Dr. Syukri Sudari, the Group Chief People Officer of Affin Bank Berhad, clinched the top honour in the Best HR Leader category at the 2025–2026 HR Stars Awards Malaysia. The award serves as a definitive recognition of his career imprint. Rather than steering HR as a traditional administrative support function, he has intentionally reimagined the department as a core powerhouse that directly shapes enterprise growth and long-term organisational competitiveness.
With decades of high-level HR experience spanning banking, insurance, telecommunications, and aerospace engineering, he brought a rare combination of commercial acumen and human-centred design to the institution. Guided by his signature operational mantra, “Be Bold, Be Brave, Be Better,” he stepped into his executive role to lead a total modernisation of the workforce framework. This extensive transformation journey focused heavily on moving away from fragmented legacy setups to build a future-ready talent infrastructure capable of navigating massive macro-level industry shifts and technical disruptions.
A primary hallmark of his leadership is his work as a tech-driven and data-informed people strategist. He spearheaded deep digitalisation across the bank’s workforce ecosystem, successfully introducing advanced tools like robotics, automation, and predictive analytics. This digital strategy was not treated as a basic software upgrade but as a critical growth accelerator designed to optimise strategic capacity planning and elevate the everyday employee experience. Central to this technical evolution was the deployment of Workday platforms, which streamlined operations while establishing a transparent, group-wide source of truth for tracking performance enablement and internal mobility.
But beyond technical systems, he focused on acting as a culture architect to foster an environment rooted in psychological safety, open debate, and continuous upskilling. His initiatives successfully embedded a growth mindset into everyday leadership habits, giving teams the courage to challenge standard norms and innovate freely. This cultural blueprint is balanced across all entities by anchoring behaviours in the ethical core values of integrity, accountability, and compassion, helping the bank evolve towards its group-wide objective of becoming an employer of choice.
Dr. Syukri influences global labour platforms through council roles. This award proves success requires clear enterprise foresight.
