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AndGrow, Abu Dhabi (2026)

05/09/2026

Across the Gulf, hiring national talent is no longer the hard part. Developing them into senior leaders is.

Localization has moved decisively from ambition to regulation. Qatar's Law No. 12 of 2024 set a target of 20% national participation in the private sector by 2030, backed by active enforcement. In the UAE, sector targets reach into senior professional territory, with banking working toward 45% Emiratisation. Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat framework has expanded well beyond labor-intensive sectors into finance, engineering, and technology.

These are not entry-level ambitions. They are leadership-track expectations, and they create a gap that policy alone cannot close.

You can mandate a hire. You cannot mandate the decade of stretch assignments, hard feedback, and accumulated judgment that normally produces a senior leader. That part takes time the targets do not allow, which means capable nationals often step into significant responsibility earlier than a conventional pipeline would have delivered them. And they frequently do it while leading large, highly multinational teams, one of the more demanding leadership contexts anywhere.

None of that is a criticism of localization. It is the natural consequence of moving quickly, and it points to where the real work sits. If the pipeline cannot form at its usual pace, it has to be built deliberately: structured development, real coaching, and sponsorship that puts people in stretching roles before they feel ready, with support around them while they grow into it.

That is why building the local bench is a national priority rather than an HR nicety. Compliance fills a seat. Development fills the role. And in a region moving this fast, the organizations that treat leadership development as infrastructure will be the ones whose nationalization targets translate into actual leadership.

Save this if building that bench is part of your mandate.

📎 Qatar Law No. 12 of 2024 on national workforce participation; UAE Emiratisation sector targets; Saudi Nitaqat programme.
https://www.thegccedge.com/gcc-nationalisation-quotas-hiring-freeze-2026/

04/09/2026

Do you overthink? Most people call it a problem.
Heard from clients again and again.

In Episode 02 of The Root Series, we ask a different question: not "how do I stop overthinking," but what it's actually trying to protect you from.

Overthinking is rarely the issue itself, it's often the mind stalling on a decision that hasn't been named yet. Once it's named clearly, the loop usually quiets down on its own.

→ What decision am I circling instead of naming?
→ What am I actually protecting myself from?

Full episode above.
What's a loop you keep circling back to?
abdullah__waey

hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag (02)

02/09/2026

Most people get promoted for being excellent at the work. Then the job quietly stops being the work.

That is the transition almost no one prepares you for. What made you valuable, your speed, your judgment, your ability to solve the hard problem yourself, becomes the very thing holding your team back. The instinct to step in and fix it was your greatest strength. Now it caps everyone around you.

The shift is uncomfortable because it feels like doing less. Your visible output drops. You spend the day in conversations rather than deliverables, and some weeks it is hard to point at anything you personally produced.

But the measure has changed. It is no longer what you can do. It is what the people around you can do because of you.

This week we are looking at that shift. What actually changes when your job becomes people instead of tasks, why the Gulf needs this more than most, and what happens to a team once its leader starts developing them.

Save this if you are somewhere in the middle of that transition.

01/09/2026

One of the most honest things we can say about coaching: it has limits.

Coaching won't fix a misaligned org structure. It won't redesign broken workflows. It won't replace a strategy that doesn't exist.

But here's what it does: it develops the leaders who see those problems clearly and have the capacity to address them.

Research shows that managers influence 70% of the variance in team engagement (Gallup, 2025). When those managers are equipped with self-awareness, diagnostic thinking, and the ability to lead through complexity, the system around them starts to shift.

Not because coaching fixed the system. But because it built someone who could.

That's the difference between coaching as a feel-good investment and coaching as a strategic one. The first changes how a leader feels. The second changes what they're capable of doing — and that changes everything downstream.

Coaching isn't the answer to every organizational problem. But it's often the answer to the question behind the problem: who is equipped to lead through this?

31/08/2026

Sometimes, knowing yourself isn’t the same as understanding yourself.

We may spend years describing ourselves with familiar labels: “I’m naturally hot-tempered,” “I avoid conflict,” or “That’s just how I am.” But beneath those labels, there may be patterns, fears, and triggers we haven’t fully recognized yet.

Real self-awareness begins when we become curious about what is happening beneath our reactions.

