling about it to juniors, if they didn’t tell, they are not the experts. Look for the strategic relevance of the HR functions not just its duties.
7- HR Revolution Middle East: How can HR professionals keep the red line between their friendship with colleagues in the workplace & the confidentiality of their work?
Ahmad Youssef: HR role require the access to sensitive and maybe personal data for other people, we don’t own these data, and we can’t reveal it in unofficial contexts. This is simply our profession ethics and we can’t claim to be professionals without enjoying these ethics. We have to make our colleagues to understand that we respect such responsibility, and any attempt to breach it will trigger our sever outrage. I don’t think that normally our colleagues will intend to disappoint us if we share the minimal mutual respect.
8- HR Revolution Middle East: Do you believe that organizations in Egypt are on the right track empowering their HR departments & involving them in the business? To what percentage?
Ahmad Youssef: HR can be a strategic formulator and contributor not just a business partner, this is a reality that has been demonstrated in hundreds of academic laboratory and field research and recognized by the majority of the great organizations that achieved turn around in the last 20 years and almost all of the fortune 500.
Such fact is either realized proactively or reactively by organizations. Proactively means that organization capitalize on its human capital and leadership qualities before any other sort of investments. At the other side organizations that reactively recognized the inevitability of sound HR at later stages usually have been through an unpleasant situation of drifting away from fitting the character and parameters of their environment. This is the situation in Egypt especially after the revolution. So yes, definitely we are on the right track, but unfortunately unwillingly, it is just because all the other tracks had failed us already. We are still in the early phase of the developmental curve, but the exposure to the international competition with its volatile and hostile change will accelerate our development as long as we have decided to be a part of this competition, and I really see number of Egyptian local and international organizations that takes very bold and smart moves towards promoting the role of HR within its business contexts, you can know them too, they are the current employer of choice where many talents will love to work with, and they are unnecessarily the highest payers and some of them didn’t exist 5 years ago.
9- HR Revolution Middle East: A problem, we are currently facing as HR professionals, that although the HR practices differ relevantly in relation to the industry, we don’t have institutions that provide sectorial HR knowledge, from your point of view what are the tangible results of that at work & how can we overcome such challenge?
Ahmad Youssef: If you allow me Mariham, I would like to rephrase the problem to be the lack of sound academic qualification within the HR realm. HR is an academic field of research and study since and even before the 1970s in the world top universities, so it is a profession that require rigour qualifications should it be mastered.
The results of such a problem are simply confusion: we don’t know the purpose of what we are doing, inefficiency: we are draining our resources, ineffectiveness: we are not achieving our objectives, and worst is the unawareness of the problem that may be aggravated to its denial as well. I have seen a lot of HR practitioners that call themselves experts just because they are very good at repeating their companies practices for years in isolation from the world and the academic knowledge where the “not invented here” syndrome form a barrier to their knowledge development and enlightenment. This does not only hurt the reputation of our profession, but also affect the perception of fairness of our work impact towards people. You see, unqualified HR practitioners are dangerous for the planet :).
I highly recommend degree programs from a reputable academic body of knowledge, the good news that these programs are facilitated to suite the professionals tight schedules, and there are many advantages for online and distant learning that even don’t exists on campus learning like the access to unlimited resources and the extremely diversified make-up of the class that enrich the learning experience even further.
10- HR Revolution Middle East: Ahmad, you had the opportunity to assist World-class HR conferences & training worldwide, what do you think we lack in Egypt to reach the same standards of these events?
Ahmad Youssef: We need to appreciate the value of learning and collaboration, we need to recognize the value of investing in these things. Learning and development managers should be concerned more about covering their people competencies gap rather than consuming their budgets on the one size fits all soft skills trainings at the end of the year. Networking is good, but knowledge sharing is more important, this should be the base of conferences design and speakers selection. Also the topics should be more oriented towards supporting business where strategic partnership and entrepreneurship languages prevail over HR jargons.
11- HR Revolution Middle East: Do you believe that Egyptians need to adapt HR certificates like PHRi/CIPD to be able to apply their knowledge in the Egyptian/Arab communities?
