Presenter: Awatif Yahya is the founder of Awe Horizons LLC, a thought-leader company advocating leadership development to business managers and entrepreneurs. She helps businesses tap into their local talent and use their skill set to gain competitive advantage.

Awatif is a Fulbright scholar with fifteen years international work experience, ten of which with a multinational organization, British American Tobacco, working for them out of Dubai (U.A.E.), Hamburg (Germany), London (U.K.) and Algiers (Algeria). She started her career in IT before moving on to business project management, marketing intelligence, HR reward analyst and finally Head of HR at BAT.

Awatif is passionate about organizations that are inspiring, motivating, safe and fun workplaces. She has great appreciation for the role of emotional intelligence in achieving competitive advantage and is an advocate for leadership skills across all levels. She has made it her mission to encourage more organizations to take the lead in employee development and engagement, creating the next generation of super-duper workplaces.

Her last role as Head of HR for British American Tobacco taught her the importance of balancing strategic business objectives with employee aspirations. She wants to share her knowledge and experiences to help both companies and their employees reach new horizons where tranquility exists between life and work. This is the mission of her company, Awe Horizons.

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Awatif truly believes “unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow”. With that as her motto, Awatif finds herself constantly hungry for challenges. And although she is proud of all her achievements, the one dearest to her heart is the Fulbright scholarship to complete her MBA.