Leadership Intelligence

Feature · Execution

The Quarter Before the Quarter

Summer gives leaders something the rest of the year rarely allows: the space to think. It is also, for most companies, the quietest stretch of the calendar. What happens next is predictable. When everyone returns in September, calendars fill, initiatives multiply, activity climbs, and progress, strangely, does not follow.

One lesson I’ve learned over three decades is that leadership teams rarely lack awareness of their problems. They can usually tell you exactly what’s wrong. What they delay is the decision to act on it, and the delay is almost always more expensive than the decision would have been.

Before deciding what to start, decide what to stop.

The instinct on returning from summer is to add: new priorities, a fresh push to close the year. It feels like momentum. Usually it’s the opposite. Ask the harder question: of everything currently in motion, how much would we begin again today if it weren’t already running? The honest answer is rarely more than half.

Activity is what a team produces when it has lost sight of the decision. Execution isn’t doing more; it’s the discipline to do less, sooner. The clarity your teams will need in Q4 takes shape now, in Q3. Not in a November offsite, but in the space these quieter weeks give you to think about where attention will, and will not, go.

The most expensive delays are the ones leaders treat as someone else’s deadline. Emiratisation is the clearest example I know.

Strategic Insight · H2 Planning

Emiratisation Is a Capability, Not a Deadline

If there’s one mistake I see leadership teams make with Emiratisation, it’s treating it as a number to reach by a date rather than a capability to build over years. Treat it as an annual target and you’ll create annual problems.

I’ve watched the same reflex play out repeatedly. The response to a people challenge is another initiative, a hiring push or a leadership programme, when the real issue is a leadership decision about where national talent sits in the business and how it progresses. The problem is rarely HR. It’s leadership clarity.

H2 is when next year’s Emiratisation strategy is either planned or left to chance. Companies that use this period to think beyond the annual target are building capability; those that don’t will find themselves hiring under pressure by year-end, the most expensive way to build any workforce.

The strategic questions were never simply about meeting this year’s target. They’re about how Emirati talent is intentionally built into the business over the next three, five and even ten years. Which roles create genuine careers rather than simply adding headcount? Where does national talent become part of your succession pipeline rather than your compliance report?

A handful of firms have begun modelling these scenarios years ahead rather than reacting to a target. It changes the conversation entirely.

And every workforce decision eventually arrives at the same table: the budget.

Strategic Insight · Planning

You Are About to Plan Around Your Biggest Variable

Within weeks, most companies will open the 2027 planning cycle. Headcount, restructuring, investment, leadership capability: every number debated in detail. And in most of those rooms, the largest line of all, people, will be treated as a cost to control rather than a strategy to fund.

Every budget is a people strategy with numbers attached. Most companies only debate the numbers.

I’ve come to believe that’s the quiet flaw in a great deal of corporate planning. The workforce is handled as an output of the budget, when it is in fact the primary input to performance. A financial plan that hasn’t been tested against a workforce plan is a forecast missing its largest variable: the availability, capability and continuity of the people expected to deliver it.

The leaders who plan well don’t bring HR into the budget conversation. They put the workforce question at the centre of it.

The largest risk in any plan rarely shows up as a line at all. It walks out the door.

Strategic Insight · Continuity

One Resignation Away

Every leadership team carries a risk it almost never prices: the sudden loss of someone who matters. Not the vacancy, but the disappearance of judgement. The relationships that don’t transfer. The context that lived in one person’s head. The months of momentum that quietly unwind while a successor is found and brought up to speed.

Almost every executive team I’ve worked with agrees that succession matters. Far fewer can tell me, with any confidence, who would step into a critical role tomorrow, how ready they are, and what capability would leave with the person who goes. Succession is discussed constantly. It is operationalised far less often.

Every executive team has one person whose resignation would quietly cost a quarter. Most have never named them.

Four questions worth answering before you need to:

• Who, if they resigned tomorrow, would we least want to lose?
• Who could realistically step in, and how ready are they, honestly?
• How long would full recovery actually take?
• What capability would leave the building alongside them?

A few teams have started mapping this deliberately: who is critical, who is ready, where a single exit would cost the most. It turns a private worry into something a board can manage.

Whether a team absorbs these shocks or buckles under them comes down to one thing: when it did its thinking.