Building the ExCo at Renovah: Meet Samir – The Empathetic Leader

August 21, 2025 | Elle Robinson

Welcome to Renovah, an organisation championing The Leadership Code. Six distinct leaders sit on Renovah’s Executive Committee (ExCo). We begin with Samir, the one who listens first and speaks last.

Role: Chief People & Culture Officer at Renovah

Years in Leadership: 17

Leadership Archetype: Empathetic

Samir (though everyone calls him Sammy) doesn’t just lead people. He listens, feels and connects with them. He’s the cultural heartbeat of Renovah, which has made headlines recently for keeping employee attrition under 6% annually and scoring 92% on internal trust in the latest company-wide engagement survey.

Samir got here by being the one people came to after the meeting. Throughout his career, he’s always known when someone’s struggling, even when they say they’re fine, and he has a great talent for de-escalating conflict in a way that leaves both parties feeling heard.

Today, he leads a cross-functional team of 60, coaches senior execs on emotionally intelligent leadership, and is a trusted presence across the business.

Samir embodies The Leadership Code’s Empathetic archetype:

“Leading with self-awareness and authenticity, building trust through emotional intelligence, and creating a culture where people feel valued and understood.”

What’s on Samir’s radar

Right now, Samir is helping Renovah and its leadership adapt to a workforce that values psychological safety, inclusion and purpose at an unprecedented level. He’s doing this by focusing on the real challenges shaping today’s working lives:

  • Hybrid team disconnect: Supporting leaders to build cohesion, trust and emotional presence across screens and time zones.
  • Burnout and fatigue: Creating sustainable rhythms that protect employee wellbeing in the face of global instability and economic pressures.
  • AI anxiety: Guiding teams through the uncertainty of automation by creating space for open dialogue and active support.
  • Inclusive leadership: Embedding empathy into everyday decision-making, ensuring every voice is heard, and turning difference into strength.
  • Social responsibility: Helping Renovah’s leaders understand that consumers and stakeholders don’t just look at what you deliver, but also how you lead, and that Empathetic Leadership is how to build brand trust from the inside out.

In short, Samir isn’t just creating psychological safety for his own team, he’s also shaping a company-wide standard for emotionally intelligent leadership.

What drives him

Samir believes people do their best work when they feel psychologically safe. He was struck by the fact that only 51% of UK employees see their leaders as empathetic. That reinforced his mission: to create cultures where trust is the default and empathy translates into impact.

How that shows up:

  • He prioritises emotional check-ins over performance checklists
  • He’s normalised feedback by embedding it into the weekly rhythm
  • His office is known as “Switzerland”: neutral ground where tricky conversations become turning points

Challenges he’s faced

Obstacle #1: Being underestimated

Earlier in his career, Samir’s emotional intelligence was misread as softness. He was skipped for a major promotion in favour of a more ‘decisive’ peer. That moment fuelled his resolve to prove that empathy is a strength, not a compromise.

Obstacle #2: Holding boundaries

Samir had to learn that being empathetic doesn’t mean being endlessly available. His development journey included learning how to care without over-carrying.

The team context

Samir operates in a fast-paced, hybrid work environment where burnout is a real risk and emotional disconnect is creeping in through the rise of screens.

His team includes:

  • High performers with perfectionist tendencies
  • Gen Z hires expecting psychological safety as standard
  • Leaders under pressure to deliver results without losing people in the process

Samir acts as a coach, translator and stabiliser. He connects human need with business strategy, and that’s where his impact lies.

What impact he’s had

  • 43% drop in regretted attrition in two years
  • Record-high trust scores in internal leadership surveys
  • Employees frequently cite him as the reason they’ve stayed

How he got there

Samir didn’t wake up like this. He’s been shaped by deliberate development. Here’s what he’s engaged with through Hanover Leadership Solutions:

  • Self-awareness module: He worked with a Hanover coach to identify his triggers, blind spots and empathy-overreach tendencies. This helped him refine when to lean in and when to pull back.
  • Psychological safety workshops: Samir rolled these out across his team after completing his own intensive course. These gave him practical tools to build trust across differences and lead difficult conversations with calm clarity.
  • Giving and receiving feedback: Through Hanover’s peer-based learning sprints, Samir developed new habits for framing feedback as curiosity, not criticism, and helped others do the same.

Why Samir’s Empathetic Leadership matters

Samir is proof that empathy is just as necessary as strategic expertise. Amid the rise of hybrid work, relentless pace and generational values clashes, he’s the kind of leader people follow not out of obligation, but because they want to. 

On the ExCo, his presence brings essential balance. Where others drive outcomes, he keeps the human context in view. He challenges decisions not just for their logic, but for their impact, ensuring leadership moves thoughtfully.

Want more Samirs in your business?

Hanover helps organisations embed Empathetic Leadership at every level. Through insight-driven assessment, inclusive leadership development programmes, interactive workshops and 1:1 coaching, we equip leaders with the self-awareness, emotional intelligence and relational skills needed to lead with empathy in today’s complex environment.

Reach out to our Directors of Leadership Solutions, Brent Herman and Elle Robinson, to learn how Hanover’s Leadership Code is shaping future-ready leaders.