The People Seat: The Chief People Officer Mandate Across Gulf Platforms, 2026

The chief human resources officer role is being asked to own senior leadership succession at Gulf platforms at the exact moment the seat itself remains the least standardised in the executive committee, and JOH Partners' reading of its own people-function search and advisory mandates since 2014 finds most boards cannot currently say with confidence whether the person holding the title has a genuine governance mandate or an administrative one wearing a governance-sounding name. The region's own corporate governance codes have moved decisively on the substance: the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority's Governance Guide for public joint-stock companies requires written succession plans for the chief executive and heads of critical control functions, reviewed regularly and tested through scenario planning, and the Saudi Capital Market Authority's Corporate Governance Regulations places systematic succession planning for the board, the chief executive and senior management squarely inside the nomination and remuneration committee's responsibilities. Neither code names the internal seat that actually does the work behind that obligation. This report sets out what the people seat now covers where it is built to meet that governance requirement, why the market has organised around it more slowly than the codes have moved, and what a board should decide about the mandate before a succession failure exposes the gap in public.

The people seat used to be an administrative one

For most of the past two decades, the senior human resources title at a Gulf group holding was, in practice and in market pricing, an administrative seat. It owned recruitment volume and cost, compensation and benefits administration, employee relations and statutory compliance, and it reported, in the overwhelming majority of the mandates JOH has advised on, through a chief financial officer, a chief operating officer, or occasionally the chief executive directly, but rarely with a standing, board-documented role in succession planning for the executive layer it technically sat inside. This was not, in JOH's reading, a failure of ambition on the part of the individuals in the seat. It reflected an honest scoping decision by the boards that created it: the people function existed to run HR operations well, and succession planning for the most senior roles was handled informally, by the chief executive and the board chair, outside any documented process the HR function owned or was expected to own.

That informal arrangement has become considerably harder to sustain as governance codes across the region have tightened specifically around succession disclosure. JOH's earlier research into the new mandate for chairs in Gulf-listed family businesses documented a closely related shift from the chair's side of the table: boards are now expected to evidence succession thinking in a way that a purely informal, undocumented process cannot satisfy. The people function is the natural home for the operational work behind that evidencing, tracking readiness, running the review cycle, maintaining the documentation, but JOH's mandate experience finds most Gulf people functions were never resourced, positioned or priced to do that work when the codes still allowed the informal version to pass.

Governance codes across the region now assume a documented succession process exists behind every senior seat. Most Gulf people functions were built for a world where that assumption did not yet apply to them.

What Gulf governance codes now ask boards to own

Figure 01FIG-01

What the region's two principal listed-market governance codes require on succession, and what they leave to each company

Regime	What it requires	What it leaves to the company
UAE Securities and Commodities Authority	Written succession plans for board members and key executives, including the chief executive officer and heads of critical control functions, reviewed regularly and tested through scenario planning; a nomination and remuneration committee composed of independent directors	Which internal executive owns producing, maintaining and refreshing the succession plan on the committee's behalf
Saudi Capital Market Authority	A nomination committee, which may be combined with remuneration, chaired by an independent director, responsible for systematic succession planning for the board, the chief executive and senior management, meeting at least every six months	The internal reporting structure and title through which succession information reaches the committee

The direction of both regimes is unambiguous: succession planning for the most senior seats in a Gulf-listed company is no longer treated as an informal chairman's prerogative, it is a documented, committee-owned governance obligation with a defined review cadence. What neither code specifies, and what JOH's reading of disclosed governance structures across the region confirms is left entirely to each company's own discretion, is which internal executive is accountable for the work that makes the committee's obligation deliverable in practice: identifying successors, assessing readiness, documenting the plan, and refreshing it on the cycle the code requires. This is consistent with corporate governance codes internationally, which generally regulate board-committee obligations and disclosure rather than prescribing an issuer's internal executive organisation chart, and the gap it leaves is therefore not unique to the Gulf. JOH's reading finds it is currently wider here specifically, because the people function's board-facing role remains newer and less standardised in the region than in more mature listed markets, where a dedicated, board-anchored people-function seat has had longer to become the market default.

A nomination and remuneration committee that meets its six-month obligation on paper but receives its succession information from whoever happened to compile it that quarter has satisfied the letter of the code and missed the point of it entirely.

