Emre Uzel talks about the ALPHA program, leadership and Qigong

What motivated you to start a career in shipping in the first place?

I was trained actually as a Civil Engineer and I practiced my profession for three years in Turkey where I am from. I was heading teams in an underground bunker project and reinforcement of an oil terminal jetty against earthquakes. It was during this time I really discovered my passion in growing my career in an international environment, which led me to take the next steps towards shipping.

My first role in shipping was a Customer Service Agent. Regular communication with people all around the world was an exciting opportunity. I was happy to respond to messages and take calls during night from the other side of the world for urgent matters. That helped me quite a lot to build strong business and personal relationships with our customers, which some of them still continue after a decade. I moved to Dubai while I was working for UASC four years ago and joined Hapag-Lloyd during the merger.

Can you tell us more about your career and your role at Hapag-Lloyd?

For the first seven years of my career, I was splitting my working time between Customer Service and Trade Management. My motivation to work for Trade Management was to explore a different side of the business where my decisions and actions could directly influence our financial results. It was not an easy move but I think my time in Customer Service helped me because I was using a lot of analytical tools for my projects.

In my view Trade Management has a facilitator role with the ultimate goal is achieving sustainable and most profitable results for the company, through understanding the operational and commercial requirements of the market and running the services to create maximum value for Hapag-Lloyd and our customers.

Shipping is an industry that serves a large and diversified customer base through B2B channels and complex operational processes. This complexity of our industry leads to increased amount of interactions between functions, more than an average industry would have. Trade Management is also one of the functions, where on daily basis we are interacting with several different teams in Commercial, Corporate, Operations, and Finance departments. I believe this intensified amount of interactions, if optimized properly, is a great opportunity for creating synergies, understanding each others’ priorities and work closely to remove barriers as an organization.

You are part of Hapag-Lloyd’s ALPHA program. How has your ALPHA journey been so far?

Late in 2018 I received two exhilarating news almost at the same time, but was feeling confused as I thought I had to choose one of the two opportunities. I had not only been selected as a candidate for the ALPHA program but I also had gotten accepted to the Global Executive MBA program of INSEAD which had been my long time dream. I reached to HR department to get guidance to navigate through this complicated situation and was happy to hear that the MBA program could be integrated into my ALPHA journey.

This was just the beginning of the journey. Assessment process for ALPHA was quite challenging, and pushed everyone of us to our limits and at the end we received extensive feedbacks about what are the potential steps to take to explore our development areas, and the strengths that we can build on. In my view this is the most valuable part. Taking the feedback from my network, as well as the management team at the end of the assessment sessions, digesting this feedback and start changing things about myself.

ALPHA gives a good opportunity to expand your network globally within the peers and the management, which in return makes it easier to do business together and leads to possibilities to explore career opportunities all around the world.

What is your leadership philosophy?

During my career, I have had the chance to work with managers with very different styles and have learned a lot from that. I have a conviction that people bring their best to the game when accountability, empowerment as well as diving deep as a team together are balanced. Hapag-Lloyd gives us all the tools and structure to run the business well with numbers. I also see that monthly one-on-one meetings with my team members are a big benefit. In these meetings we do not speak much about the numbers, but more about development goals, barriers which also include plenty of two-way feedbacks. Thanks to my team members and their feedbacks, I have learnt a lot about myself during these dedicated time slots, which also enable us to blend the business challenges, with personal development goals.

I also believe that growth mindset is a must in our new world. On hindsight, I can see that all my professional life I have worked hard to make myself not needed on my seat anymore allowing me to take on the next challenge.

How has moving to Dubai been for you and your family?

Dubai is a very convenient location for the expat community to adapt into the life because only 15% of the population are citizens. One day my daughter then seven years old was telling about a classmate that she liked spending time with. I asked her where she was from, she said she did not know and she did not ask. There are roughly ten different nationalities in her class and we have a few dozen different nationalities in our office. Bringing up your children as global citizens in Dubai is a very valuable opportunity.

In Dubai natural green is what I miss most, hence I started playing golf. Similarly to many players that I have met, I have a love and hate relationship with golf. Both of these activities allow to take a break from the high rhythm of the life, and helps as good as mindfulness exercises.

How do you maintain a healthy work life balance?

Apart from golf I also have been playing guitar since a long while. It is a quite relaxing experience to join my daughter playing piano, especially since she has stepped a bit out of children’s music. That is a totally different joy than when I was playing for bands back in the day in some live music bars.

Something that many don’t know about me is that I have also been trained by a Chinese Grandmaster for Qigong, an ancient Chinese healing technique. Qigong is basically a deep and long discussion, and I know just the tip of the iceberg. Similar to other meditational retreat activities, practicing Qigong helps quite a lot to bring balance to mind, body and spirit, which is a form of self healing. I was also trained with different techniques for healing others, though I am not advanced to that extent.