 Great, and we are live. Thank you everyone for joining us again. We're doing a special series of podcasts and video cards for the Dive-In Festival, which is a global festival in the insurance market, promoting diversity and inclusion. Brilliant, brilliant festival. And today, I'm really, really delighted to be joined by Lena Hantas, who is the CEO for Argo Global in Dubai. Lena, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. Actually, I'm very thrilled to be with you, and this is a great platform for me. No, it's great. I mean, we spoke a little bit before we went on air, and also a few weeks ago as we were discussing the podcast, and your story was fascinating. You know, growing up in Lebanon and ending up today as the CEO of an insurance company in Dubai. Yeah, we'd love to hear how you ended up as the CEO of Argo Global in Dubai. Yeah, actually, it's been a journey for me. As you mentioned, I was born in Lebanon, and I was raised there. My parents, my mother is a teacher, math teacher, and my father is an engineer. Both of them, they were, they are Muslim, but very secular, and Lebanon, anyway, has a lot of religion, and people there are very much exposed to other culture and to too many nationalities. So I come from a family, I would say middle class, educated parents. They had all the time, a lot of aspiration for their kids. I have two sisters, and they wanted those three girls to do something in their life. So my parents raised the three of us that there is no difference between a man and a woman, and you can do anything a man can do. And then they instilled in me this gender equality, and a girl is as strong as a boy. Great. Was that a common thing when you were growing up? Were your parents doing something that was slightly different from the norm then? Yes, actually, my parents, they spent a lot of money. I think they spent all their money on our education, on the exposure, on the activities we were doing. So they sent us to top schools in Lebanon, and they made sure that we become three languages. So I speak Arabic, I speak English, and I speak French. And I went to a French Catholic school in Lebanon, and this was supported by the French government, basically. And your language at home was Arabic? My language at home is Arabic, yes. Amazing. And did you learn English at school while you were taught French? Yes, actually, in school, I would say in the primary school, and middle school, it's more French and Arabic, but in the last three years at school started to learn the English. And my mother said, you have to go to the American University. You don't have any choice, because she wanted us to be also mastering the English language. So, me and my sisters, all of us, we graduated from American universities. I graduated from the Lebanese American University as a university in Beirut in 1996. And then I started a career at the bank. I worked six years associate general. It's a French bank in Lebanon, and what gave me the opportunity to work at the French bank is my multilingual capacity and skill. So I stayed in the bank for six years, and then I moved to Dubai with my ex-husband. I had two kids at that time. I had Nazar, five years old, and Sarah, two years old, and then came here to Dubai as a family. Later on, things didn't work between me and my husband. So I became a single mother. I took care of my kids, but I started a career in insurance. So when you moved, did you had a job in insurance? No, I moved actually to be with my family and then to figure out what I will do, because my aspiration was to find a job in a bank, because this was my experience, my career experience was in the bank. But when I came here, I had another door open for me. It was insurance. I met a friend of a friend, and he said, why don't you come and join us? And at that time, I joined AIG, one of the biggest insurance company in the world. And I started my career with them. I was trained to be a casualty underwriter. I have been given an opportunity to study in the US, in New York, in their insurance school. I did my underwriting training there, and I was flying to Dubai every month to do on job training, and then go to the US to do the classes training. And then I was trained to be a casualty underwriter for six years. I worked in AIG for six years as well. And in 2008, when the credit crisis started in the world, I moved, I was pitched by ACE, which is CHOP now. And I worked for them to build the casualty book for them in the region in the Middle East. So they announced that regional casualty manager was my position at that time. I stayed with ACE CHOP for two years, and then Argo called me. And I joined Argo. I was the first employee to join Argo in 2011. So I've been with Argo for 10 years. I joined Argo in 2011 as a chief underwriting officer. And I started to recruit the team after that. So the team, in my strategy to recruit and bring colleagues to my team, I always wanted to make sure that we have a diverse team in terms of expertise, languages, exposure. And I made a strategy on this. And I think I have succeeded. Yeah, I want to usually explore the recruitment strategy as well. But one thing I want to ask, actually, if we just go back a little bit, is how you experience kind of the gender equality as you move from Lebanon to Dubai, you obviously studied in the US as well. So did