Case Study
prominent positions through your business – this is a reframe that places your organization at the forefront of people engagement in the Middle East.
My experience of working with local team members in the Middle East presents a picture of a population who take pride in their culture, heritage and their people. Harnessing these core internal competencies is the key to really making headway in the region.
We have introduced a retail talent program into the Saudi Arabian territory in this financial year, focusing upon bringing in Saudi nationals at a sales assistant level, and placing them through a fast-track development program to department/assistant manager level (of significantly sized retail units) within a 6-8 month period. The program is still ongoing, but I can certainly share the significant learnings to date, from an L&D perspective:
• Ensure we follow the appropriate assessment and screening process to procure the most talented of the local population. A Saudisation initiative may only focus on bringing Saudis in. Our initiative focused on bringing the best Saudis for our business.
• Marketing the program as a “Local Leadership” program as opposed to Saudisation initiative immediately made the participants feel that they were part of a positive-focused development journey, rather than they were there to “make up the numbers”.
• A clear usage of the 70:20:10 learning model is successful in truly engaging the local leaders, providing a diverse learning experience where they can engage with their fellow Saudis and ex-pat team members in both a formal and informal learning environment.
• Detailed day-to-day objectives are important. Especially for those locals who are new to a workplace environment. We created a detailed diary that broken down learning objectives, tasks and projects on a daily basis throughout the program. This also enabled clear direction for line managers and measurement of the success of the program.
• Line management engagement and understanding is key to success. One of the objectives of the program is to increase on a very small number of local leaders in our business. The majority of the current leaders are from an ex-pat talent pool. WE have had to do a lot of work in “Managing Across Cultures” to enable these managers to engage with their local colleagues as effectively as possible. On the flip side, we have also delivered cross-cultural training to our local trainees to enable their integration into a multi-cultural working environment. The last thing you want to create with such initiatives is create silos within your business.
• Language awareness is vital. Though we prepared all training and coaching materials in Arabic, our new team members embraced the fact that they wanted to work on being multi-lingual contributors to our business. We are now investigating how to enhance the program for the next financial year with some form of English development for the trainees, and further Arabic training for the ex-pat line manager who will be working with them.
The Middle East is a dynamic environment for commerce at the moment. It has also long been a large hotbed for ex-pat working. This isn’t necessarily going to change. But the truly forward thinking organizations will embrace the concept of “Local Leadership” and use it to take their organisations to the next level in the coming 5-10 years through the integration and development of talented, knowledgeable local team members and managers.
Chris Jones has worked in L&D for 15 years, at all levels within a number of customer and people-oriented organizations. He has L&D functions & projects across the UK, European, Asia-Pacific and MENA regions, as well as an independent consultant for a number of global organizations.
He is currently the Learning & Performance Partner, responsible for leading the learning, performance development and talent management for the Middle East Hub of Pearson, the world’s leading learning company. He is also a part-time tutor on the Global MBA Program at Durham Business School, UK.