Two tiers, and the gap between them

Figure 02FIG-02

The administrative and board-anchored versions of the chief people officer seat

Typical mandate

Feature	Administrative tier	Board-anchored tier
Core ownership	Recruitment, compensation administration, employee relations, statutory compliance	All of the administrative remit, plus senior organisational design and executive-committee succession readiness
Reporting line	Typically through a chief financial or chief operating officer	Direct or near-direct to the chief executive, with a documented channel to the nomination and remuneration committee
Succession documentation	Informal or absent; reconstructed reactively when a vacancy opens	Current, documented and refreshed on a defined cycle aligned to the committee's own review rhythm
Compensation benchmark	Priced against the traditional HR director market	Priced against a governance-facing comparator, materially above the administrative tier at comparable company scale

The two tiers share a title far more often than they share a mandate, and JOH's search and advisory experience across the region finds this confusion is the single most consistent structural problem in how Gulf boards scope the seat. A board that wants the board-anchored version, capable of feeding the nomination and remuneration committee a genuinely current succession view, but prices and scopes the role against the administrative comparator, will either fail to attract a candidate capable of the governance half of the mandate, or will appoint one who is systematically under-resourced and under-priced for what the board is actually asking of them. JOH's earlier work on the chief people officer role, published alongside this report, sets out the role-definition argument in more depth from the perspective side; this report is concerned with the governance-code context that makes the distinction newly urgent, and with the market-wide pattern across JOH's own mandates rather than the single-article treatment of the role.

JOH's earlier work on the CHRO-board line of sight documents the reporting-line mechanics of the board-anchored tier in more detail, and JOH's research into CHRO compensation inside PE-backed portfolios finds a closely related pricing pattern on the private-equity side of the market, where sponsors increasingly demand the board-anchored mandate but have been slower than listed-market boards to adjust the benchmark that pays for it. Any compensation figure in JOH's own work on this seat reconciles with the firm's published Operator CEO Index and Gulf Executive Reward Report; this report extends those findings to the people seat specifically rather than restating their figures.

A board can test, in a single conversation, which tier it actually has, and JOH's reading of its own advisory mandates finds three questions do most of the diagnostic work. Can the person in the seat name, without notice, a current internal successor candidate for at least three members of the executive committee, and explain in general terms how recently that view was tested against the individuals concerned. Does the seat attend the nomination and remuneration committee's own succession discussion as a standing participant, or only when specifically summoned to answer a question the committee has already raised itself. And is the seat's own compensation package, set against a genuine external benchmark, or inherited from whatever the previous HR director earned adjusted for tenure. A board that cannot answer the first two questions with confidence has, in JOH's reading, an administrative-tier seat regardless of the title on the appointment letter, and the third question usually explains why moving to the board-anchored tier has been deferred rather than actively resisted: nobody has re-priced the seat to reflect the scope the board actually wants from it.

Why the gap persists at board level

The persistence of the gap between governance-code expectation and market organisation is not, in JOH's reading, primarily a failure of individual boards to notice the requirement. It reflects a genuine sequencing problem: governance codes have been amended relatively quickly, the UAE's Governance Guide most recently in 2025, while the labour market for genuinely board-anchored people-function leaders develops on a considerably slower cycle, because building the specific combination of operational HR credibility and board-committee fluency the mandate requires takes years, not a single regulatory cycle. A board that wants to comply fully with its own committee's succession obligations today is, in many cases JOH has advised on, choosing between promoting an administrative-tier incumbent into a mandate they were never developed for, or running an external search into a genuinely narrow candidate pool.

Family-controlled group holdings, which remain the dominant corporate structure across much of the region, carry an additional version of this difficulty. JOH's earlier succession research across sixty GCC family-controlled listed companies found that a substantial share faced a succession event within five years without a documented internal successor at the chief executive level; the people function best positioned to own the operational work behind closing that gap is, in the same population of companies, frequently the one least resourced and least board-connected to do it, because the informal, chairman-led succession culture the earlier report documented at the top of the house tends to replicate itself one level down, in how the HR seat beneath it has historically been scoped.

The family-group succession gap and the people-seat definition gap are not two separate problems. In JOH's reading of its own mandates, they are frequently the same underlying decision, deferred at two levels of the same organisation at once.