you find kind of major differences across the different countries you've worked and lived in, or has it been kind of similar? Yeah, actually, yes, when I came to Dubai, I would say the insurance market was not as exposed as now in terms of gender equality. And I used to be one of the fewest women in the team where I worked. But I over the years, I see the face of insurance has changed. And we see more women in the field and other fields as well, not only the insurance, also the banking, the government, the schools. I think this is a big topic in UAE in Dubai. And it is not anymore a topic of discrimination or it is gender equality. Nobody talk about it now because this is something instilled and engraved now. I've been in Dubai for 20 years. It took some time to reach there. But I can see that the face of insurance has changed, the face of career for women has changed as well. Yeah, but I would say I always had the respect of my male colleague all the time. I was supported by a lot by male colleague. I was supported by a lot of mentors in the market, male and male mostly and female. And there are also women empowerment. Brilliant, brilliant. So Shantek has really evolved quite quickly over the last 20 years you've been there, which is awesome. And you mentioned mentors. So did you have, I do you mentioned your mom was a teacher. Did you have a look for other mentors over your career that helped you? Yes, actually, you're always in your career have direct mentor, you know that this person is going to be my mentor, because the company has said to me, this is going to be your mentor. But there are other mentors that they are inborn, you know, you get the chemistry and the trust and the trust and you go for them and you ask them for their for their opinion. But my real mentor was my boss at AIG, and I still can now consider him my mentor. He's one of the very well respected CEOs in Dubai. And yes, so a mentor, a leader need a mentor all the time and need a coach. And sometimes your coach will be yourself as well when you look in your mirror or your mentor could be a person you trust. So I have more than one mentor, but some of them have made a difference in my life in my career more than others. Yeah, I think it's so important. It's good to have role models, you know, like when people are growing up in Dubai want to be an insurance and you know, they look to you for, you know, the path you've taken and what you're and what you're doing. I think it's so great to have a I call it like being the CEO of your career, you know, treat your career like a business, build a board of directors, you know, so I mentors, people in your life that can that can help you have this growth mindset and, you know, like, because a lot of people they often wait for the company to provide the training or provide career progression opportunities. And sometimes, well, I think now more than ever, you need to take ownership of your own career. And I think, you know, the mentorship and all of those things is really great. Yes, exactly. I would say recently I've listened to Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, and him telling the story of his life. And there is something he said that made a difference for me. And I think he's right. Of course, he's a shek of Dubai. He said that the world will present the opportunity for the people who knows what they want for the person who knows what he wants. So the opportunity will come to you if you know what you want. If you are not focused, I believe in focus. I believe in having one strategy and follow the strategy and execute it. It's not it's not good to have a lot of things to work on many things. It's good to be focused and work on one thing and execute it and reach it. And of course, if the goal is smart, you will be able to achieve it. Did you always have, because you seem pretty clear on where you wanted to get to, where you are now, did you always have that clarity and purpose? Or was it something that people can develop? Because if someone's listening, thinking, oh, okay, I'm not quite sure yet. How did you go about doing it? Yes, I think when you are at the age of 17, no one knows what they want. But as we mentioned, sometimes you have a role model in your life. You want to follow it or you are inspired by this model. My family, I was inspired by a woman in my family. I would say my aunt and my mother made a lot of difference in my life. Because all of them were educated, all of them, they had status in their jobs and in their career. And I always wanted to make my mother proud of myself. So I wanted to do something. I didn't know what is it because I was young at the age of 17? You don't know exactly what you want. But I had this something here in my inner light, in my heart, that is telling me that I will achieve. I will achieve something. And to be honest, at school, I was one of the good students. But my mother always told me that, see, this something, if you cannot make it happen for you, it's like a rock. You either break it or they will break you. Anything hard that I used to have, hard thing, for example, math. I'm challenged with algebra. She tells me, or my mom is a math teacher, she tells me math is like a rock. You either break it or they will break you. So I always had to fight. I love that. Yeah. I love that. My mom was also a math teacher, funny