FRET not if you are a top performer with proven track record. Jobs will search for you instead of the other way around.
Such is the case for Malayan Banking Bhd (Maybank) group president and CEO Datuk Seri Abdul Farid Alias who will be leaving Malaysia’s largest bank by market capitalisation and total assets on May 1 (today is his official last day).
Ever since Maybank announced that the veteran banker would not be seeking a renewal of his contract in early January, a few job offers have come the veteran banker’s way.
“People are already calling me asking if I can do the job for them,” Abdul Farid said in a podcast interview with Maybank Investment Bank Bhd’s CEO Datuk Fad’l Mohamed.
“I want to be clear with most of them … I said I don’t want to start talking about anything until I leave the bank. It’s only right we start talking after I leave and not while I’m sitting on this chair. I don’t want to start talking until May … it’s only right.”
The podcast interview is part of Maybank Investment Bank’s C-suite talks which are shared with the investment bank’s clients and sighted by FocusM.
Abdul Farid, 54, who was appointed as Maybank’s head honcho on Aug 2, 2013 will be succeeded by former RHB Banking Group managing director and CEO Datuk Khairussaleh Ramli, 53, who will helm Maybank beginning May 1.
“I want to explore something else. Typically, a lot of people, once they do similar jobs after a number of years, they want to do something bigger … hopefully do something meaningful after working 10-20 years,” quipped Farid.
“For me, I want to do something else. I don’t know what that something else is in the first place but it will definitively not be more of the same.”
Abdul Farid also does not discount the possibility that he will sit on the board of companies.
“For now, I just want to take a short break and have some quiet time. It’s been very noisy with the e-mails and WhatsApp (texts) which come to you 24/7 … I just want to have some quiet time.”
Farid said there is little individualism within Maybank because such behaviour will create a negative culture that permeates throughout the entire organisation.
“An organisation is like a football team …and it’s about leadership is through teamwork and it’s always about ‘we’. It’s never about (Barcelona forward Lionel) Messi. It’s about the team,” he summed up Maybank’s organisational culture. – April 29, 2022
