Talent development in a company that’s been running for decades looks nothing like the programmes most training budgets pay for. That was the observation from Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene, who has built Al Shene Marine Holding as a seafood and cold-chain group serving European, Gulf, Asian and North American markets.
In his view, the operators who end up carrying a long-running business weren’t developed by training schedules. They were developed by being given real responsibility earlier than their formal role suggested, and left to work out how to carry it.
Al Shene says the standard model of talent development, with its course calendars and annual reviews, misses what actually makes an operator capable. Capability comes from decisions the person has had to live with, not from frameworks they’ve been taught. A manager who has never had to tell a buyer that a shipment won’t arrive on time has not yet had the conversation that teaches most of the job. No training module simulates it well enough.
In long-running businesses, Al Shene argues, the people who become reliable operators over a decade did so because someone trusted them with a problem they weren’t formally ready for. The uncomfortable fit between the person and the responsibility is the mechanism. Give it to them cleanly, and they’ll develop the judgement the role needs. Give it to them after they’ve mastered it in theory, and they’ll stay theoretical.
Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene points out that there’s a difference between handing someone responsibility and abandoning them with it. The approach that develops people is the one where the responsibility is real, the consequences are real, and the structure around the person catches the biggest failures before they become unrecoverable. That structure isn't an oversight, exactly. It’s a quieter kind of presence, an understanding that the newer operator can ask and will be helped, but the decision is still theirs.
This matters more in businesses where errors are visible to customers. In sectors with long-standing buyers who compare suppliers across years, a junior person learning on real work can’t hide behind a training label. Their decisions leave marks. Al Shene suggests this is a feature, not a problem, and that the pressure of visible consequences is part of what makes the development real.
A common trait of companies that have been operating for decades is that their internal talent pipeline doesn’t rely on a formal programme at all. The pipeline is the structure of the daily work: who handles which customer, who travels to which supplier, who carries the conversation with which partner. People move through that structure in small steps, and over years they end up with the composite judgement that makes an operator senior.
Al Shene argues that formal talent development programmes often add least to the companies that need them least, because those companies already have a working apprenticeship built into their operations. The programmes matter more in businesses where the daily work has been stripped of judgement, where everything is routed through a system that leaves nothing for a person to decide. In those businesses, training is the only remaining development mechanism, and it isn’t enough.
The honest version of talent development, Al Shene says, is that it’s a decade of small bets on people whose capacity isn’t yet fully visible. Some of those bets pay off and become the operators who hold the business together. Some don’t. A company that isn’t willing to make the bets won’t produce the operators either way.
For Sultan Rashid Abdullah Rashid Al Shene, talent development is the slowest and least visible part of a long-term business plan, and often the most consequential.
Companies that keep producing capable people across decades tend to be the ones where the work of developing them was happening continuously, quietly, through the structure of ordinary operations.