enough. Yeah. And the hard stuff, I love the hard stuff. Because I think it's really good to go through and do difficult things. Because so often at school, you do your, you go to school, if you do well, you maybe go to university. The kind of path is set. And so if you're a good student, you just you do well. And suddenly, you go into the real world and the real world is tough. Everything goes your way. It doesn't always end nicely like a Disney movie might end nicely. It's hard. There's a lot of, it's not fair, obstacles in our way. And so I love doing difficult stuff, whether it's, I do a lot of like, I do long distance running or I go to the gym or I lift weights, which is hard. And it prepares me mentally for what's to come. I think it's important for people to do that. Yeah. It is important to have a challenge in life because this is what keeps you going. So yeah, I'm more driven with the challenges. And I like competition. I like to go into a competition. And this is where we work. We work in an environment of competitive edges and competition and insurance. And there are other underwriters in the market, but we compete with each other's and we win, they win, we lose, they lose. So this is life. And who said life is easy? Life is not easy. Life's hard. It's hard. It's hard. Yeah. And you have to be up to it strong to be able to fight. You've got to be strong. And you can do things to make yourself more resilient and tougher. And look, you know, people go through different things in their lives. And you know, a lot of people struggle with their mental health and things like that. And I think for me, it's just great to go back to my earlier point, you know, build a really good support structure around, you know, make sure you have people that you can rely upon who are mentors, you know, do like difficult things to repay yourself for whatever life and work, whatever throws at you. I think it's really important. I love that. My next question was going to be how your life experiences have influenced your leadership. And it sounds like, I mean, if you've kind of gone through a lot of a lot of your what you believe already, but I think it's really fascinating. Is that the stuff you've described? Is that how you how you now like go about leading? Yes, I think it is my my my education and the way I was raised and the way I was pushed and motivated into life has influenced my my leadership. And but the most important thing that influenced my leadership is my exposure with international. I worked with international companies with multinational individuals. I had local mentors. I had international mentors and international colleagues. All of this will add and add to my experience and the way I want to go forward and the curve of my learning. Every day, every day I had in my life was a curve for learning. And I always told my my children, if you stop learning, you stop growing and growing is not growing just by age. It is growing by being more wise, more having this intuition that things gonna happen. A vision, your vision, you get your vision because of your experience. And you know, you know that scenarios in life. That's why you have a vision and you put it and you execute on your vision. So all of this helped, yes. But I always had this strong drive for the diversity for gender and gender equality and the workplace. I didn't want only to see this happening. I wanted also to be part of it and drive it. And this is what happened in my little word at Argo where I encourage my colleagues, male and female, but I stress on female more because I feel like a woman can make a difference in the business world as well because we have this intuition. We have different things from a man. We can bring to the workplace other things. We are mom. We are smart. And we make it difficult. Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's great. You know, having a diverse team, whether it's male, female, different places in the world, different perspectives, it just gives so many more opinions and options and better decision making and things like that. And it's also, it's great to work in a team of diverse people. It's more interesting. Exactly. And one other thing in my leadership actually I've done here, I made sure as well for all my team to encourage them always to have a life balance, work balance, life work balance. And this is one of the topics that Dave and Festival is focusing on this year. So this is very important for the balance of any human being in order for you to achieve in the workplace. You have to be happy in your place outside the office or outside the workplace. So I always encourage everyone to have this balance in life, exercise, eat healthy, sleep well, go for mindfulness, do some meditation, do some yoga. So this is something I always encourage my team to do. I always speak about that. I always speak about it's so important. You know, treat yourself like a professional athlete, you know, exercise. I have in my diary is the most important meeting of the day. Like I'm just not going to move it. And then the sleep is obviously important and eating well is key, you know, having all of that stuff together. It's important, absolutely. How did you go about building your diverse team? I mean, there are certain things that you did to attract people. What are some of the things that