There is a particular kind of leadership that doesn’t announce itself. It shows up in the 8pm WhatsApp message to a colleague who seems off. In the meeting where the agenda gets quietly set aside because something more human needs to be addressed. In the decision to keep a team informed when the easier path would be to say nothing. This is the leadership that has defined the UAE’s female PR community in recent months, and it is time we talked about it openly.
The communications industry runs on words, yet the most powerful things happening right now inside agencies and in-house teams across the Emirates are largely unspoken. A quiet shift is underway. And it is being led, in no small part, by women.
Emotional intelligence is not a soft skill. It never was.
For years, emotional intelligence – the capacity to read a room, to regulate one’s own responses under pressure, to genuinely attend to the human being on the other side of the table – was dismissed as a ‘soft’ competency. Something nice to have, but secondary to strategy, commercial acumen or technical expertise.
It is worth being clear: emotional intelligence is not the exclusive domain of women. Men are equally capable of high EQ, and many exercise it with skill and consistency. Overall EQ scores between men and women are broadly comparable. But the data does show that women, on average, score higher on specific dimensions – most notably empathy – according to the EQ-i 2.0 normative data published by Multi-Health Systems (MHS), one of the most widely used validated assessment tools globally. This is not a ceiling for men, nor a crown for women. It is simply a signal of where, at this particular moment in the UAE’s communications landscape, certain forms of leadership are visibly concentrating.
In a communications environment where clients are anxious, news cycles are relentless and teams are tired, EQ has become a core leadership tool, arguably the most important one in the room.
Competitors becoming collaborators
Women in PR have always looked out for one another and this is not a new instinct born of crisis. Communities like Global Women in PR have been building exactly this kind of cross-agency solidarity for years, creating the infrastructure for women to share knowledge, support each other’s growth and speak honestly about the realities of leading in a demanding industry. What the events of recent months have done is deepen it. The solidarity that already existed has been stress-tested, and it has held. Women who lead competing agencies are checking in on one another with a candour and consistency that goes beyond the professional.
One of the most quietly profound expressions of this is a WhatsApp group formed at the start of the current conflict, exclusively for female owners of PR businesses. What began as a practical space for sharing information quickly became something far more significant. There have been tears, of sadness and of laughter. Conversation that moves from the gravely serious to the irreverently funny in the space of a few messages, in that particular way that only genuine trust allows. There has been honesty about fear, about uncertainty, about the peculiar burden of holding a team steady while privately feeling unsteady yourself.
What strikes me most about that group is not what has been shared, but the conditions that made the sharing possible: a clear sense of who was in the room, a shared experience of vulnerability, and enough dry wit to keep the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight. These are not acquaintances supporting each other through difficulty. They are, I suspect, lifelong peer mentors in the making, the kind of professional relationships that only form when people have seen each other at their most unguarded, and chosen to stay.
The most tangible expression of this shift is what is happening inside agencies and communications teams themselves. Transparent communication, even when the news is uncertain, has become a stated value rather than an aspiration. Teams are being told what is known, what is unknown, and what is being done. This sounds simple but in practice, it requires a particular kind of courage from leaders who could just as easily choose the comfort of managed distance.
These are not grand gestures. They are small, consistent, human choices made daily, and they accumulate into the kind of culture where people feel genuinely held. That is the difference between a team that stays and a team that leaves at the first opportunity.
Choosing to stay: resilience, opportunity, community
It is fashionable to frame conversations about professionals in the UAE in terms of transience, namely the suggestion that talent is always looking for the next destination, the next opportunity, the next passport stamp. In my experience, and in conversations with women across the industry, the reality is far more grounded than that narrative allows.
Many of us chose to stay. Not by default, but actively, and for reasons that go beyond the obvious. The UAE continues to offer genuine commercial opportunity and a regional platform that is hard to replicate elsewhere. But the more powerful retention factor, particularly for women in communications, is community. The sense that there are people here who have your back, professionally, personally, sometimes both at once, which matters enormously when the external environment is uncertain.
Resilience is sometimes invoked as a kind of stoic endurance, the ability to absorb difficulty without complaint but that is too thin a definition. Real resilience is built through connection, sustained by honesty, and expressed in the willingness to show up for others when the pressure is on. That is what I see in the women around me in this industry. Not the performative kind of strength, but the quiet, durable kind.
The role of organisations in fostering collective progress
None of this happens in a vacuum. Organisations like PRCA MENA and Global Women in PR MENA play a structural role in creating the conditions for connection and professional development. These are not networking bodies in the conventional sense; their value lies in providing architecture for the kind of sustained, substantive relationships that actually shift things over time.
Global Women in PR MENA, in particular, has become a space where senior women across the industry can speak honestly about what they are navigating, with clients, with boards, with teams, with themselves. That kind of professional candour requires trust, and trust requires institutional structure to support it. When that structure is in place, the conversations that follow have a way of changing how people lead.
The progress being made is collective, even when it is expressed through individual acts of leadership. One woman’s decision to have a difficult and honest conversation with her team creates a permission structure for others. One agency’s investment in flexible working shifts the expectation across a sector. These are connected acts, even when they do not feel like it in the moment.
A real-time reflection
This is not a retrospective. The story I am describing is happening now, in team meetings and mentoring calls and the margins of pitches being written under pressure. It is the human side of PR that rarely makes it into case studies or award entries, but which is, in many ways, what the industry is actually made of.
The communications professionals who are thriving in the UAE right now, and helping their teams to do the same, are not doing so because they have perfected the management framework or discovered the leadership formula. They are doing so because they have learned, or perhaps always known, that in genuinely uncertain times, the most powerful thing you can offer another person is the sense that they are not facing it alone.
That is empathy in practice.
By Loretta Ahmed, Chairman of Global Women in PR MENA, Strategy Board member of PRCA MENA and Founder and CEO of Houbara Communications.
