Were Your Mantras That You Kept Repeating to Your Team?
I often said: be human! When you are in your organization, do not forget that at the end of the day, we are all human. We need to take care of our people in this organization. I have grown up the ladder myself; I was very junior in the organization when I joined the government in 1994. I have seen how people can be treated as juniors, and that is why I made sure that every single senior person in our organization had a proper human relationship with colleagues and teams.
Another aspect about being human is that, as a public servant, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of citizens or residents. Public servants tend to forget at the end of the day that they will receive the same services that they provided during the day. Think about how you want to be treated if you are not part of the service organization. That is why each time we designed a system or a service, we brought in employees from across the organization to shape the design of the service, in addition to going out of the organization to the ground and listening to people.
“Listen with an open mind and heart,” we said. Normally as a public servant, we are so attached to our services, we fight when the client says the service is bad. Just listen to them and go to the ground and test! I find that many of the government leaders, the CEOs themselves, they have never tested their own services. Their office will handle everything for them. Leading the organization, you need to know your kitchen, you need to draw the process maps and know exactly how things are cooked and what is going on. That is why I made sure that everyone in our organization, in SDO, they had less ego and were very down-to-earth when it came to the services that they provided. That they would be very open-minded to listen and hear others to be ready to revisit our services and processes.
What Were Your Regular Practices or Routines to Act on These Values or Make Delivery Happen?
It was important to be there myself with the team as necessary. One of the things in our office was that the walls were made of glass so that everyone could see each other. The team could always reach me; I was always there: whether in the office or WhatsApp or any of my social media accounts. This enabled me to put more pressure on them to deliver. Because they knew I would always be there if needed.
Speed was our pressure. I needed the team who could run with me. They needed to believe in me under the pressure. They needed to see that I was there 24/7, so I did reply to their requests, emails, calls immediately as soon as I could.
We had a policy in the meetings that anyone could attend any meeting. Register at least half an hour before, and we would make sure you have a seat. If it is with external members, listen in during the meeting—if you have anything to ask, ask at the end. This opened more doors for the people to understand what happened around them. Imagine you are in this organization and working very hard, then suddenly there is a new project or success, and you hear about in the newspaper or radio only. This will kill the enthusiasm in your heart that made you every early morning come to work and join this organization. So I made sure that everyone in the organization believed and felt that they were an important part of the of the organization.
We also needed to be happy employees to make the lives of people happier. That is why we took leisure trips together or went to events, also outside the country. Or we would go biking or sailing. Some of these things were going on every weekend, also with families. Happy employees could present this vision to the others, and they would believe it more if they saw it in us.
In the last years, we implemented the tribe and holacracy models.2 That changed the mood for later-stage deliverables. People who used to punch in at 7 am and punch out 3 pm, they started working as if they were new people—as soon as they saw that each one of them was valued and could contribute. I had to send people dinner to their office or ask them to go home!
We went for the tribe approach to have a very fast way to deliver even small deliverables all the time. It was also a way to make sure that management needed to interfere only if necessary. No need to interfere if things were going right anyway. This was also a way to allow for experimentation, to have teams go and have a space to implement and test what works.
What Were Your Biggest Achievements as the Director General, in Your Own View?
Building a livable digitalization and our Smart City blueprint.
I am proud of having had and built this strong team in Smart Dubai that was a team like never seen before in Dubai. They came from different nationalities, from different entities, but believed in the same goal. They were like fire, every day and night, just to make sure they implemented things. They were really building things for themselves. Like one of the teams that worked on registering the buying and selling of cars in the city. They tested it with their own cars: one sold his car to the other guy through the system. I saw how powerful and happy these tiny teams of enthusiasts were when they achieved a change, even if small.
We surely also achieved for Dubai making a mark on the global digital transformation agenda. It was a huge achievement to become one of the cities that has managed to transform its own systems and experiences in this way.
My third accomplishment is a very personal one—understanding and believing in myself that I can change my own skin to grow this organization and at such a speed.
What Prompted You to Move Ahead from Smart Dubai after Five Years in 2021?
I had been working and in government mostly for the last twenty-eight years; I never had a break. Even for summer vacations, I took one week at best. My mom had started to need me more as she was getting older, and I did not want to lose the chance to be close to her. My daughter is grown now; she is twenty-two and started her own business. I also wanted to start a new journey with myself, therefore.
I learned from Smart Dubai that I need to be open-minded and transparent also with myself to see where are the nodes that I need to expand in my own way of thinking and my own body. I started on a personal growth journey—with meditation, lots of yoga, learning new things about my own self. Started a new hobby of tennis; I had never held a racket before! I am still a member in many areas of the city management, but my main time is for me now.
How Did You Prepare for the Handover and Making Sure Your Initiatives Would Live On?
New management groups surely come and have their own agendas; they will change the work at the end of the day. But I made sure that the teams themselves were mature enough to deal with such change so that the systems could adapt.
What Were—or Are—Going to Be Next Challenges for the Team and Smart Dubai?
There still is delivery to be done to meet the initially set deadlines.
Also, I tried to push in the last five years that IT is not just IT. Normally IT is seen as a support function, right? In Smart Dubai, IT is a digital platform that can change the whole perspective of the business—it can push you up or kill you. Either satisfy your client or lose your client.
In my role, I was not just paying attention to the deliverables per se, but the philosophy and way of life across government about how to see IT people. That they are not there to provide you cables and Wi-Fi and troubleshoot—they are the masters of reshaping the business. This idea of IT still needs cultivating to last.
What Do You Wish You Had Known When You Started the Job? What Do You Think You Learned the Most?
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