Introduction
Have you ever felt like a failure, like you let everyone down? That is exactly where Hasan Khair started. He won a scholarship to a private school from Tottenham, then left with no A levels to be proud of, feeling he had let down the immigrant mother who worked her way from speaking no English to translating six languages for the NHS.
He did not let the failure define him. From stacking shelves at Blockbuster to running a 13 million pound department at 19, to HR director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at one of the world's most famous advertising networks, Hasan's story is a case study in what he now teaches through Mavericks Unlimited: everyone has superpowers, and the job is to find them and unleash them.
When school is the wrong shape for your brain
Hasan is clear-eyed about why school did not work. Education teaches at scale: this is the way, fall into line. It made no allowance for neurodiversity, and although he was always intellectually capable, the structure left him behind early and he carried the failure. Whenever he worked on something he was passionate about, he aced it. He is pro-education, he stresses, but what we need to succeed now is very different from what we were told we needed then.
The irony he owns: he worked with fierce discipline for two or three years to win his assisted place, then let it fall apart once inside, because thriving in an elite academic environment needs an infrastructure around you that a young widowed mother, working nights and raising two children alone, could not have known to build.
Confidence is built by doing
The rebuild started small. At Blockbuster he discovered he loved people and took pride in work others might dismiss. That tiny bit of confidence took him to Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, where within six months he was buying product for a multi-million pound department, and at 19 he was managing 50 people. When he realised the retail path led somewhere he felt no passion for, he studied HR and jumped, giving up a permanent job for a secondment that might have evaporated. Both feet in.
Listen to the signals, then act
Hasan's life philosophy is to listen to your intuition, which he describes as your whole computation system: all the evidence you have built up, producing a knowingness about what fits. At one retailer he knew on day one the vibe was wrong. He had the difficult conversation with the CFO who hired him, walked out knowing he had made the right call, and within ten minutes got the call about a short-term gig at Grey Advertising, the beginning of his entire HR leadership career. Listening is half of it; taking action is the other half.
Tottenham taught him what London-centric leadership misses
At 32, Hasan became EMEA HR director at Saatchi & Saatchi and found a regional unit firing London-centric edicts at markets as different as South Africa, the Middle East and Russia. His approach was the opposite: go in, listen, meet people at their level, understand their pain points, then find consistent value to bring. He traces that ability directly to his childhood commute, waking up in Tottenham, hobnobbing with MPs' sons at private school, then coming home again. Be connected to who you are first, then assimilate with every kind of people.
He is honest about one regret-shaped reflection too: as a leader of influence and a person of colour, he wishes he had distributed his time differently and driven the opportunity agenda harder while in post. His view now: nothing made him different except the access he had, and access and exposure are what underrepresented talent actually needs.
Finding your superpowers
Everyone has superpowers, Hasan insists: the things that energise you, that you are genuinely brilliant at, that bring you alive. To find yours:
- Notice what energises you and correlate it with what you are good at.
- Ask what people always compliment you on, what they come to you for above anyone else.
- If you are struggling to see your own value, ask four to six people you trust: what do you think my superpowers are? Then cluster the themes.
- Use tools if helpful: StrengthsFinder, Strengthscope, and strengths literature.
Then bring them into the world in tiny steps. Do one small thing that affirms the strength, then a little more the next day. Tiny steps lead to momentous changes. In teams, use his "call on me" exercise: tell colleagues what to call on you for, so superpowers become a shared operating system. Sope's own example lands the point: his calmness nearly cost him a job offer because interviewers mistook it for lack of urgency, then became the very thing the organisation praised him for. Bring your superpower anyway; let it challenge people's notion of what right looks like.
The accidental manager problem
The Maverick Manager Toolkit, Mavericks' digital training platform, exists because of a pattern Hasan saw everywhere: craft experts promoted into accidental management, unsupported, until they stop being recognised for their excellence and start being labelled bad managers, and in the worst case get exited. He cites Gallup research that companies pick the wrong candidate for manager 82 per cent of the time, while managers account for around 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement. The toolkit's three courses, on setting up for success, conversations that matter and coaching, put the fundamentals at managers' fingertips exactly when they need them.
Boundaries, focus and flow
Hasan confesses he is bad at boundaries and getting better: family dinner is non-negotiable, he no longer works weekends, but the phone at night is still a work in progress. His practical wins are worth stealing. Check yourself when you find yourself on autopilot, paying invoices at 10pm that could wait until morning. Impose screen-time limits and keep email away from the first hour of the day. And protect flow: he now restricts coaching bookings to two days a week, because context-switching between coaching, workshops and business meetings makes deep focus impossible. Rebalance where the time actually goes; the hour lost to scrolling is the hour you said you did not have.
Leadership, defined
Never expect somebody to do something you would not do yourself. Set a pathway, create a vision, nurture the people you are responsible for, have conviction, and be okay with failure. Leadership stands out, he says, when you can say: I might have got this one wrong, let's take a different path. You do not need to be right all the time; you listen to the great people around you.
