Change Leadership, General Manager PFA @ Batgroup & Member of the Board @ Putzfrauenagentur

Leadership isn’t about volume.
It’s about clarity, confidence and direction when the pressure is on.

I partner with HR leaders, GMs and Executive Teams across MENA & Asia to strengthen leadership capability from the ground up. My work sits where strategy, people and day-to-day execution meet in service-driven organisations.

Most performance issues in hospitality, retail and education aren’t about effort.
They come from three gaps:

❌ Leaders promoted before they’re ready to lead
❌ Executive Teams pulling in different directions
❌ No clear pipeline or succession to stabilise performance

So my work covers both sides of the leadership equation:

Strategy & alignment for senior teams
Facilitated Strategy Days that help GMs and Executive Teams:
✅ Agree a small set of must-win priorities
✅ Translate those into a 90-day execution plan
✅ Build the clarity and focus teams need to perform
✅ Name the leadership behaviours that sustain results

Leadership development for emerging & mid-level managers
Practical, human-centred programmes that build the skills to lead through others, communicate with clarity and coach across cultures.

Coaching & capability building
1:1 and group coaching, Train-the-Trainer, and tailored L&D that strengthen the pipeline and reduce turnover.

Across 25+ years with Apple Retail, Swissôtel, St. Regis and service organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, one truth holds: engagement and commercial performance rise when leaders at every level know where they’re going and how to bring their people with them.

If you’re building your leadership pipeline or want stronger alignment at the top, I’m happy to explore how we can work together.

📞 Book a call: https://cal.com/jeffross

Jeff Ross

I’ve been quiet on LinkedIn for a few weeks.
Intentionally.

The end of 2025, especially early Q4, was demanding. Not just professionally, but mentally and emotionally too. So I chose to step back, spend time with family, and create some much-needed white space.

Here’s the thing we don’t talk about enough in leadership:

Growth doesn’t only happen in motion.
Sometimes it happens in pause.

Over the break, I did what I often encourage leaders to do, though many struggle to make time for:
• Reflect honestly on what worked (and what didn’t)
• Revisit priorities instead of blindly setting new goals
• Notice patterns in my own behaviour under pressure
• Ask better questions, rather than rushing to better answers

Self-awareness isn’t built in the middle of constant execution.
It’s built in moments of distance.

The leaders I see grow the most aren’t the ones who push hardest every quarter.
They’re the ones who regularly step back, recalibrate, and return with more clarity than noise.

As we step into 2026, my focus is simple:
Fewer reactions.
Clearer priorities.
More intentional leadership, starting with myself.

If you haven’t created space to reflect yet, consider this your reminder:
White space isn’t time lost.
It’s leadership work.

Here’s to a more conscious, grounded, and human year ahead.

Helping service brands align strategy, strengthen pipelines and deliver consistent performance | Strategy Days, L&D and coaching | MENA and Asia

People are not “human capital”.
And they are not “assets” either.

I keep seeing employees described this way in leadership, L&D, and wellbeing content.

I understand the origin of the term.
Historically, human capital described skills and capabilities built through investment, not the people themselves.

But the distinction has blurred.

Here is the line I think we need to redraw.

❌ People are not capital
❌ People are not assets

They are human beings who choose, every day, how much energy and judgement they bring to work.

Human capital is what grows through investment
Skills. Confidence. Capability. Leadership depth.

That growth comes from:
✅ training done properly, not tick-box
✅ coaching that changes behaviour
✅ managers who develop people, not just measure them
✅ time and safety to learn, practise, and think

That is where human capital lives.

Language shapes decisions.
Decisions shape culture.

If we want more human leadership, we should start by speaking like humans, not balance sheets.

Calling people “human capital” is already the problem.

If people are capital, then what are they?

Owned?
Optimised?
Written off when returns dip?

No serious leader believes this.
Yet the language sticks.

Here is a cleaner distinction.

People are not human capital.
People are not assets.

Human capital is the outcome of investment, not the object of it.

You build it when you:
✅ develop managers instead of promoting the best technician
✅ coach leaders instead of just reviewing them
✅ invest in learning instead of squeezing efficiency
✅ play the long game, not just the quarter

Strong organisations do not extract value from people.

They create conditions where capability compounds.

If your culture talks about people like inventory,
do not be surprised when engagement feels transactional.

Words are never “just semantics”.
They are shortcuts to how decisions get justified.

In fast growing organisations across the UAE, managers are often promoted quickly to keep pace with expansion.

What usually does not scale at the same speed is leadership capability.

New managers are suddenly expected to lead multicultural teams, absorb pressure from both sides, and deliver consistency under operational intensity.

