StrongHer by StrongYes
Maha Kassim spent more than a decade at one company without ever feeling stuck, and the reason has become the organising idea of her career. Titles are what other people see. Experiences are what actually build a leader, and she now applies that test to everything from succession planning to Emiratisation.
Maha Kassim is Senior Director of People and Culture at Ras Al Khaimah Tourism Development Authority. She has 25 years of experience across talent, culture and business transformation, including more than a decade at PepsiCo in staffing, talent acquisition and regional talent management, global talent acquisition and HR business partnering roles at Aramex, and senior HR and talent leadership at AstraZeneca and Aujan Coca-Cola Beverages. She is an RL100 member and a trained coach, based in the UAE.
Editor’s note: Ambitious professionals are told to manage their careers, which usually gets interpreted as managing their job titles. Maha Kassim built a 25-year career on a different measure, and it is the same one she now uses to develop everyone else.
When it stopped being process
Maha Kassim did not begin in HR. She started in administration and operations, and the shift in how she understood her own work arrived with her first people manager role.
What she noticed was where the fulfilment came from. Having an impact on her team’s development, their career growth and their wellbeing turned out to be the part of the job that mattered to her, and it did not stay contained. Over time she found she wanted to develop talent beyond her own team, mentoring people and supporting their progress.
The second defining moment came when she moved into HR and talent acquisition, and her description of it is refreshingly free of abstraction. Finding the right match for a role, creating a good experience for both candidate and hiring manager, and helping the business bring in the right person became something she looked forward to daily. She still takes pride in every placement she has made, on the straightforward grounds that a single successful hire can change what a business is able to do.
Chase the experience, not the promotion
Kassim spent more than ten years at PepsiCo, and she is unbothered by the assumption that staying that long means stalling. She never felt the need to leave, because new opportunities arrived every eighteen to twenty-four months.
The company functioned, in her description, as an HR academy in its own right, and it took her from administration into HR and then across multiple HR disciplines. Those moves built the skills that eventually qualified her for larger roles both inside the organisation and beyond it.
Which produced the lesson she now offers to anyone plotting a career, and it reframes what progress actually looks like. The thing to pursue is not the next title or the next company. It is the right experience.
The distinction matters because the two often diverge. A promotion can leave you doing a slightly larger version of what you already know how to do. A sideways move into an unfamiliar discipline can be the thing that makes you employable at a level you have not reached yet. Judged by titles, one of those looks like progress and the other looks like a detour.
“Focus on gaining the right experiences rather than simply chasing promotions or changing companies.”
Development is not a training course
Of everything Kassim did at PepsiCo, the experience that most changed her thinking was talent management, which she describes without hedging as the heart of HR.
It taught her to think about career development well beyond the traditional instrument. Training courses still matter, but they are one part of a development journey rather than the whole of it. The greatest growth, in her experience, comes through meaningful experiences, stretch assignments and opportunities that challenge people in genuinely new ways.
It is the same principle she applies to her own career, turned outward: if experiences build leaders, then a development plan made only of courses is not a development plan.
She adds a second element that organisations routinely neglect, and it addresses a real unfairness in how careers progress. Development is not only about building capability. It is also about visibility, making sure people have the chance to demonstrate their potential and be considered for what comes next. Capability that nobody in a position to promote you has seen is not, practically speaking, doing much for your career.
“Development is not only about building capability. It is about ensuring people have opportunities to demonstrate their potential.”
A global framework with room to move
At Aramex, Kassim led the global talent acquisition centre of excellence and built a more centralised but hybrid recruitment model inside a highly matrixed organisation. The principle she worked to has a neat formulation: global solutions that are locally relevant.
In practice, that meant every global process was built on a common framework for consistency and standardisation, with deliberate flexibility designed in to accommodate local market needs, nuances and regulations.
Her justification for that flexibility is pragmatic rather than diplomatic. The success of any process depends on whether people actually adopt it. A framework nobody uses is not consistent, it is just uniform on paper.
Not every textbook solution travels
Moving from multinationals into Ras Al Khaimah’s tourism ecosystem has reinforced something Kassim rates highly: agility.
