Name: Farrukh Mobeen

Title: Sales Director

Organisation: Oracle

With 18+ years of experience in the IT industry, Farrukh Mobeen is a seasoned sales leader at Oracle, managing the technology sales team for a cluster within MEA. His current role involves overseeing the sales strategy, execution, and performance for Levant, Egypt, and North Africa, covering a diverse portfolio of technology solutions and services

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

I hope Farrukh's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. What have you found most challenging as a leader?

As a leader, most challenging yet important to me is to identify and create more leaders within the team.

2. How did you become a leader? Can you please briefly tell the story?

Biggest quality of a leader is to keep evolving, nobody is a perfect leader and I am no different. Sales was a coincidence to me and I had self-doubts when I started in this field. I was lucky to have some amazing mentors throughout my career who didn't just encourage me for the achievements but were never shy to discuss areas of improvement. They taught me how to self analyze and keep moving forward with a growth mindset.

3. How do you structure your work days from waking up to going to sleep?

I manage regions with different time zones so it is challenging to manage work days unless I have utmost clarity on the priorities. I am of the opinion that no matter what role, clarity comes by putting a structure in place for yourself and the team. I have days dedicated for weekly cadence calls, team meetings, upward reporting and operational activities. Having said that, considering the nature of my role, everything takes a backseat if its about a 'customer' or any of my 'people' issues.

4. What's a recent leadership lesson you've learned for the first time or been reminded of?

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments! No matter how talented you are, lack of discipline will stagnate the growth at some point in time.

5. What's one book that has had a profound impact on your leadership so far? Can you please briefly tell the story of how that book impacted your leadership?

'Leaders Eat Last' by Simon Sinek. It's a great read about building sustaining, performing, long-term teams. My takeaway from the book was leading with trust is a must, nobody expect leaders to be right all the time, but they expect them to own up to their mistakes rather hiding behind the title.

6. If you could only give one piece of advice to a young leader, what would you say to them?

Do not thrive to have followers rather create more leaders within the team - better, faster and more effective than yourself.

7. What is one meaningful story that comes to mind from your time as a leader, so far?

I started sales from the ground up! In my first customer meeting along with my manager at that time, I gave him my feedback on how he could have let me run the show rather anchoring the conversation himself. Five years down the road, I became a manager myself and went back to him asking Do's & Dont's of Leadership. Guess what...he remembered my feedback from the first customer meeting we had together and told me to keep that in mind with my team. Empower people, give them direction, tell them what needs to be done and let them figure out the 'How' themselves in their own unique way. It all goes back to the same approach, create more leaders and not followers!