Triptta Neb is the director of Qiyada, a new leadership consultancy based in Dubai. She speaks about the results of a survey in which the Middle East scored the lowest in terms of leadership development.
The US leadership consultancy FranklinCovey, an affiliate of Qiyada, conducted a survey of 463 companies across three regions - Europe, the Middle East and Africa. What did it reveal about the Middle East?
What we found was that there was a shocking difference between the West and the Middle East. The Middle East came out the lowest in terms of scoring when it came to team planning, when it came to team motivation, when it came to people aligning themselves to the measurement factors of their jobs. In some cases the Middle East was down to 46 per cent in terms of job understanding or team planning and the top 10 companies would be in the range of 73 to 80 per cent, so it's a huge gap.
Why do you think that is?
Two factors: if you look at the type of people in workplaces over here, you've got the old stalwarts who have been around for the past 15, 20 and in some cases even 30 years with an organisation, who have been promoted for their technical ability or (because of their) loyalty to the organisation. But when you get to a managerial level you need more in terms of managing people and you need more in terms of communicating.
What was the second factor?
There was such a dearth during the boom in the market that they were recruiting any and everybody without really checking the competencies and skills. They didn't either have the time (to train their people) because there was so much that people had to do to keep up with the market or they didn't have the inclination in any case because they were doing well, riding the wave.
When did these problems come to light?
When the downturn happened companies started looking at productivity of people. We did some surveys at that time for organisations. Productivity per individual was as low as 20 per cent in some cases. They started trimming the fat after the downturn. They then started looking at who was producing, so that's when the competencies came into play. That's when companies started focusing on training.
You help fix these problems, but you also have a programme that assists organisations in developing the potential of their employees. How does it work?
We ask the organisations if the high potentials that they're putting on to the programme have been measured in any way and why have they been selected. If they don't have (a way to measure them) we provide that. We will set up the assessment for them and we measure them so we can see where we need to take them to. If organisations already have that in place we take the competency information and on the basis of that we start structuring different modules and different programmes that then get rolled out in an organisation anywhere from six to 18 months.
