Sheikh Mohammed outlines three principles for future government leaders

Dubai: His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, has outlined three principles he says will define successful leadership in a rapidly changing world, urging government teams to embrace adaptability, empower people and make decisions faster.

In a letter titled “A Message to My Work Team” as part of his new book “The Messages”, Sheikh Mohammed thanked those who have worked alongside him on the country’s development journey before setting out his vision for the leadership of the future.

“To those responsible for implementing our plans, striving to bring happiness to our people and persevering for the advancement of our country, I salute you, appreciate your efforts and am grateful for my journey working alongside you,” he wrote.

He paid tribute to those who had accompanied him on the development journey, describing them as people who had devoted their lives to serving others, worked day and night for people’s wellbeing and helped drive the nation forward.

Sheikh Mohammed said he was addressing the letter specifically to government employees because they were not merely public servants, but leaders.

He then posed a central question: What kind of leader is needed in this new era, one capable of dealing with the complexities of the future, its profound transformations and its interconnected changes?

World has changed

Sheikh Mohammed said technology was no longer changing only once every decade, but every month and sometimes every week.

Political and economic changes had also become more rapid, he said, while climate change had become a major factor affecting politics, economies, production and labour markets, with consequences for countries’ social and political stability and investment decisions.

These forces, he said, were interconnected, with developments in one area creating consequences across others.

“The leader of the future is therefore not someone who merely understands change, but someone who can work amid all this complexity,” he wrote.

“The challenge is not the speed of change, but that many things are changing at the same time. This is our reality today.”

Sheikh Mohammed cited the example of a programmer at a startup whose decision to write a single line of code could change the fate of a company worth billions of dollars, alter an entire industry and affect global financial markets.

In today’s interconnected world, he said, the scale of an event was no longer determined solely by the size of its immediate impact, but by its position within a highly connected global system.

Leadership in this new world, he said, must therefore be different from traditional leadership.

First principle: Adaptability over long term plans

Sheikh Mohammed said the first principle was that “the leader of the future does not build long term plans or develop five year and 10- year strategies.”

Instead, he said, successful leaders build adaptable institutions, teams capable of learning and systems able to forget what they have learned and learn again.

Future leadership, he said, would depend more on mastering readiness than on mastering prediction.

“The future cannot be predicted, but it can be prepared for,” he wrote.

The successful institution of the future, he added, would not necessarily be the one with the most sophisticated strategies, but the one ready for multiple possibilities because resilience would belong to institutions capable of adapting to change.

A future leader’s strength, Sheikh Mohammed said, would not lie in accumulated experience and knowledge alone, but in the ability to ask the right questions.

Anyone who believed they knew everything about the future, he added, would become one of its first victims.

Second principle: People are the greatest resource

Sheikh Mohammed said the second principle centred on people, describing a team as the most important resource within an organisation.

“Resources today are not the machines that write, store, archive, programme and monitor operations. People today are more important than all of that,” he wrote.

People, he said, are the foundation of creativity and the source of ideas and imagination.

Every employee in an organisation may possess an idea capable of radically changing its future, he said, adding: “The future is the future of ideas.”

Sheikh Mohammed contrasted traditional leadership with the leadership required for the future.

“The traditional leader monitors employees. The leader of the future liberates them and unleashes their potential,” he wrote.

“The traditional leader fears their mistakes. The leader of the future builds an environment that allows them to experience everything new.”

While a traditional leader sanctifies discipline, he said, the leader of the future builds trust and encourages initiative.

“Every leader who kills the spirit of initiative is eliminating the future of their organisation,” he said.

Third principle: Speed of decision making

Sheikh Mohammed said his third principle concerned the speed with which institutions respond to change.

“When the speed of change becomes greater than the speed at which institutions respond, institutions begin to decline and fall behind rapidly,” he wrote.

In the past, making the wrong decision was considered the biggest danger facing an organisation. Today, he said, being late in making a decision could pose an even greater risk.

The future leader might not have more hours than others but would have the ability to shorten the time between an idea and its implementation, he said.

Sheikh Mohammed pointed to artificial intelligence as a powerful tool for compressing time and accelerating that process. “History will be written by those who act before certainty is complete,” he wrote, adding: “A good decision you make today is better than an ideal decision you make next month.

Sheikh Mohammed concluded his message with three pieces of advice: be flexible, invest in people and speed up decisions.

“The future does not wait,” he wrote. He said the future would be far more beautiful than the present if institutions succeeded in building a culture of adaptability, continuously developing their teams and unleashing imagination and innovation across their working environments.

Sheikh Mohammed ended the letter with the words: “May God grant us success, now and always.”