Ahmad Youssef: They have their values, but they are not the best investment in gaining credible HR knowledge. My concern is on their cost rather than their relative quality. I prefer more degree programs from credible academic body of knowledge with similar or a bit higher cost, then practical learning initiatives and trainings. I always recommend learning after gaining suitable practical experience about the subject, and against starting our exposure to new subjects in a class room.
12- HR Revolution Middle East: What do you think is the main downfall for most of the HR practitioners in Egypt?
Ahmad Youssef: Thinking they can do it without knowing what, how it and why it should be done. And taking any bias towards the company or the people side.
13- HR Revolution Middle East: Being a regional manager for the MENA & North Africa region, how do you assess the quality of HR professionals in Egypt in comparison to other regional professionals?
Ahmad Youssef: Well, I am not ethnocentric nor prejudiced, I don’t believe in good and better in human or professional traits based on geography especially and logically among similar culture. The chances of better qualifications, personal qualities and innate capabilities and behaviors can decide better than nationalities on the quality of a caliber in a given context, contextual factors are very important here. Our Egyptian tok tok will outperform a Lamborghini in some of our streets, so you can’t tell which is better without defining the context. Culture of course is a critical contextual attribute that can falsely add or detract credit from the individual caliber subject to the assessment. I think this will be an obvious subjective assessment so I will give you the same answer if we were comparing Egyptian versus German our Japanese professionals.
14- HR Revolution Middle East: Would you tell us more about your relation with your work teams & your employees?
Ahmad Youssef: Awww, my team, they are my friends, I prefer to work in a casual, relaxed and friendly atmosphere, we trust each other and believe in each other, I just do a lot of effort in selecting them, then I never needed to do any effort in managing our relation, they are very nice guys, I take a lot of pride in finding and working with them.
My employees, or better my people, I work for them, before any complicated HR process that I apply on these nice group of humans, I always try to make them happier or at least less stressful. It is a big reward when I come back home at the end of the day to my another few group of humans that are called my family with the feeling that I have put some effort in making another man or woman happier, a bit more motivated or at least less stressful. I really would like to thank God for this opportunity of contributing to touch other people life in a positive way. By the way we can apply the same in our normal lives away from work.
15- HR Revolution Middle East: Ahmed, we believe u have a very inspiring story behind founding “OD expert“, and for sure it is a result of years of sincere efforts & practical experience, would you kindly share with us more about it and how it plays a sound role in assisting Comp & ben specialists?
Ahmad Youssef: (OD expert) is a consultation firm focusing on organizational development, it is driven by a purpose of challenging the status quo of organizations’ efficiency. We deliver consultations services and develop solutions that demonstrate our purpose and what we believe in to our partners. Our latest release is a pay management platform that perform merit increases, salary adjustment and pay gap identification versus targeted markets, salary structure and internal equity. It uses the merit matrix approach to direct funds towards rewarding high-performing employees who are paid less than the market. This approach helps in looking at salaries adjustment from both an internal (performance) and an external (market value) standpoints and ensures that we are rewarding your talents that gears forward your organization. The novel idea is to perform all of these operations visually with plotted comparisons graphs instead of the typical dull spreadsheets, plus it carries out what used to be completed in weeks in just a couple of minutes. We have two offices one in Cairo and the other is in Dubai serving our clients around the world 24/7.
16- HR Revolution Middle East: How do you escape your work stress?
Ahmad Youssef: Piano, Jazz, Sinai, Reading and YouTube. I love Sinai so much, I like traveling in general, but it always goes around this sweet spot of the world.
17- HR Revolution Middle East: What is your dream for the future of HR in Egypt?
Ahmad Youssef: I first wish that HR will have a future in Egypt, the future is getting more unpredictable and more radical every day, so I hope we will be still needed, we still be able to change at the speed of life and get at the center of the stage by adding more value to the people and the organization and this value to be appreciated in return.
18- HR Revolution Middle East: I have been one of the fortunate persons to be one of your students more than once & learn a lot from you; how do you describe your feeling when you contribute in extending your experience to new generations?
Ahmad Youssef: Thank you Mariham, I feel exactly the same. Believe me nothing is more valuable and enjoyable to me than the enthusiasm and the sparkling eyes of an eager listener when discussing an interesting topic. It’s a mutual learning and a forum of exchanging knowledge, perspectives and positive energy. It refreshes my knowledge and flicks my brain. I gain a lot of purposefulness and a lot of self-worth.