you are able to do? Okay, that's a good question, actually. In fact, I started with myself. I influenced with myself. I will be the role model for everyone. So I'm the face of this little organization here in the Middle East. And I always gone to be the role model. So when I speak to any colleague, I'll share with them my personal experience. I try to impress them with whatever I achieved. And the thing that I'm proud that I did, I do this all the time. And I act as a mentor. And sometimes if I need to be a friend, I will do that. I go not only on the professional side, but also I try to be as friendly as possible to know if there are any other problems that will affect in the workplace. And I think there are a lot of leaders, and since that the NI program started, and they started to support and supporting employees and mental health and everything. But I think I did more than just the protocols and the programs, because not all the leader can be just a leader and a mentor. But also I took this further to be a friend as well. So this is something I did all the time for my colleagues. So being kind, caring, trying to appreciate where people are in their lives and how you can support them. And you have to be genuine about all of this. You cannot just say I'm there for you and you are not genuine about your words. I think a leader has to be genuine, has to be crystal clear, has to be adamant, correct. I mean, those are traits and ethics, ethical as well about what you do and never lie, never say something you cannot do. Promises has to be executed as well. Yeah, definitely. Interesting. And also, I mean, I'd love to hear how the pandemics affected how you guys are working. Because in the UK, we're at a scenario where, I mean, I'm just kind of almost looking at Lloyds of London now as we speak out the window. And the streets of Venturet Street, Leadin Hall Street, right now are super quiet. I mean, there's hardly anyone. And there's a lot of talk about how things might go back. Some people are doing maybe three days a week. Teams are coming in similar times. But I think we're still arriving there. We're not quite, I don't think we're quite there yet. How is it in Dubai? Actually, the pandemic made us as a team get closer to each other. Great. Yeah. It is the same. We treat this organization as our little home. And whatever we did in our places, we executed here. So we get closer together. For example, in a normal day in the office, I might not be able to speak to everyone. But during the pandemic, especially at the beginning, and during the lockdown, we were calling each other every day. We were checking on each other. We were having more team meetings, not a long one, but at least just to check on each other. See if we need anything, any help, any support, whether in personal or professional. Sometimes it will be IT, for example. Yeah. So it is like we get more into each other's life and the closer to each other. Now, after the lockdown, it came by stages. After the lockdown, we sat together. We sat who wants to come to the office. And I had two of my colleagues, or three of my colleagues, they wanted to come every day. I said, okay, great. We'll get you there. And I came to the office, made sure that the office environment is suitable for them to come back. And then me and another colleague, he's my second in command, actually, we used to come every other day. We were not coming every day because I wasn't sure I wasn't ready to come every day yet. So we were taking turn to make sure that the team in the office are functioning mentally well. So we took turn to come here and check on them. And then when summer started to come, we started to think and vaccination started to be enrolled. We started to think, what shall we do next? So we were all the time ahead of the curve and the head of at least our London office. So I met with the team and I said, what do you want to do? And even I went further step with a survey locally to ask them what is their preference? And I had three or four, they wanted to be hybrid. Some other they wanted to come every day to the office. One of them, she said, I said, I don't want to come at all to the office. So people differ and they're in their way. And so are you now arrived at the point where you're like, everyone's different, everyone has different wants, and are you able to cater for that? Exactly. We said, let's sit all together and discuss what we should do in order to make everybody happy. But the same as well, we want to ensure collaboration, training, innovation to come and see our clients. So as a team, we agreed that we would prepare a workflow, a hybrid one. Twice a week, we have them and we have the underwriters in the office. Once a week, we have all the team in the office so we can collaborate, innovate, training, whatever. And then we decided that when we go back to home and work from our home, we do less exposed things with the client, things that we need to do it from home. But when we are in the office to make sure that we have face time and take opportunity of this face time. Interesting. So this is very much aligned with our mother company in the UK. And is it similar with other companies in Dubai? I would say we are leader in this and people will start following what we are doing. Right. So your future is hybrid ultimately, right? Which