What triggers this response? What am I protecting? What feeling keeps appearing? What pattern am I repeating without noticing?

The goal isn’t simply to know your strengths and weaknesses. It’s to recognize your patterns while they’re happening, so you can respond with greater awareness instead of automatically repeating them.

Because sometimes, the biggest blind spot is the part of ourselves we believe we already understand.

Face yourself. Understand the root. Start there.

(01)

30/08/2026

Every coaching conversation starts with the same small set of concerns. They're not unreasonable — they're how careful organizations think. But each one becomes clearer with the data.

"Now isn't the right time." 42% of employee turnover is preventable — if someone addresses it before the resignation (Gallup, 2024). The quarter you wait is the quarter the cost compounds.

"We'll develop them internally." Only 44% of managers globally have received formal management training (Gallup, 2025) — including in organizations that believe they're developing internally. Intention isn't infrastructure.

"Coaching is too expensive." Replacing one senior leader costs up to 200% of their salary (Gallup, 2024). Structured coaching costs a fraction of that — and often prevents the replacement entirely.

These objections aren't wrong. They're reasonable starting points. But reasonable thinking without complete data leads to decisions that look prudent in the moment and expensive in retrospect.

The right question isn't whether to invest. It's what the delay is actually costing.

Sources:
📎 Gallup — State of the Global Workplace, 2025
📎 Gallup — Employee Retention and Attraction, 2024

27/08/2026

What distinguishes leaders who keep developing from leaders who plateau isn't intelligence. It's a few habits.

Leadership research has spent decades trying to identify what predicts continued growth over a career. The strongest answer that's emerged isn't a personality trait. It's a set of behaviors that some leaders practice consistently and others let lapse.

Three of them stand out in the data.

First, growing leaders actively seek information that contradicts them. They treat unexpected disagreement as a clue, not an attack. Plateauing leaders gradually filter their information environment until contradiction stops arriving.

Second, growing leaders pause when something feels off. The decision that doesn't sit right. The relationship that's gone slightly cold. The project that's underperforming for unclear reasons. They name the discomfort and investigate it. Plateauing leaders explain it away.

Third, growing leaders review decisions, not just outcomes. A good outcome can come from a flawed decision, and a bad outcome from a sound one. Examining the reasoning is what builds judgment. Examining only results builds a portfolio of stories.

In leadership research, this cluster of behaviors has a specific name: learning agility. It's been identified by Lombardo & Eichinger and refined through decades of work, including Korn Ferry's research, as the single strongest predictor of who continues to develop. It's stronger than IQ. Stronger than experience. Stronger than ambition.

The practices that produce learning agility aren't natural. They have to be built and maintained, which is the work we do at AndGrow.

Save this for the next time someone asks what actually predicts long-term leadership effectiveness.

Sources:
📎 Lombardo, M., & Eichinger, R., ""The Leadership Machine,"" 2000
📎 Korn Ferry research on learning agility

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23/08/2026

The coaching that helps a first-time manager is not the same as the coaching that helps a CEO. Same profession. Very different work.

At junior levels, coaching builds skills — delegation, feedback, and team dynamics. At senior levels, coaching does something harder: it surfaces blind spots that the rest of the organization either doesn't see or isn't willing to name.

Because at the top, honest feedback becomes rare. Peers become fewer. And the assumptions that drove past success quietly become the assumptions that limit future performance.

Research from ICF shows that 82% of leaders who work with a coach report improved self-confidence and leadership effectiveness. But the value isn't in validation. It's in having someone positioned to challenge — with the context, skill, and permission to do it well.

Senior leadership coaching isn't about support. It's about ensuring the thinking at the top keeps evolving.

21/08/2026

Most organizations default to training when performance drops. It's familiar, scalable, and easy to measure — at least on paper.
But training and coaching solve different problems.

Training fills knowledge gaps. Coaching addresses the behavioral and systemic patterns that prevent leaders from applying what they already know. One delivers content. The other delivers change.

Research supports this distinction: only 12% of employees apply what they learn in training to their work (24x7 Learning). Meanwhile, organizations that invest in structured coaching see 70% improvement in individual performance and 50% increase in team effectiveness (ICF / American University).

The question isn't whether your team needs development. It's whether you're choosing the right intervention for the right problem.

AndGrow

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