A leaner organisation has required her to think differently and build for the realities in front of her. Not every solution that works in a large multinational will work in a team of around a hundred people, and she is clear that the sequence has to be need first, design second, rather than importing an approach because it succeeded somewhere else.
The habit underneath that, and the one she names as her biggest lesson across all the moves, is listening. Listen to leaders, listen to employees, then build solutions relevant to the organisation’s needs without overwhelming it with change. That final clause is easy to skim past and worth pausing on, because over-delivering change is a failure mode most ambitious HR leaders have to learn the hard way.
She holds a steady view underneath all the variation. People are people across industries. Employees broadly want the same things, though the order of their priorities shifts at different career stages. What determines their experience is whether those things are delivered with consistency, fairness and genuine care.
Ambassadors, not just employees
Tourism has changed one thing about how Kassim thinks, and it is a useful lens for any business where the product is an experience.
Culture in tourism is far more visible. Employees need to feel connected to the organisation’s purpose, understand the part they play in the destination’s ambitions, and feel empowered to improve the visitor experience. Which changes the goal of talent work. She is not building functional capability alone. She is creating ambassadors for a destination.
That raises the bar for the leadership the sector needs. Tourism is among the most competitive industries in the world, and the talent that will deliver on the strategy has to be visionary, agile and deeply customer-focused. Leaders have to balance long-term thinking with flawless execution, see opportunities ahead of the market, embrace innovation and keep raising the standard of the visitor experience. They also have to build high-performing teams, develop local talent and create a culture of collaboration.
Her conclusion is a corrective to how destinations are usually assessed. The ones that succeed globally will not be those with the best infrastructure or attractions, but those with people who consistently deliver exceptional experiences. For Ras Al Khaimah, she frames the opportunity as combining ambition with authenticity, which requires leaders who can both inspire people around a shared vision and execute it well every day.
What AI gives back
Kassim has led HR digitisation and worked extensively with recruitment analytics, so her position on AI comes from having implemented the technology rather than observed it.
She expects core people processes to continue to be led by humans. What AI does is make HR more efficient by streamlining processes and reducing administrative effort, and the value of that is in what it frees up: more time for meaningful human interaction, coaching, development conversations and decision-making.
The framing is worth noting because it is neither anxious nor evangelical. AI will transform how the work gets done. It will not replace the human element at the heart of managing people.
Emiratisation begins with clarity
Asked what organisations need to get right for Emirati talent to progress into leadership, Kassim says this is a topic close to her heart, and her answer starts somewhere earlier than most programmes do.
Before building anything, organisations need to invest time in creating awareness around career pathways and growth opportunities. They also need to understand both the strengths and the development opportunities within the talent pool, honestly, and then build relevant programmes on that basis.
Her reasoning puts the individual in charge rather than the scheme. Clarity helps people make informed career decisions about their own futures. Combine that clarity with meaningful development experiences, the same currency she has traded in throughout her career, and you get stronger career journeys and a genuine pipeline of Emirati leaders an organisation can retain.
Seniority is not leadership
The belief Kassim held early and sees very differently now is one that quietly shapes how most organisations promote people. She used to assume that seniority naturally equated to leadership.
It does not. Not every senior professional is a leader.
Leadership, as she now understands it, is both an art and a science, and it requires continuous investment and development rather than arriving with the job grade. She is candid about why: showing up as a leader every day is not easy, having difficult conversations is not easy, and leading through uncertainty and crisis is not easy. Those capabilities get built deliberately, through self-awareness, feedback and a commitment to keep growing.
It is the same argument as the one she makes about careers, applied to the top of the org chart. A title is evidence of what an organisation has decided about you. It is not evidence of capability.
Which is why she does not treat her own development as complete. Asked what still feels unfinished, she answers that learning has no finish line. Every role, interaction, industry and experience brings new lessons, and staying curious is something she treats as a lifelong commitment rather than a phase.
“Not every senior professional is a leader. Leadership is both an art and a science, and it requires continuous investment.”
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