Lose Your Just-Good-Enough Managers

An interview with Raad Al-Saady, managing director at Abdul Latif Jameel

It’s better to have a terrible manager than a good-enough one,” says Raad Al-Saady, managing director for more than 7,000 employees at Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ), one of the biggest companies in the Middle East. “Leaders are very quick to make decisions on bad or ineffective leaders.” But managers who are just good enough, he says, seem to linger forever.

They linger because they don’t do anything really wrong—but they don’t do anything really right either. That leads to mediocrity, which Al-Saady calls a slow poison. In the following conversation with Gallup Business Journal, Al-Saady shares how to detect the poison and teach, move, or lose good-enough managers before the damage of mediocrity spreads.

Gallup Business Journal: What’s so bad about good-enough managers?

Raad Al-Saady: The difference between a great company and an average company is how it deals with barely sufficient managers. If you continue to infect your organization with people who don’t drive excellence, you drag your company down.

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Leadership Quality

This issue is Mathusalem-old: I recently reviewed a Cambridge University book on audting leadership. It came out that - out of the almost 100 pages print - more than two thirds were dedicated to the usual audit trivial matters, like opening and closing meetings, check-lists, reporting, follow-up. But the heart of the matter is that Leaders are by definition "Untouchable", that true Democracy is pure Utopia, that any governance form is based on tyranny or olygarchy. We may make effective managers, sure, who will manage by numbers, only; but real leaders can only be real Humans. Thank you.