Sarmad Khan ’96, ‘98
By: Mcmaster Alumni
Tags: Mcmaster University, Science, United Nations

A leadership journey from Mac to the United Nations

After high school, Sarmad Khan travelled down the QEW from Oakville to enroll in Sciences at McMaster, because “if you wanted to study medicine, that was the place to be.”

During his time in the mid 90’s at Mac, he actually ended up doing two Bachelor of Science degrees — first in Life Sciences and then in Biology-Psychology. “Probably 99% of the students in my first-year classes aspired to go to med school,” Sarmad remembers. “But as I was coming close to concluding the program, I started to get the feeling that there were ways I could help people other than through medicine.”

Sarmad Khan ’96, ’98, Faculty of Science

He connected with the Centre for International Health (associated with Health Sciences Faculty at that time). He volunteered to be part of a landmine working group led by an Afghan physician and academic. “I got very interested in the landmine cause the year before,” he says. “I was minoring in Anthropology, and the opportunity to work with and study refugees who were affected by landmines in their country was a huge eye-opener for me.”

It was 1997, and he and another McMaster student designed a psycho-social study of refugees close to the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan to determine the levels of social suffering from landmines and how that society was coping and further examine related political economy dimensions. “We were just undergrads, but we did a lot of qualitative research and focus group discussions by talking to men, women, and children who were physically affected by anti-personnel mines and often left socially dejected. We grappled with a lot of heavy issues. It was at this time that my interest in international health began to transition to an interest in international development.”

Sarmad wanted to do more on an international level, so he began considering an MBA in International Economics and Development. He always kept one foot in the door with international development issues, and soon joined the United Nations Association in Toronto to become its Communications Director. He and the Association’s President wanted to change the approach to advocacy on the work of the UN: they started a speaker series inviting New York-based UN Ambassadors from various countries to explore current international topics. Sarmad then applied to the UN Young Professional Officer program (jointly funded by Government of Canada and UNDP). With his experience at Mac in hand and a curious resume, he was invited to interview. He was accepted and went straight to the operational headquarters of UNDP’s crisis prevention and recovery bureau in Geneva. “I worked long hours, absorbing like a sponge as much as I could while trying to do some good.” The Master's degree would have to wait.

After a year and a half, Sarmad applied for a job as Special Assistant to the UN Resident Coordinator (RC) in Yemen. The RC, appointed by the UN Secretary-General, is the most senior UN official in the country and Head of UN Country Team. He got the gig and three weeks later was on a flight to the southern Arab country that was considered a “fragile state” at the time. “This was the most valuable entry into fieldwork I could get,” he explains. “It was a crash course in international and government relations, development work, inter-agency programming, and contingency planning to help move the various teams forward together with national partners to create a UN development plan and help the country meet the targets of the Millennium Development Goals. It was a complete paradigm shift for me to be living and working in a country with such a rich history and different culture than I was used to. The work was very challenging and very exciting; I experienced a lot of personal growth during those four years.”

It was about this time when Sarmad also began working on a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management from the University of London, SOAS, in tandem with his work at the UN. He soon got an offer to work with the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq, helping to establish the integrated UN office and support the UN country team and government move to a more normalized state of development planning as part post-conflict transition management. “This was a UN political mission and I learned a lot from this kind of operational environment.” He continued to build his substantive knowledge on diplomacy and international relations from his field experience — the ‘practice’ that complemented scholarly theory.

While he was considering his next move, he was asked to join the UN System Staff College based in Turin, Italy, as an executive-level trainer for UN senior managers and government officials. Over the course of five years, he worked with and in 23 different countries — travelling with facilitation teams to manage consultations between the UN, government officials, and national citizen groups to decide on priorities of the UN in their countries.

“It was fascinating to travel to different places in the world with different levels of economic and social development. It reinforced my learning and understanding of development operations facing multidimensional challenges and circumstances. The leadership challenge for the UN is how to navigate and overcome these complex issues while still pursuing the desired human development outcomes. It was a rich learning environment. I left with a whole new education.”

Sarmad moved into leadership development with the College and applied all his learnings from the field to critical areas where he could help UN leaders and teams be more effective. He began designing tailor-made programs to raise the bar for specific leadership roles within the UN.