The talent-market constraint compounds the structural one. JOH's own search mandates for board-anchored chief people officer and chief human resources officer appointments consistently draw from a narrower pool than equivalent searches for chief financial officer or chief commercial officer mandates at comparable scale, because the specific combination the role demands, genuine operational HR depth plus committee-level governance fluency plus, increasingly, comfort presenting succession and organisational-design material directly to independent directors, remains scarce relative to demand across the region. JOH's search building the senior leadership layer across a diversified Saudi industrial holding illustrates the wider discipline of defining exactly what a senior seat is meant to own before a search opens, a discipline this report argues applies with particular force to the people seat given how routinely its two tiers are conflated.

This scarcity has a direct consequence for how a board should run the search itself, and JOH's mandate experience finds boards that treat a board-anchored people-function search as a standard senior-HR hire consistently take longer and land a weaker field than boards that scope it explicitly as a governance appointment from the outset, briefing the search with the same rigour a chief financial officer or chief risk officer mandate would receive rather than defaulting to the shorter, more transactional process a traditional HR director search typically follows. The candidates capable of the mandate are, in JOH's experience, unusually sensitive to how seriously a board has thought through the reporting line and the committee relationship before the search opens, because they have generally seen, in a previous role, what happens when a board creates the title without making those decisions first.

What this means where no listed-market code applies

The UAE Securities and Commodities Authority and the Saudi Capital Market Authority regimes described above apply to listed public joint-stock companies. A large share of the Gulf's most significant corporate platforms, the diversified family-controlled group holdings that dominate much of the region's private economy, sit entirely outside that direct obligation, which raises an obvious question: does the argument in this report apply to them at all. JOH's reading, drawn from its own advisory mandates across the family-business population, is that it applies with equal or greater force, for three reasons that have nothing to do with formal regulatory compulsion.

The first is that the same governance logic increasingly reaches private family groups indirectly, through the expectations of international lenders, minority co-investors and, for groups with any listing ambition on even a five to ten year horizon, the governance track record a future prospectus will need to evidence. A private group preparing for an eventual listing that has never documented senior succession will find the gap surfaces at exactly the point in the listing process where it is most expensive to close, during due diligence rather than in the ordinary course of business. The second reason is generational: JOH's earlier succession research found a substantial share of GCC family-controlled companies facing a succession event within five years without a documented internal successor at chief executive level, and the people function is the natural, and in most of these groups currently absent, owner of the operational discipline that would close that gap before it becomes a crisis playing out in front of family shareholders, lenders and, in some cases, the wider market. The third is simply competitive: family groups that build the board-anchored version of the people seat ahead of a regulatory requirement to do so are, in JOH's observation, materially better positioned when a succession event does arrive than groups that wait for a listing, a credit event, or a public succession failure to force the decision.

The practical implication for a privately held Gulf group is that the absence of a formal SCA or CMA obligation is not, on its own, a reason to defer the mandate decision this report describes. It is, if anything, a narrower window in which to make the decision deliberately, before an external event, a lender covenant, a family charter renegotiation, or a listing process, makes it for the group on someone else's timetable.

What a functioning structure looks like

Boards that have closed the gap between their own governance-code obligations and the mandate they have actually built share, in JOH's observation across its people-function search and advisory mandates, four consistent practices. They decide explicitly, and document in the relevant committee's own terms of reference, that a named executive, whatever the title, is accountable for producing and refreshing the succession information the nomination and remuneration committee relies on. They give that executive a genuine reporting channel to the committee, distinct from routing purely through the chief executive or chief financial officer, so the committee receives the people function's own current read rather than a filtered summary. They price the seat against the governance-facing comparator the mandate actually requires, accepting that this is materially above the administrative HR director market at comparable scale. And they review the structure itself on the same cycle the governance code requires for the succession plan it supports, so the mandate's scope does not quietly drift back toward the administrative default between formal reviews.

Boards wanting ongoing visibility into how this structure is functioning between the committee's own formal review cycles, rather than reconstructing the picture only when the six-month or annual meeting arrives, increasingly use platforms such as Board Pulse to track executive-layer succession and governance signals on a standing basis. Sandrine Bardot's account of redesigning compensation for the modern Middle East workforce offers a useful adjacent perspective on the same underlying discipline from inside an operating people function: reward and governance decisions land credibly only when the function making them has genuine standing at the table where they are actually decided, not a seat added afterward to explain a decision made elsewhere.

