Irfan Hafeez is a leading Learning & Development specialist. He has been associated with multinational banks and large corporate organizations over the last 28 years developing human capital across different business segments. He has extensive experience in enabling leadership & talent development. His passions and specific areas of experience include building business acumen, goal alignment, strategy execution, executive coaching, driving peak performance, enhancing customer & employee engagement.
Tell us about your background and your journey to CEO of Human Development Solutions.
My passion for making a difference in people’s lives explains my journey thus far. 28 years ago, I started my career as a banker and gradually moved up the ranks across key functions including branch banking, service quality and last held the position of Head of Learning & Development in a multinational bank.
Driven by my extreme passion of inspiring people, transforming behaviours and thereby improving business results, I took the leap of faith and founded Human Development Solutions in 2011. And since then, it’s been a highly rewarding and fulfilling journey of enabling organizations in strategy execution, building business acumen, goal alignment, driving peak performance, enhancing customer and employee engagement.
My belief and mantra in life, is to constantly upgrade and not remain loyal to anything that may have brought success today. This ethos has helped me evolve as an individual and helped HDS as a company reinvent and stay relevant in a competitive and dynamic business environment.
What solutions does HDS provide?
Human Development Solutions is creating value through alignment, execution and continuous development of organization’s most valued asset, its people. Our value proposition is all about creating business impact. We achieve this through driving change, building business acumen and introducing cutting-edge technologies to sustain learning impact and improve learning effectiveness.
Our key solutions include:
• Change management simulations
• Leadership simulations
• Management development programs
• Nationals development program
• Online simulations • Digital experiential learning games
• Online psychometric assessments
• Digital bite-sized micro learning
• Immersive learning
• Innovation management platform
• Elearning platforms – technical & behavioural skills
• Mentoring application
What skills are corporates and organizations currently lacking? And where do you fill the gap?
We have had the opportunity to partner with corporations across varied industries and across varied geographies. And we have engaged with people across levels, i.e. leadership, management and individual contributor levels. Based on our experience and understanding of business realities, we have observed most organizations face challenges in the following areas:
– Mindset: Ownership, accountability and proactive approach
– Alignment: Clarity on goals and alignment of actions to business priorities
– Collaboration: Operating in silos and lacking communication and cross functional synergies
– Change: Resistance to change and not being as flexible and agile
As we know the dynamic business environment is pushing organizations to rethink their way of working. To survive and thrive in an increasingly complex and disruptive world, it is imperative to build leadership at all levels, proactively participate in generating more revenues and driving cost efficiencies within their circle of control and influence.
Our interventions enable organisations to achieve this and drive a performance culture to stay relevant and ahead of the game.
Our experiential trainings, international simulations, coupled with digital micro learning reinforcements provide an action and result oriented framework enabling organizations to:
• Drive change
• Build alignment and business acumen
• Instil curiosity and mindfulness
• Embrace diversity and inclusivity
• Cultivate trust and collaboration
• Lead culture of conversations
• Enhance customer experience
• Enhance team synergies and cross-functional collaboration
What is your most in demand training program right now?
In today’s VUCA (Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, driving change and leading collaborative and high performing teams has largely been the priority for most organizations. Given that as the focus area, there are 3 interventions that have been most appreciated and valued.
1. WALLBREAKERS – A change management simulation where leaders experience real business world scenarios and discover pragmatic techniques for overcoming resistance, implementation and anchoring of organisational change.
2. TERRA NOVA – A simulation that mirrors real world organisations, where individuals are engaged in different teams representing departments, regions, or functions, and must work together to meet a common vision. Delegates discover in the experience to be successful, they will need to create a culture of execution and high morale.
3. ILM recognised Management 4.0 Program – 5 highly experiential training modules coupled with gamified digital micro learning experience and mini assignments that enable managers to lead result oriented high performing and engaged teams.
What industry do you see the most rapid growth in right now, for the services you provide?
IT, Healthcare, Travel, Hospitality, Banking will be some of the key industries where we see growth and opportunities.
How important is leadership training for CEOs?
