Every search I have worked on in this region ends the same way.
Two or three credible people. All of them have done impressive things. All of them interview well. And a board that has to choose between them, largely on the strength of what they have already done somewhere else.
That is a significant decision resting on a single source. We would not make any other decision of that size the same way.
The problem with a CV
A CV is a record of environments. It tells you what someone achieved with a particular team, a particular budget, a particular set of conditions, at a particular moment. It is history, and history is useful.
But it only answers one question, and it is a question most Gulf organisations have stopped being able to rely on.
The question used to be: has this person done this job before? For a mature business in a stable market, that is a reasonable thing to want to know. Find someone who has run a similar operation at a similar scale, and you can reasonably expect a similar result.
Now look at what this region is actually hiring for.
A first chief AI officer. A first sustainability lead at a national energy company. A chief executive for an organisation that did not exist two years ago. Roles created by transformation programmes that are themselves only a few years old.
Nobody has done this job before. There is no comparable role to measure a candidate against, because the role is new.
So we fall back on adjacency. He ran something similar in Europe. She did this at a larger business. It feels rigorous. It is mostly inference.
Think about how we handle any other decision of consequence. Nobody approves an acquisition on one data point. No court reaches a verdict on a single witness. Evidence gets weighed together, and confidence comes from several sources pointing the same way.
Leadership appointments are made on considerably less. One document describing the past, and a conversation in a room.
The answer is not to throw out a track record. It carries real weight. The answer is that it should be one of several things.
What the other evidence looks like
In my experience the leaders who succeed in roles without precedent share very little on paper.
What they share is how they behave when the plan stops working.
They change their minds without treating it as a defeat. They ask questions that expose what they do not know rather than protect what they do. They treat a setback as information. They can be told they are wrong by someone junior to them and thank that person for it.
None of that appears on a CV. Some of it appears in an interview, if you happen to ask the right question and the candidate happens to answer honestly. Most of it does not appear at all.
And these are not soft qualities. In a role with no precedent, the plan will change. It is the only thing you can predict with confidence. Whether a leader can change with it is the whole job.
The uncomfortable bit
What we usually add to the CV is instinct.
Experienced people, in a room, forming a view. I have been in hundreds of those rooms and I would back that judgement against most things. But instinct has a failure mode, and it is a specific one: we are drawn to people who present well under low pressure, and the job is about high pressure.
Confidence reads as capability. Certainty reads as clarity. Neither is the thing we are actually trying to measure.
That is why this matters more here than elsewhere. When roles are new and pace is high, the gap between someone who performs in an interview and someone who performs in the seat gets wider. And the cost of getting it wrong lands faster, because there is no established organisation to absorb the mistake.
The piece almost nobody weighs
There is one more thing worth knowing, and it is the one boards forget entirely.
We assess the individual. We rarely assess what they are walking into.
A leader who challenges openly will thrive in one culture and be quietly managed out of another. A team that cannot tell its chief executive bad news will fail a strong appointment as surely as a weak one. I have seen capable people fail in roles they were well suited to, because the organisation around them could not absorb what they brought.
So the same discipline applies to the environment. How does this team handle being challenged? Does it learn from what goes wrong, or explain it away? Is it safe to be the person who says the plan is not working?
You can measure that, and it belongs alongside everything else. An appointment decision made without it is a decision about half the problem.
What changes
None of this means track record is worthless. It means it is one input, and increasingly a partial one.
What is missing is how a leader thinks, and what the culture they are joining is actually like. Not what people believe about themselves, not what they say in a room. Measured, benchmarked, and put in front of the people making the decision at the point they make it.
That exists. Mindset Advantage measures how an individual thinks, learns and adapts. Collective Advantage measures how a team performs together under pressure. Both are validated and both are used by serious organisations globally.
As Matthew Syed Consulting’s Regional Lead for the Middle East, we now deliver both under ecap advantage. We are also accrediting coaches and consultants across the GCC to use Mindset Advantage in their own work.
None of it replaces judgement. It is what judgement should have had all along.
The last thing
I have never seen a board regret having more information about a leadership decision.
I have seen plenty regret how little they had.