With little preparation.

When that happens, managers compensate.

➡️ They over control.
➡️ They escalate everything.
➡️ They work longer hours instead of building capability.

❌ This is not a motivation issue.
❌ It is not a generational issue.
✅ It is a pipeline design issue.

Growth without leadership infrastructure creates silent pressure in the middle.
And silent pressure always leaks somewhere.

If you want scale without burnout, development cannot be assumed.
It has to be designed.

In the UAE and GCC, managers are expected to be decisive, inclusive, and steady, all at once.

When we don’t develop them for that reality,
pressure doesn’t disappear.

It concentrates.

Promoted for doing the job.
Stuck because you are still doing it.

The peer to manager transition is not a mindset problem.
It is a capacity design problem.

If nothing changes in how time, decisions, and responsibility are allocated, leadership never starts.

What I have seen work repeatedly is simple and structured:

✅ 30 percent doing the old tasks to stabilise
✅ 30 percent pairing and teaching to hand over
✅ 40 percent coaching, prioritising, removing blockers

For the first 60 days.

One rule makes or breaks it.
The handover must be scheduled.

If it stays informal, it does not happen.
Urgency will always win.

A promotion does not create leadership.
The moment you stop being the bottleneck does.

Question worth answering this week:
Which task will you stop doing by Friday, and who will learn it instead?

Training the peer-to-manager transition muscle

If a manager is still doing most of the work, you have not promoted a leader.
You have relabelled a high performer.

Leadership starts when decisions move down, accountability stays up, and capability is built deliberately.

Without that shift, organisations stay dependent on individuals instead of systems.

This is why middle management feels stretched in so many businesses.
The role changes, but the expectations do not.

❌ Titles do not create leverage.
✅ Design does.

✅ When leadership transitions are supported early, pressure reduces later.
❌ When they are ignored, problems surface quietly and expensively.

The question is not whether someone earned the promotion.
The question is whether the system changed enough to let them lead.

Coming up on one year since we moved back to the UAE.

So much has changed since we lived here nearly two decades ago, and a lot of that change has been really good.

I’ve seen owners of large companies walk the floor, greet employees by name, ask about their families, and mean it.

And then I’ve seen something else, in the same companies:
Middle managers who abuse power over the people under their care.

Not always loudly.
Sometimes it’s subtle:

❌ public shaming disguised as ‘standards’
❌ threats disguised as ‘performance’
❌ pressure passed down because ‘that’s how we do things here’

Here’s the part leaders don’t want to hear:

Culture doesn’t scale through the founder’s intent.
It scales through the manager’s habits.

And the numbers in MENA should make every owner pause:

Only 14% of employees are engaged, while 24% are actively disengaged.

46% are watching for or actively seeking a new job.

31% experienced anger ‘a lot of the day’ yesterday.

Only 25% are ‘thriving’ in life evaluation.

You can invest millions in brand, strategy, and service standards…

…but if a middle manager creates fear, distrust, and turnover, your business pays for it twice:

in retention + recruiting costs
in inconsistent service + customer experience

Gallup has a brutal line leaders should sit with:

Managers drive most of the variance in team engagement.

So the fix isn’t ‘hire faster’ when people resign.
The fix is slow down and build the capability that prevents the resignations in the first place:

✅ Train new managers before they ‘learn leadership’ by copying the worst examples.
✅ Coach existing managers on how to lead under pressure (without leaking it onto their teams).
✅ Make people metrics visible at leadership level (turnover, internal mobility, manager 360s, team climate).
Reward leaders who build trust, not just those who hit numbers.

Because in this region, trust is everything.

And owners should be able to trust their management teams to execute the vision, for the business and for the people.

Question for leaders in the Gulf:
Where is your culture breaking, in strategy, or in the middle layer where it gets executed?

In fast-growing organisations across the UAE and GCC, leadership gaps rarely show up at the top.
They show up in the middle.

High-performing specialists are promoted quickly to keep pace with growth.
Suddenly they’re expected to:

➡️ lead multicultural teams
➡️ balance global standards with local realities
➡️ deliver consistency under constant operational pressure

Without a leadership pipeline, this becomes improvisation.

That is not a talent issue.
It’s a development design issue.

Organisations that scale sustainably here invest early in:

✅ leadership transitions, not just promotions
✅ manager development as ongoing infrastructure
✅ clarity, coaching, and judgement, not just skills

Middle management doesn’t fail loudly in this region.

It absorbs pressure quietly, until it can’t.

Many first time managers say the same thing, quietly.
“I do not want to get this wrong.”

So they hold on longer than they should.
They delay delegation.
They avoid conversations they know are coming.