My belief is that people at all levels require some degree of unlearning, learning or reshaping to stay relevant. Trainings help in gaining a fresh perspective, acquiring new knowledge or skill, or at times, it’s simply a validation of a right way of thinking or doing things.
Leaders play a pivotal role in formulating and communicating strategic directions, driving engagement and high performance culture. And in a constantly changing business environment, to lead organizations successfully it is imperative for leaders to be agile, resilient and emotionally intelligent.
In my view, leadership interventions in any format, which could be self-paced learning, facilitated training or executive coaching will help them stay on top of what is going on within their industry and learn best philosophies, ideas and practises in business and people leadership.
What are the best practices for increasing the results of training courses?
A training course has highest impact when it is aligned with business priorities and addresses challenges and pain points of the organization. At HDS, we follow a holistic approach and methodology, which is categorised into 3 distinct phases:
• Pre training stage: Conduct competency based assessments and engage with key stakeholders to design and develop a customised intervention aligned with the expected ROI, success factors, strategic business focus areas, knowledge or skill gaps
• During training stage: Deliver an experiential learning experience that enables discovery based learning and is aligned with the preferences and needs of the learner
• Post training: Sustain learning impact, guarantee learning implementation and business results thorough action oriented coaching, work assignments, digital learning reinforcements, pragmatic working tools and resources
How can training provide ROI?
At HDS, delivering ROI sits at the heart of all our interventions. We apply the Jack Philip model to measure ROI at 4 levels and its evaluated by answering the following questions:
• How valuable did the learners find the learning experience?
• How effective was the training in helping learners gain relevant knowledge and skills?
• Were the learners able to apply what they learned to improve their performance at work?
• What qualitative or quantitative business impact did the training program achieve?
The answers to these questions help determine whether the training was worth the organization’s investment. Post-training quizzes, employee surveys, assignments, line manager validation are some of the methods used by us to measure training effectiveness and impact.
Can you share a Case Study of a recent success story?
We partnered with a local bank in UAE to develop their newly recruited UAE Nationals, responsible for selling retail banking products. At the end of the 3 months’ project period, the employee retention rate stood at a staggering 96%. Additionally, the organisation has clearly filtered 62% of the group who are high performing and high potential talent for further investment. In terms of business results, on an average each employee sold over 6 retail banking products. And those numbers are only growing as the teams had participated in strategic initiatives that had significant potential business opportunities.
In terms of qualitative results, individuals have shown growth in areas such as prospecting, approaching clients, overcoming objections and closing deals, which will yield results in the future.
How have you embraced and incorporated digital learning into your training courses?
Digitisation is the future and we have integrated digital solutions, into our learning journeys to meet the demands of the modern learner. Therefore, our learning is connected, mobile, relevant, motivating and reinforced.
Some of our key digital solutions include:
• Digital micro learning that provides bite sized, gamified and engaging content in a collaborative learning environment. It addresses the biggest challenges of forgetting curve and lower learner attention spans and enables behavioural shifts, business impact and ROI
• World’s largest financial services library offering over 750 tutorials across categories such as Banking, Capital Markets, Regulation & Compliance, Fintech, ESG and more
• Innovation management platform that engages organisation’s collective intellect and crowd source ideas to solve pressing issues and explore emerging opportunities
• Experiential learning games that spice up virtual trainings and webinars, making them extremely engaging and an immersive experience of discovery-based learning
• Mentoring application that simplifies and digitises a mentor- mentee partnership
What is the biggest success of HDS?
We strongly believe that collaborations and partnerships is the key to leveraging greater opportunities and creating value for stakeholders. We have partnered with leading companies across the globe which have strengthened our value proposition.
Our global partnerships include:
• Workz, Denmark – Change Management Simulations
• BTI, South Africa – Business Acumen Simulations
• On the Mark, Canada – Leadership Simulation
• Intuition, UK – Financial services eLibrary
• Code of Talent, Romania – Digital Microlearning Platform
• Innovation Cast, Portugal – Innovation Management Software
• Talespin, Immersive Learning Platform
In addition, our management development program is recognised by Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM).
Get in touch with HDS via email: support@hdsolutions.ae
Or phone: +971505523857