I think is great. Which of course is super different to how it was pre-COVID. You must have had everyone in the office, classic, I did too. How have you found it personally? It's also good to offer flexibility. Whether we work all the time hybrid or we work all the time from the office, it's flexibility that we are trying to implement here. Yes, yeah. And how have you found it leading a company now that not everyone's in together? You obviously, you spoke about it before, you take time to get to know your employees, you're being kind and caring and things like that. Have you had to change the way that you've led over this past 18 months? I think, yeah, not a big change, just a tweaking here and there because if this is your personality, you are going just to tweak it in order to to be able to match the changes. So there is definitely a new normal, but also I feel that we are going back to normal. This is the new normal, so we're in normal right now. This is the new normal, yeah, but it's also, it feels like normal. It's a new normal, but it feels like normal, yeah. That's true. And what do you prefer? Like you're working life now. Are you in all the time or are you also staying at working at home a little bit? I enjoy the flexibility very much because it will give me a lot of freedom and freedom is priceless in some cases. It gives me freedom to maneuver around and if I want to do a late call from from home, I can go earlier home and stay there and do it from home. If I want to be with my team in the office, I will come and see my team. If I want to be with my client, I will come and see my client. If I want to go to Lebanon and meet my parents, I can still work from a good Wi-Fi that this is flexibility. It is really what matters and this is what the pro side of COVID is flexibility. Yeah, definitely. Tinty, what do you think the effect will be on gender equality? You know, being able to, it feels like, you know, being able to work flexibly will give more people the opportunity to work in companies that previously would have said, no, you got to be in five days a week. Suddenly, maybe someone's saying, well, do you know what? You know, your family situation, maybe you're looking after your kids or you have an elderly relative or whatever it might be and it's fine if you work at home and do that. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think it will bring more women to the workplace. If you have more flexibility, because women not only have the responsibility to go out and do their career, but they are also responsible to raise generation and raise kids. And if the generation is good, the credit goes all for the mothers and the family and the foundation of this. So I think it will bring more women to the industry or to the workplace and find the work balance that we just talk about it and that I encourage always to do and this is a big topic as well as we said in the dive. So it will boost the life work balance. Yeah, I think also speaking as a dad, it also gives us more options to be able to take our kids to school if we want to. One of the things I've noticed I've got, I'm almost about to have three daughters, so I've got two and one on the way. And the really cool thing over COVID was I was able to take them to school. And if I looked at the people dropping the kids off pre COVID, it was mostly moms. And now there's, I mean, there's almost loads of dads and it's a real mix now, which I think is a really nice thing. Yes, I'm sure you must have thought at some point, oh, I missed a lot. I thought it was, I don't know, the mentality was different, right? It was, I've got to be, you know, I've got to be an A30. And yeah, it would have been, yeah, like absolutely, like, you know, it's fun to drop the kids to school and chat to the parents and see what they're up to. But then in your mind also, it's like, right, I need to make money, support my family, you know, be a good role model, things like that. And so I would always feel guilty pre COVID if I'd started later. So I dropped my kids off. I would do it occasionally, but I just feel, I don't know, just feel guilty because of the scenario, you know, everyone's in it. Whereas now, everyone, like dads, moms, everyone's doing these kind of things now, it's just really good. No difference, no difference. It's equality again and inclusivity again. Yeah, exactly. You know, I want to make sure my daughters grow up and teach them like your parents showed you that they can be whatever they want to be. Yes. And I will always remember that that dropped us to school, like me, my dad used to wake us up in the morning and do our sandwiches and our lunchboxes and used to drop us to school and pick us up from school because my mom was a working mom. And we will never forget this. I always say, my dad has done a lot for me, not only by providing the bread to the table, but also he bonded with us. He spent a lot of his time as well with us. Yeah, it's good. It's a team game. Yes. Yeah. If you see your parents, partners, when they're working together, you know, doing different things equally, it's a great thing. So, well, good place to end. Lina, thank you so much. Really appreciate you sharing your experiences and views and stuff. It's been really interesting. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. Pleasure. Speak to you soon.