Mohamed Alabbar on finding people better than himself, and what it takes to keep them.
I have fired members of my own family, and I would do it again if I believed it was necessary. People sometimes find that difficult to understand, but I have never believed that carrying my name should entitle somebody to a position they have not earned. On the contrary, I expect more from them, because family loyalty is a beautiful thing in life, but it can become a dangerous thing in business when it begins to interfere with your judgement.
I have spent much of my life building companies, but the longer I do this, the more convinced I become that my most important work is finding people who are better than me.
I need heroes around me.
I have no use for people who admire what I have achieved or tell me how wonderful my ideas are. I want the ones with the intelligence and the nerve to take those ideas somewhere I could never have taken them alone, who are prepared to challenge me and who care about getting things right even when nobody is watching.
Finding them is one of the things that keeps me awake at night.
I have met individuals so exceptional that I stop asking what they cost and start asking how much more becomes possible because they are there.
“My most important work is finding people who are better than me.”
Titles and impressive CVs do very little for me. I am interested in the person who takes responsibility before anyone asks and who has enough pride in their work to be genuinely troubled when something is not right. I admire hunger because it is difficult to manufacture, and I admire courage because without it, even the most intelligent people can achieve remarkably little.
I also have very little patience for mediocrity, and I make no apology for that.
There is a popular belief that good leadership means treating everybody exactly the same, and I cannot follow the logic. Everybody deserves respect, but when you treat someone who gives everything exactly like someone who gives very little, you are being unfair to the person who gave everything.
Of course, that means making decisions which are sometimes uncomfortable. I do not enjoy disappointing people, and I know that I can be demanding and impatient. I am always in a hurry because there is so much I want to accomplish, and I have made mistakes because of it. Some of my decisions have been wrong, some of my judgements about people have been wrong, and I have learned that experience does not make you immune to either.
But I would rather acknowledge a mistake and correct it than spend months protecting my pride while the business suffers.
Perhaps one of the greatest dangers of success is that people gradually become less willing to tell you the truth. They assume that because you have built something important, you must know more than everybody else. I find that a frightening prospect, because the day the people around me stop challenging my thinking is the day I begin losing touch with reality.
I want colleagues who will tell me when an idea is foolish or when somebody else has found a better way. If I am paying people for their intelligence, I would be a fool to expect them to leave it outside my office.
Across our businesses, there are remarkable men and women making decisions every day that I could never make as well as they do. They understand their markets and their customers in ways that I simply cannot, and I consider myself fortunate to have them.
My responsibility is to give them the confidence to use their ability and to make sure their ambition never becomes smaller simply because they are working for somebody else.
I still get excited when I meet an exceptional person. I can feel the possibilities opening up almost immediately, and I begin imagining what we might accomplish together. After all these years, that excitement has not diminished, and I hope it never does.
I am sometimes asked what keeps me motivated when I have already achieved so much. The answer is that there are extraordinary people out there whom I have not yet met.
When I find them, I will give them every reason to stay.
This is part five of twelve. Beyond Profit is a twelve-part series published exclusively on The Buzz in which Mohamed Alabbar, founder of Emaar and Noon, family man, and one of the Arab world’s most influential business leaders, shares personal reflections on leadership, legacy and what it really means to build something worthwhile. The series moves beyond towers and financial results to explore the values, experiences and hard-won lessons of a man who grew up with nothing, has spent a lifetime building cities, businesses and opportunities across more than twenty countries, and is now thinking harder than most about the kind of future we are all building together: human, technological and everything in between. A new instalment publishes each month.