A forward view

Three developments are likely to sharpen this question over the next two to three years. The first is continued tightening of governance-code succession requirements across the region's principal listed markets, following the pattern the UAE's 2025 amendment already set; JOH expects disclosure and documentation expectations to move in one direction only. The second is a widening gap between the administrative and board-anchored tiers of the seat as boards that have already made the mandate decision pull further ahead in market pricing and candidate quality, making it progressively harder for boards still running the informal version to catch up on comparable terms. The third is the same family-group succession dynamic JOH's earlier research documented at chief-executive level working its way down explicitly into how boards scope the people seat beneath it, as more family-controlled platforms professionalise ahead of a listing, a capital raise, or a generational transition.

A fourth, slower-moving development is worth naming even though it will not resolve within the report's own three-year window: the population of candidates capable of the board-anchored mandate is being shaped right now by which Gulf institutions choose to build the role deliberately over the next several review cycles. JOH's own search experience finds that candidates who have genuinely held the board-anchored version of the seat, standing succession accountability, committee-facing reporting, organisational-design ownership, become materially more valuable to the market the longer they hold it, because the combination of skills the mandate requires is not one most HR careers currently develop by default. Institutions that build the seat properly now are not only closing their own governance gap; they are training the next generation of candidates the rest of the market will eventually compete for, a dynamic JOH has observed play out over a similar multi-year horizon in the chief financial officer and chief operating officer markets previously.

None of these developments resolves the underlying decision for any individual board; each simply raises the cost of continuing to defer it. The practical task for a board reading this now is specific and immediate: test whether the nomination and remuneration committee currently has a credible, current, documented answer to who succeeds each member of the executive committee, identify who is actually accountable for producing that answer, and decide deliberately, rather than by default, whether the person and the mandate currently in place are the ones the governance code now assumes exist.

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Key findings

Methodology and evidence base

This report does not draw on a proprietary JOH survey or dataset; no sample of Gulf people-function leaders was scored specifically for this question, and none is claimed. It is built on two layers of evidence, consistent with the standard JOH applies across its published research. The first is public, citable sources: the UAE Securities and Commodities Authority's Governance Guide of Public Joint Stock Companies, as amended by the Chairman of the Board of Authority's Resolution No. 24 of 2025, and the Saudi Capital Market Authority's Corporate Governance Regulations, both read directly for their succession-planning and nomination-and-remuneration-committee provisions; and JOH's own earlier published research, the succession gap across sixty GCC family-controlled companies and the new mandate for chairs in Gulf-listed family businesses, cited here for continuity rather than restated in full.

The second layer is JOH Partners' own qualitative read, drawn from twelve years of practice since 2014 and more than 1,000 senior mandates across the Gulf, the United Kingdom and Singapore, concentrated for this report in the firm's people-function, chief human resources officer and chief people officer senior search and advisory mandates. This qualitative layer is presented as observation, not as measurement: where a claim in this report rests on JOH's own mandate experience rather than a citable public source, that is stated explicitly in the text, most directly in the illustrative framework in Exhibit 2, the two-tier structure in Data Figure 2, and the three-question diagnostic set out in the discussion of the gap between the two tiers. No figure in this report is attributed to a JOH dataset that does not exist, and no source cited is a competing executive search, recruitment or staffing firm.

A note on scope: this report concentrates on the chief human resources officer and chief people officer seat specifically, rather than the wider senior HR population beneath it, because that is the seat the region's governance codes place closest to the nomination and remuneration committee's own succession obligation. A future refresh of this research, should JOH's own mandate volume in the function continue to grow, would be well placed to extend the analysis to how the mandate cascades into the talent and organisational-design layer immediately beneath the chief people officer, which this report treats only briefly.

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JOH Partners is an executive search and senior executive recruitment firm advising boards, family groups and sovereign-adjacent platforms on chief people officer, chief human resources officer and senior executive-office appointments across the GCC, the UK and Singapore. For the full report, download the PDF above, then request a Board Pulse demo for continuous visibility of succession and governance signals across the executive layer, or engage a partner for a confidential conversation about scoping or filling a chief people officer mandate.