Not because they lack confidence.
Because they lack support.

Leading former peers, older colleagues, or more experienced team members carries real emotional weight.

When organisations treat new managers as finished products, people protect themselves.
When they treat them as learners, behaviour changes.

❌ Confidence does not come from the title.
✅ It comes from practising leadership with permission to learn.

If you want managers who act calmly under pressure, give them room to build judgement before you test it.

I ghostwrite for founders who want clients + calm + their weekends back

I didn’t start writing LinkedIn posts to build a business.

I started because I was broken.

Three days after I left the man I thought I’d marry → I opened LinkedIn and wrote my first post.

No plan. No niche.
Just a girl in a one-room life, pouring stories out of her chest like survival.

Fast forward →
That raw storytelling turned into a 6-figure ghostwriting business...
Then into a system. A framework. A vibe. A lifestyle.

And now...

I help emotionally intelligent, time-poor founders go from:

“What the hell do I even post anymore?”

to

“Leads came in while I was at brunch with my family.”

You’ve built the dream…
But you’re still ghostwriting your own success.

37 tabs open.
3 half-finished hooks.

Your VA’s vanished.
You’re 12 hours late to your own content calendar.
And your wife just asked if this is another “just 5 more minutes.”

You’re making bank.
But somehow… you’re still the one writing posts at 11:07 PM in Notes app panic.

You didn’t build a dream business
just to ghostwrite your own life away.

It’s giving sabotage. Let’s rewrite that.

What I actually do (without screaming “I help founders grow on LinkedIn”):

→ Ghostwrite story-first content using my TAK Framework™
→ Match your voice so well it feels like you on your well-rested, well-paid days
→ Turn your lived moments into posts that bring you inbound leads and your weekends back

→ No cold DMs
→ No bro hooks
→ No sales calls

Just clean systems, magnetic storytelling, and soft power that sells.

Some wins worth flexing:

→ One saw 3X inbound leads
→ Another hit 169.2% engagement growth
→ Just 7 posts turned into  21 inbound leads
→ Took a week off but still got 3-4 inbound leads
→ Clients featured in Favikon Top 200 + AuthoredUp

I’m not for everyone.

I’m for the founder who’s exhausted but excellent.
The one who’s done chasing hacks and finally wants peace.

I ghostwrite for 4 clients max.

If doors are closed, join the waitlist.
Your peace is worth waiting for.

DM me “TAK” to reclaim your weekends.

Shivani Tak

We sold out.

And it had nothing to do with urgency tactics.

During my New Year trip to a hill station, we visited a random shop.

The guide took us there and in my head I was already like:

Okay… commission scene.
We’ll just look and leave.

The shopkeeper said something unexpected:

Sit. Watch.
If you don’t want to buy, you can go. It’s not mandatory.

That one line slowed everyone down.

Then he didn’t talk about the product.
He talked about a problem.
A very specific one.

One my brother already had.
One my sister-in-law was already irritated by.

I saw the shift instantly.

From → Let’s leave
to → Wait… listen.

Then he told a story.
A story from ancient times.

How this same problem was handled back then.
How people trusted it.
How it worked.

Just a story.

Only at the end, he said:
If it doesn’t work, I’ll refund your money. No questions.

That’s it.

Problem → story → solution → guarantee

And yeah…

We bought.

They sold out.

Building freedom-first™ businesses using story, systems, and automation

If you’re waking up to messages like this, you’re doing LinkedIn right.

There is no panic to jump on a call.
There is no sacrificing sleep because someone lives in a weird time zone.
There is no “quick question” that quietly steals 45 minutes of your life.

Just a founder who wants their weekends back and warm inbound leads showing up on their own.

That’s the difference between being visible and being positioned.

Meanwhile, hustle bros are still flexing:14 calls today.

Cool. Keep grinding, bros.

This is the part most founders miss:

When your story does the selling, you don’t need back-to-back calls to convince people.

Your inbox does the chasing for you.

Not because you posted more.
Not because you engaged harder.

But because your content clearly signals:

who it’s for
what problem you solve
and why you’re different 

Before anyone ever messages you.

This doesn’t happen by accident.
It happens when your story is doing intentional work.

That’s how you scale without losing

Your sleep
Your sanity
Your Saturdays

It should feel like this.

Quiet. Calm. Inbound.

And that’s it.

taplio

The Battle

Jeff Ross

Shivani Tak

Followers

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Performance ScoreJeff Ross's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreShivani Tak's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Jeff Ross

Shivani Tak

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jeff Ross's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreShivani Tak's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreJeff Ross's LinkedIn Performance