Welcome to Renovah, an organization championing The Leadership Code. Six distinct leaders sit on Renovah’s Executive Committee (ExCo). Today we meet Farah, the one who turns financial stability into organisational endurance. 

Role: Chief Financial Officer at Renovah

Years in Leadership: 18

Leadership Archetype: Resilient

Farah’s steadiness anchors Renovah through change, uncertainty and the calm in between. As Chief Financial Officer, she treats resilience as the organisation’s greatest source of long-term value.

Financial health and human endurance go hand-in-hand in her world. Her remit is to fortify Renovah against the unpredictable: economic turbulence, operational shocks, and shifts in workforce stability that ripple straight through to employee retention, productivity and cost. 

She manages her own resilience with the same intent, pacing her energy, maintaining perspective, and modelling composure so her team can draw steadiness from hers.

Farah embodies The Leadership Code’s Resilient archetype:

“Navigates adversity with confidence, building a culture of resilience and optimism, through every challenge.”

What’s on Farah’s radar

Farah’s agenda balances financial rigour with the operational conditions that sustain it:

• Workforce capacity as a financial asset: Farah pays close attention to findings like CIPD’s latest Good Work Index, which shows 34% of employees with poor mental health intend to quit within a year, more than double the rate of healthy peers (14%). Insights like those feed into her models on continuity, risk exposure and replacement cost.
• Scenario modelling and stress testing: Farah runs rolling forecasts that model financial shocks while also simulating people risk. Her team analyses how workforce strain affects delivery, margin and long-term investment.
• Continuity planning: She has built contingency plans that tie liquidity and capital flexibility to business continuity. By maintaining financial headroom, she ensures the organisation can keep investing in its people and operations even under pressure.
• Resilient growth: Farah evaluates every growth plan through a resilience lens, testing whether projected returns hold up under stress and whether financial or operational capacity can support them.
• Investment in resilience systems: She directs capital towards resilient infrastructure, from risk analytics and scenario tools to initiatives that protect leadership continuity and workforce capacity during disruption.
• Personal resilience: Farah recognises that her own stamina sets the tone. She builds reflection and recovery time into her schedule, knowing that when she overextends, the organisation feels it too.

What drives her

Farah came of age as a finance leader during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, when liquidity dried up overnight and CFOs became crisis managers. The immediate lesson was cash is oxygen, but the experience left a deeper imprint.

The crisis exposed how over-leverage, over-extension and exhaustion of both capital and human capacity leave organisations brittle. It also taught her that the same principle applies to leadership itself: resilience starts with the ability to manage your own limits before you can stabilise others.

Since then, she has shaped her philosophy around one conviction: lasting value comes from balance sheet resilience and the collective capacity to withstand volatility – financial and human alike. 

How that shows up:

• She balances ambition with endurance, asking: “Can we afford it, and can our people sustain it?”
• She monitors productivity and attrition indicators alongside cash flow to flag early signs of organisational strain.
• She has redefined “financial resilience” as something that’s about keeping people, leadership and reputation steady under pressure as much as it’s about solvency.
• She treats workforce investment with the same rigour as capital spend: measured for its impact on retention and performance.
• She safeguards her own endurance by delegating with trust and maintaining clear boundaries.

Challenges she’s faced

Obstacle #1: Equating resilience with restraint

Early in her career, Farah equated resilience with cutting back: freezing budgets, reducing exposure, deferring investment. It strengthened cash reserves in the short term, but in the long term, drained the organisation’s energy and capacity to adapt. She learned that true resilience isn’t about restraint, but flexibility. Today, she builds flexibility into every plan, protecting cash while still funding the people and systems that keep the business moving.

Obstacle #2: Overlooking people risk in financial forecasts
Farah used to treat workforce turnover as an HR metric, not a financial variable. But when a key project stalled after unexpected departures, she saw how talent instability could distort forecasts and delay returns. Since then, she’s built human-capital risk into Renovah’s financial modelling and quarterly board reports.

The team context

Farah leads a finance function that protects Renovah’s financial and strategic resilience:

• Core leadership roles: The Chief Accounting Officer, Controller, Treasurer, and Direction of FP&A (Financial Planning & Analysis) each report directly to Farah, overseeing accounting integrity, financial reporting, liquidity, capital structure, and long-term forecasting across the business.

• Specialist teams: Accountants, analysts and tax specialists handle the day-to-day rigour, maintaining accurate reporting, ensuring compliance and supporting treasury and governance processes. 

• Insight and planning: FP&A teams lead rolling forecasts, budget modelling and scenario analysis, while risk analysts evaluate market volatility, regulatory change and operational exposure through a financial lens. 

What impact she’s had

• Reduced turnover costs by 18% through strategic workforce investment

• Lifted Renovah’s credit rating outlook after resilience strategy implementation

• Improved cashflow accuracy by 25% through capacity-linked forecasting

How she got there

Farah’s leadership was honed through Hanover’s Resilient Leadership modules:

• Building resilience: Hanover coaches helped Farah develop frameworks that transform financial stress into opportunity. She applies this by running “pressure scenario” sessions with her team, training them to respond, not react. The module also reframed her personal approach to pressure. She learnt to “put her own mask on first” by managing her energy and mindset before leading others through volatility.
• Managing wellbeing: Through this module, she learned how to embed wellbeing into financial strategy. Her quarterly performance dashboards now include human sustainability metrics: absence rates, workload variance, and leadership bandwidth.
• Growth mindset: This programme reframed how Farah thinks about setbacks. She now uses post-project reviews to identify recovery strategies as diligently as ROI, treating every shortfall as data for improvement.

Why Farah’s Resilient Leadership matters

Farah shows that resilience, financial and organisational, is what sustains value through volatility. Her approach combines financial discipline with long-term capacity planning, building a business that can absorb shocks and sustain performance. Her steadiness comes from within; she practises the same resilience she expects of her teams, maintaining balance so she can lead with clarity when conditions tighten.

On Renovah’s ExCo, Farah pushes her peers to pair every growth plan with a recovery plan, and to weigh financial decisions for their impact on people as well as profit. 

Want more Farahs in your business?

Organisational resilience is never a coincidence. It’s designed, led and modelled by people like Farah.

Hanover helps organisations embed Resilient Leadership into their culture. Through leadership programmes focused on building resilience, managing wellbeing, and developing a growth mindset, we equip finance leaders with the tools to safeguard long-term value and lead with calm confidence through uncertainty.

Reach out to our Director of Leadership Solutions, Elle Robinson, to learn how Hanover’s Leadership Code is preparing future-ready Resilient Leaders.