With a fast growing experience economy, driven by the relentless pursuit of economic diversification in the Middle East, speed alone is not the differentiating factor, it's the baseline. The real challenge now is ensuring creative quality and innovation in that context.
In the design and marketing sector, we know that traditional leadership models are not fit for purpose, even with initiatives such as 360-degree feedback. The ‘all knowing’ commander is a legacy concept, the new requirement is the Active Curator. This is a leadership formula that balances high standards with a culture of collective expertise and mastery.
From Leadership Ladder to the Leadership Circle
Traditional hierarchy is being dismantled by a generation of marketers in the region who are technically brilliant, emotionally intelligent, multilingual and culturally diverse experts, especially with such a blend of GCC, Arabic and International talent. However, this young talent is still building resilience and experience, at accelerated levels of speed and responsibility. They don’t want to be cogs in a machine, they want to see the big picture.
Leadership in this context becomes the anchor point at the centre of a circle, not the top of a leadership ladder. When engaging a specialist in your team, work needs to shift from being about tasks to having a shared mission. This builds agency, where they can contribute to ground breaking work but also understand the hard edges of commercial KPIs and customer expectations.
Editor-in-Chief of the T-shaped Squad
In an integrated agency, you are leading a squad of ‘T-shaped’ talent. This could include individuals blending strategic planning and creative ideation, or CX with UX design and so forth. These talents are deeper in their specialisms than a single leader can ever be. Whilst any leader will have their own specialisms, attempting to become a ‘10 headed hybrid hydra’ only creates a bottleneck, without the evolving depth of knowledge in key specialisms.
Instead, the leader must act as Editor-In-Chief. This fosters a culture of mutual expertise. The specialists own the ‘how’ while the leader curates the ‘so what’ for customers, and safeguards the quality and value for clients. Decision making remains paramount; the need to say no until the work is right, and to avoid design by committee. This provides the safety-net of knowing that excellence is always recognised and never settling for ‘that will do’.
Market Sensor
We all know that the Middle East flows in fast moving currents across demographics, planning, trends and technology but whilst your team is crafting the work, the leader has to spend time out in the market.
When a leader acts as a market sensor, it creates contextual spaces to explore growth or contain risk. Your team is not hitting deadlines in a vacuum, they know that you are discovering those signals to sense a change in the tides before it hits the desk. External navigation can help the team execute at their highest level without being blindsided by market volatility, which can drive the relentless speed that is the reality of the market.
The ‘Active Pulse’: Avoiding executive drift.
There is an increased risk today of Executive Drift, getting stuck in a loop of high level talks, podcasts and losing the ‘hands-on’ intuition and customer facing experience that built your career and expertise. To be a credible Curator, you need to maintain an Active Pulse on the craft.
This does not mean micro-managing, it means being ‘play ready’ to help shape creative workshops, attend the immersion sessions or to explore and guide the ‘messy middle’ stage of the concept development. This creates a culture of shared craft. When a leader stays close to the work, it dissolves the ‘us vs. them’ barrier and proves you are not just the judge of the end product, but part of the creative design journey.
This also supports the need for continual learning and upskilling, here the Leader gets to understand new skills first hand and it gives the team the opportunity to teach and share their knowledge to leadership.
Ultimately, the Leader as Curator is a style that creates a workplace which is both high-pressure and high-support, through this circular structure. In the Middle East’s ambitious landscape, the most effective leaders aren’t those with all the answers, but the Curators who build the best environment for those answers to emerge and great, effective creative work to flourish.
