The leadership ask: Are we attending to the crumbling and the confident?

By Houda Tohme

posted on Mar. 31, 2026 at 12:45 pmMar 31, 2026

HAVAS Media Middle East's Houda Tohme says that the leaders who rise in moments of collective turbulence share one quality above all others: they make people feel seen without making them feel exposed. They don't broadcast empathy. They practice it, quietly, consistently, without fanfare.

Crisis has a way of revealing things. Most of all, it reveals a lot about leadership, teams and people: who they are, what they carry, and how much of it has gone unseen.

The people you would expect to be struggling; those who have lived through conflict, displacement and loss, who know what it means to lose everything and start again, not once but repeatedly, are fine. More than fine. They are the steadiest people in the room. Anchored.

Grateful for the safety that the UAE affords them. Stability, for them, is not an assumption. It is a gift they recognise every day.

The ones unravelling? The ones awake at two in the morning, catastrophising, paralysed by an unfamiliar dread? More often

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