As he undertook this role, he looked at all kinds of leadership in various industries and sectors and applied design thinking and new ways of collaboration. “It was very gratifying to explore new approaches and flex some creativity in that process. Under the leadership of my boss and mentor, what transpired was a new flagship program around leadership that ranged from emerging leaders to the highest levels of the organization.”

Sarmad says that McMaster’s hands-on, problem-based learning approach was a valuable perspective he took when developing leaders at the UN. “Being a student at Mac was a transformational experience for me because we all had to get very intimate with the information. I was forced to lean into what I thought I knew and find out what I didn’t know. Mac instilled that kind of mindset in me that has lasted throughout my career. The school was really ahead of its time.”

In 2014, Sarmad landed in New York City where he led the Global Resident Coordinator System Leadership team and tried to influence policy and design strategies that would help senior leadership do better in the countries they were working in. “At that time, as we were transitioning from the MDGs to the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) I felt it was critical to move away from past project-based thinking to systems thinking,” he says. “My job was to manage the assessment and selection processes of RCs and try to come up with the UN’s first leadership model that would articulate the characteristics and new capabilities needed, moving away from status quo focus around skills and competencies. We needed leaders who could deliver when it counts in dynamic, quick-paced, and often stressful situations. We were looking for collaborators, navigators, and connectors. This was the big vision: we needed a policy and leadership model that is in step with the global transformations needed to better understand and lead on. Thankfully the model was given the green light and that tactically allowed me to start designing a program that would deliver on that model.”

He explains that it’s functional as well as experiential in-field learning around specific and relevant development challenges, overlaid with new leadership approaches, that is necessary to change thinking and behaviours. This ‘capabilities model’ was taken and adapted across the UN system as the blueprint for spurring change in the way UN teams on the ground would do development work.

Sarmad is modest about this success. But his passion shows through as he continues to explain the new Leadership Solutions for Sustainable Development platform he launched with a teammate. They started to use foresight thinking and systems thinking without getting bogged down by a trendy notion of innovation. A partnership was even struck with MIT to adapt systems thinking to the UN’s change agenda to help deliver on the SDGs on the ground.

“Changing your thinking, redefining problems, and taking risks to do development differently — that’s innovation,” he proclaims. “I’ve found that whether a new idea succeeds and becomes best practice or it fails, it’s a learning experience. It becomes a prototype that we build on. We can fail forward. This is design thinking.”

He goes on to say that “the UN and academia need to work together more to use our insights into informing and influencing action for real-life solutions. It’s important for us all to roll up our sleeves, unravel our knowledge, and work together.” Sarmad’s Twitter account reinforces that notion with the byline: “The ocean of what we can achieve together has no shore.”

At the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, Dubai UAE

Sarmad’s current assignment is in the United Arab Emirates as Head of RC Office and Senior Advisor to the UN Deputy Commissioner-General for World Expo 2020 in Dubai, being held for six months starting this October. He’s working to help the UN team move on a cooperation framework for that country while also helping to create a UN Expo pavilion that will connect to the Expo them of changing mindsets and creating the future we want to see. “This is a unique opportunity as the UN commemorates its 75 anniversary this year for all of us to contribute to the global dialogue to articulate what we want the next 75 years to be for people and planet.”

His work has led him to be recognized this year by the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt as one of 40 global Responsible Leaders for their program. As a Board Member of the Academic Council on the United Nations System, Sarmad is keeping one foot in the learning and leadership sphere as well. He is also advising on the curriculum of the UAEU’s ‘university of the future’ initiative — indeed the future of higher education — and how it can support sustainable development solutions.

As he talks, Sarmad realizes that his current post in the U.A.E. is addressing his three passions: learning, development solutions, and leadership development. He also reflects that it’s brought him full circle back to when he was a student himself at McMaster.

“In diverse ways, I’m applying the McMaster model that pursues experiential learning and problem-focused approaches. It has served me well.”

Sarmad’s advice to Mac grads is “to always stay curious about your interests and never stop learning. And the choices and steps you take along your journey, take them with purposeful intent.”