Blog
Longer pieces on the management problems that come up repeatedly in Dubai — written for practitioners, not for search engines.
Most managers in Dubai control far less of the pay than of the things that actually drive engagement. The trouble is that the standard advice on those levers assumes a team that shares expectations.
Both models get used for the same purpose and they are not interchangeable. One describes behaviour you can observe in a meeting; the other describes motivation you cannot.
A manager asks whether everyone agrees, nobody objects, the decision proceeds. Three weeks later it turns out half the room never agreed. This failure is common, expensive and fixable.
Most groups pick the language everyone can follow. That is the wrong test. A training session works when participants can argue in the language, not when they can follow it.
Young professionals are described as impossible to retain. They are not — they are expensive to retain badly. Five factors decide it, and four of them are the direct manager rather than the company.
A Dubai team spanning a dozen nationalities does not need a country-by-country manual. Three dimensions explain most of the friction, and two of them are structural rather than cultural.
Every team has someone whose own account of their contribution does not match anyone else's. Four versions of it, and the diagnostic question that separates a visibility problem from a real one.
The two ends of a team are described as having incompatible values. In the room, what they actually disagree about is four unwritten rules — and the disagreement is settled by writing them down.
Seven instruments, sold for the same purpose, measuring different things with very different levels of evidence behind them. A comparison of what each is genuinely good for, and where each one should not be used.
Two colleagues are said to be in conflict and everyone else describes themselves as a bystander. In practice a lasting conflict needs four roles filled, and two belong to people who feel uninvolved.
Most people leave a session on the method convinced, and stop using it within a fortnight. The method is sound; the version taught for personal relationships does not transfer to an office as it stands.
