John Iossifidis reflects on his role as the Group CEO of Al Ghurair, one of the largest diversified family business groups in the Middle East.
Author: John Iossifidis
Six years ago, I became Group CEO of a business that was already 60 years old.
That fact matters. When you lead a company that existed long before you arrived, the question is not only what you will build. It is what you have been trusted to protect.
Al Ghurair has come through the founding of the UAE, decades of regional growth, challenging cycles, and periods of profound change. None of that was my work. All of it was handed to me when I became its Group CEO.
Six years in, I do not wish to provide a list of achievements. What feels more honest, and more useful, is a list of lessons. What surprised me. What I misunderstood about the job when I started. And how the role has changed me as a leader.
Custodian first, builder second
When you found a company, you set the standards. When you join one that is decades old, many of the standards are already there. They were set by people who earned the right to set them.
Your first task is to understand those standards. Not only what they are, but why they exist.
That does not mean leaving things alone. In the past six years, we have moved a great deal across foods, development, mobility, infrastructure, and property management. We have entered new sectors such as healthcare, taken our mobility business into Saudi Arabia, and committed serious new capital to food production in the UAE.
But the sequence matters. Understand what has been handed to you. Work out what is load bearing. Identify what is ready to evolve. Change what needs changing. Hold the line on the rest.
The longer the horizon a business is built on, the more stewardship matters. Stewardship is often mistaken for preservation. It is not.
In a business like this, founders are authors. CEOs are editors. Your work sits inside a story that already has a voice. The task is to make it stronger without losing what it is.
Much of that responsibility is expressed through decisions about capital and people. Where to invest. Where to grow. Where to hold the line. The challenge is not simply deciding what to build next. It is creating opportunities for future generations while protecting the foundations that made growth possible in the first place.
When pressure comes, people carry the business
I joined in July 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Plans for the year had already been overtaken by events. The question was no longer whether the strategy was right, but how we would respond.
My first act was not to create a new plan. It was to align the organization around a common purpose and a simple belief: people are our greatest asset.
At a time when many were concerned about their health, their families, and their livelihoods, clarity mattered. So did consistency.
We are part of the everyday infrastructure of the UAE, and stopping was never an option. We had two obligations that had to be met at the same time: keep our people safe, and keep critical operations running.
Yet what I remember most is not the operational challenge. It was the human one. The world was facing the same crisis, but many people felt entirely alone. Stripped of everything else, the job became making sure nobody at Al Ghurair did. Our purpose at the time, Enhancing Life, became a daily instruction.
Those months taught me something I have seen repeatedly ever since. Plans tell you what should happen. People carry the business when reality has other ideas.
That is why I have long believed that culture is not a slogan beside the business plan. It is the element that determines whether the plan survives contact with reality.
Half the job never shows up in an announcement
We tend to measure leaders by what they build: new businesses, new markets, new assets. Those visible outcomes matter.
What surprised me was how much of the role is actually about alignment.
Leadership at this level is a continual process of communication. This work never shows up in an announcement. Nobody writes a media release about a board debate, a mentoring discussion, or a message that helps people make sense of uncertainty. Yet these are the moments that shape culture and build trust.
I also learned that people pay far more attention to what leaders do and say than leaders often realize. They look for consistency. They watch what is rewarded, what is tolerated, and what receives attention.
A leader’s words do not replace strategy. They help thousands of individual decisions move in the same direction. Over time, that alignment becomes culture, and culture is what carries an organization when the leader is not in the room.
Respond. Do not react
Setting long-term direction is demanding work. The harder discipline is holding that direction while something urgent competes for your attention every day.
There is always something demanding an immediate response: a market shift, a geopolitical event, a customer issue.
The distinction I keep returning to is between reacting and responding.
Reacting lets the urgent thing set your agenda. Responding deals with it properly and then puts you back on the road you were already on. One is motion. The other is progress.
I once thought this was a personal leadership skill. It is an organizational one.
Some of the most valuable capabilities we built during the COVID-19 pandemic were not crisis responses at all. They became enduring strengths that serve us still.
A leader who responds rather than reacts is useful. An organization that can do the same at every level is powerful. It means people have the context, judgement, and confidence to make decisions without waiting for permission.
For a business held across generations, this is a genuine advantage. But it is not a license to ignore the near term. No serious business has that luxury. Ours certainly does not. We are in the essentials of everyday life: we feed people, house people, and move people.
That work has to perform today and compound over decades. The discipline is holding both. Deliver today, without spending the long term to pay for it.
Steadiness is a strategy, not the absence of one
Steadiness is sometimes mistaken for caution. It should not be.
We put real weight on planning and considered decisions. Much of that work happens long before anyone sees the result. Yet it is a large part of why the business is steady today and why, when genuine opportunities emerge, we can evaluate them on our own timeline rather than someone else’s.
What steadiness creates is optionality: the ability to be patient when patience is required and decisive when the moment is right.
In a world that increasingly rewards immediacy, that freedom is worth more than almost anything else I could name.
One last thing
Six years in, the biggest surprise is how differently I now think about the role.
I arrived believing leadership was largely about direction. Setting it. Driving it. Making things happen.
Direction matters. Performance matters. Over time, I see the role differently. Less about making decisions yourself and more about creating the conditions for good decisions to be made throughout the organization.
Everything entrusted to us today will one day pass to others. Our responsibility is to leave it stronger than we found it.
This business was here long before me. The intention is that it will be here long after. The measure is not what I put my name on. It is the condition of the business, and the strength of the people running it, on the day it stops being my responsibility.
Six years in, that is what I am working towards.