Global HR leadership means being a business leader first: Apotex CHRO

It takes a certain multicultural mindset to be a global human resources (HR) leader, according to Carina Vassilieva, Chief Human Resources Officer at Apotex in Toronto. And that mindset means paying attention to the language of the message one is trying to convey, she says. 

"Regardless if it's global or domestic, a head of HR needs to be strategic business leader," says Vassilieva. "You really need to understand strategy, but strategy really gets affected by the environment and being a multinational [organization] – you really need to be multicultural and understand how the same message resonates in different part the world.” 

Apotex, one of Canada's largest generic pharmaceutical companies, employs nearly 7,000 people across operations in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and India, and sells products in more than 70 countries. As the executive responsible for people strategy across that entire footprint, Vassilieva says she has learned that the distance between saying the right things and actually living them can make or break an organization’s culture. 

The multicultural imperative 

Operating across multiple geographies means that even the most carefully crafted corporate message can land differently depending on where it's received. For Vassilieva, that reality shapes everything from how her team is structured to how she defines leadership success. 

"The goal is to engage and inspire people across the world, and communication matters,” she says. “Communication is key, but thoughtful communication is a key as well." 

That same thinking informs how she builds the HR function within her organization. Vassilieva is deliberate about ensuring that the leaders within her HR team share what she calls a multicultural lens – one that treats equal opportunity not as a headquarters policy, but as an operating standard bridging local and international teams. 

"No matter where you are, if you perform, if you deliver mandate, if you're curious, if you invest your time, your skills to the true betterment of the company, everybody has an equal opportunity to be celebrated and recognized," she says. 

Apotex runs a matrix structure spanning both business units and regions, and Vassilieva is emphatic that this kind of cross-functional collaboration requires psychological safety to function. Local representatives, she says, must feel genuinely free to push back on decisions made at the centre. 

"Representatives from different countries should feel safe to challenge headquarters if they feel the need and know that this feedback will be heard, valued, and won't have any consequences," she says. "It's a balancing act, how to achieve results faster without compromising this important cross-functional and cross-geographical collaboration." 

Walking the talk on culture 

Apotex has been recognized as a top workplace in multiple regions during the same period the company was navigating significant organizational transformation. Vassilieva says the timing made the achievement more meaningful. 

"This was done back in time when as a company we went through the period of very high transformation,” she says. “For us to achieve this designation at a time of very heavy change and transformation that the company went through – this is definitely a point of pride." 

The foundation of that recognition, according to Vassilieva, was transparency – and treating employees as capable of handling honest information. 

"I strongly believe that people need to be treated as adults and they deserve to know what’s going on,” she says. “Why the company is doing what it’s doing – it's not necessarily they always agree, but at least they know and they can appreciate the reasons behind it." 

Vassilieva believes that there’s a direct line between that cultural investment and the organization’s business performance. Three years after a significant culture turnaround towards a high-performance and global mindset, Apotex completed a successful initial public offering (IPO) as a publicly listed company in June 2026, she says. 

"People coming together, being engaged, being focused on deliverables, and being appreciative of transparent communication – it all played a major role in the success of us as a global publicly listed company now,” says Vassilieva. 

HR must be at the M&A table from day one 

One area where Vassilieva speaks with particular conviction is her approach to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) due diligence and integration, of which she’s experienced several in her career. In her view, the most common failure isn't in the integration itself – it's in the timing of HR's involvement. 

"HR needs to be part of due diligence, because if HR is brought on board only for the integration part, this is when things start,” she says, adding that in all her experiences HR was involved from the beginning. 

The full cost of cultural misalignment and talent loss can outpace the hard financial figures captured in early valuation work, according to Vassilieva. She believes that culture assessments and talent evaluations belong at the due diligence table – not just compensation benchmarking and payroll analysis. 

"There is a much bigger strategic cost associated with mismatching cultures, which is loss of key talent," she says. "Organizations that don't have it right usually bring HR just to integrate and then you just deal with problems which could be anticipated and addressed earlier." 

A disciplined approach to AI 

Vassilieva's approach to artificial intelligence (AI) is measured and consistent with her broader leadership philosophy: scattered, function-level initiatives create more risk than value. 

"AI in HR should be linked to enterprise AI strategy, because otherwise organizations run the risk of having isolated, functional, fractional AI initiatives," she says. "It really needs to be aligned to one enterprise view of how to leverage AI in the business." 

Vassilieva describes the current state of AI adoption in HR as an "exploration phase" – one where surface use cases such as drafting job postings, are increasingly routine, but deeper structural transformation remains ahead. The guardrails that make transformation sustainable, she says, are governance and risk management. 

"We can't risk anything in business in favour of being an AI champion – it all requires a disciplined approach and thinking through things,” she says. “Governance is super important around it, which is impossible to do without an enterprise approach to it.” 

According to a global survey of data and analytics leaders and AI leaders by Gartner in November and December 2025, organizations with successful AI initiatives invest up to four times more in data governance and analytics foundations than those with poor AI outcomes. 

Business leader with HR expertise 

Across all of it – culture, transformation, M&A, AI – Vassilieva returns to the same professional identity she has held since the early stages of her career. 

"I see myself as a business leader with functional expertise in HR – it's important to be a business leader and really understand the business and stay on top of how the organization performs,” she says. "Credibility of HR leaders comes from being effective business partners – everybody says ‘business partner,’ but being a real business leader with functional expertise is how you add value to the overall successful outcome of organizational operations."