Message to the leaders of tomorrow

Recently, I was delighted to celebrate the graduation of the LEAD, EMERGE, GROW and ENGAGE cohorts of the Majid Al Futtaim Leadership Institute.

Over the past year, these team members have been challenged, stretched and pushed outside of their comfort zone in order to grow both personally as well as professionally. I know this journey was not easy, and I am sure there have been days when each of them questioned whether it is even possible to deliver what is being asked. However, 251 MAFers completed the programmes. And I couldn’t be prouder. 

As they look back and revel in the journey they just completed - the learnings, the friendships, the opportunities for impact, the challenges, the great moments - the reality is, it is actually a great time to look forward.  

I had the honour of speaking at their graduation ceremony. This is what I shared with them, which I think is relevant for anyone aspiring to lead in the world of today and tomorrow…

Reflect on how you will ‘show up’ at work from tomorrow, how much bigger you will dream, how much bolder you will be in your aspiration to make a difference to your teams, your business units, your functions. 

At Majid Al Futtaim, it is precisely this desire to make a long-lasting difference to our organisation that propelled us, a few years ago, to establish an engine to develop our talent from within. We wanted to build a pipeline of leaders that would ensure the longevity of this organisation, the sustainability of our business and its continuous success.

We started with a deceivingly simple question – what behaviours should Majid Al Futtaim leaders’ role model, congruent with our vision of creating great moments for everyone, everyday and with our values of Bold, Passionate and Together? 

This led us to our Leadership Model. We could not have anticipated then the incredible impact that the Leadership Model would have on our transformation. It gave us a common definition of leadership that is relevant to our organisation. One common framework to assess leadership potential across all levels of Majid Al Futtaim.

 The Leadership Model was and continues to be the foundation for the Leadership Institute and all its programmes and learning journeys were designed to develop the behaviours enshrined in this Model.

It gives me immense pride to see the transformational impact that the Leadership Institute experience has had on so many of our talented team members.

 We can all agree that learning is a complex process and that creating seamless, memorable learning experiences is very difficult. But true learning requires humility, an open mind and happens in the service of behavioural change. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

And it goes much beyond learning new skills. Rather, it is about changing our way of approaching the world, it is about shifting mindsets and unleashing our leadership potential.

I believe leadership is underappreciated in today’s instantaneous, technology-enabled world. And yet it matters today more than ever. The nature of leadership is changing rapidly, at pace with the transformation of how people create value.

 Most people’s essential skills remained largely the same from the emergence of agriculture 12,000 years ago to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. The transition to an industrial economy in the Western nations, and the accompanying shift in skill values, took well over 100 years. The subsequent turn to a knowledge-based economy took most of the 20th century.

 For much of the past century, companies’ primary principle underpinning organisation structure was hierarchy and leadership was determined largely by your position in that hierarchy. Moreover, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution most of the work in factories and offices alike was of a repetitive nature, machine-like.

However in today’s world, organisations are increasingly flat and agile, and leadership is defined not by your role but by your value added and overall contribution. Similarly, great performance is becoming less about what you know and more about what you are like.

As technology gallops ahead with longer strides every year, the transition from what you know to who you are is happening faster than corporations, governments, education systems, or most human psyches can keep up with.

The greatest anxiety troubling workers today, from Tokyo to Lima, from Oslo to Cape Town is embodied in a simple question: How will we humans add value?

The implication of this is that leadership is now more than ever THE ultimate competitive advantage. Now more than ever, the skills required to succeed will be much more skewed towards right-brain capabilities, such as relationship building, empathy, teamwork, creativity and grit deriving from a strong sense of purpose and resilience when faced with adversity.

Majid Al Futtaim is not immune to such fundamental shifts in the nature of work and in leadership behaviours that will make the biggest difference. This is why we are investing more than most organisations GLOBALLY in our talent.

Frankly I do not know what our markets will be like in 10 years, how our customers’ behaviours and preferences will change, whether there will be new mega trends emerging that we will need to adapt to or new competitors we will need to win against.

But what I do know is that in 10 years our Leadership Model will continue to be relevant and at the heart of our corporate DNA. What I do know is that if we continue to invest in our talent, we will have the capacity to adapt, and thrive. What I do know is that TALENT will remain our most important and enduring source of competitive advantage.  

Our vision is not simply to continue to be a talent powerhouse in the region. We aspire to become an organisation that provides an attractive and impactful career to top talent globally, to fresh graduates and professionals that would pick Majid Al Futtaim.

More than this, we also aspire to become net exporters of talent. We hope our talent will be able to join any global organisation and to thrive and make a difference. We want them to look back at their time at Majid Al Futtaim as a great place to work that provided them with invaluable opportunities to learn, to drive impact and that propelled them to have a fantastic career.

 I am envious of the opportunities that lie ahead for our talent. No generation has been able to make change happen faster than theirs. Equipped with their learnings, and aided by technology, every one of them has the tools, potential, and reach to build a better Majid Al Futtaim than the one they joined. And to have a meaningful impact on their communities, on this region, and beyond.  

In fact, I would say they have the OBLIGATION to do so because the essence of leadership is step change forward, not incrementalism. So, I urge graduating MAFers to use the incredible power they have been given to drive change. No big challenge has ever been solved, and no lasting improvement has ever been achieved, unless people dare to try something different, to think different. This was probably the most indelible nugget of wisdom that Steve Jobs left with us – that great things come from a restless refusal to accept things as they are.

Hence, my wish for them as they graduate is that they leave LESS with sense of accomplishment, which they should all have, and MORE with a burning question: “How will I push this great organisation forward?”

In 1997, the chess world champion, Garry Kasparov, played two matches against the IBM SuperComputer, Deep Blue. He won the first one. And lost the second. It was the start of the man vs. machine competition that people remember to this day.

As Kasparov himself said: “Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion… And if we fail, if we fail, it's not because our machines are too intelligent, or not intelligent enough. If we fail, it's because we grew complacent and limited our ambitions”.

If we fail, it’s because we gave up on our obligation to lead.

No matter how robust our strategy, how solid our endowments, how smart our moves, it is the quality of our leaders that ultimately will differentiate Majid Al Futtaim.

So, to all our graduates and every upcoming leader:

BE BOLD and have the courageous conversation when you hear the refrain ‘that’s just how things are done here’.

BE PASSIONATE and lead driven by a higher purpose, never to seek self-aggrandizement.  

And ACT TOGETHER, because you cannot do it alone. The purpose of any training, even the legendary six-month US Navy SEAL program, is not to produce super individuals. It is to build super teams.

I can’t wait to see how you will leave your mark on your organisations.

Majid Al Futtaim Leadership Development Programme Graduates:

Source: Majid Al Futtaim

Source: Majid Al Futtaim

Source: Majid Al Futtaim

Source: Majid Al Futtaim