Talent Alone Never Made an Elite Athlete

StrongHer by StrongYes

Two decades building capability in organisations, more than eight of them at Saudi Aramco, and now a move into elite sport. For May Abokhodair, the crossing confirmed something she already believed: potential means very little unless the environment around it knows how to develop it.

May Abokhodair, MBA, Assoc CIPD, has two decades in HR and talent development across energy, industrial, hospitality and now elite sport, including more than eight years at Saudi Aramco as Talent Development and Performance Advisor. She is Head of Learning & Development at Team Saudi, the Saudi Olympic & Paralympic Committee, based in Riyadh, an ATD-certified Master Instructional Designer and Trainer, and holds an MBA from the University of Technology Bahrain.

Editor’s note: Saudi Arabia is building new sectors and institutions at pace. That makes the question of capability increasingly consequential. May Abokhodair has spent two decades working on precisely that question, and has now taken it into one of the most visible performance environments in the Kingdom.

From the energy sector to the podium

May Abokhodair has spent twenty years building capability inside organisations, across energy, industrial, hospitality and now sport. More than eight of those years were at Saudi Aramco, in what she describes as a highly structured and technically demanding environment, where capability, performance and business requirements were closely connected.

In October 2025 she moved to Team Saudi, the Saudi Olympic & Paralympic Committee, as Head of Learning & Development. On paper it is a considerable distance to travel. In practice, she says, the move did not change her thinking so much as confirm it.

What sport does is make performance impossible to hide. “In sport, we naturally understand that talent alone does not create an elite athlete,” she says. There is coaching, preparation, training, feedback and exposure. Nobody watching a final believes the athlete arrived there on raw ability.

Organisations, she argues, can be less deliberate about this. We identify someone as high potential and then assume the rest will follow on its own. It does not. People need pathways, appropriate challenge, competent leaders, feedback, and the chance to practise a capability before they are expected to perform with it.

That is the connection she now sees running between her two worlds, and she states it as a sequence rather than a sentiment.

A Learning Request Is Not Always a Learning Problem

The habit that shaped her practice came from Aramco. Someone asks for a course because performance is not where it needs to be, so the request arrives pre-diagnosed. Abokhodair learned to slow that down. Start asking questions and the real issue is often unclear expectations, a process gap, no opportunity to practise, insufficient feedback, or simply that the person has never been given the chance to apply the skill.

The second lesson followed from the first. Development does not have to mean a course, a certification or an expensive learning solution. Working alongside people with deep technical knowledge showed her how much development could happen through the work itself: a stretch assignment, a secondment to another team, mentoring from an experienced colleague, a deliberately engineered transfer of knowledge from an expert to someone who needed it.

If someone needs to strengthen project management or stakeholder management, she notes, another course is not necessarily the answer. Give them a real project to own, put them in front of more senior stakeholders, pair them with an experienced project manager, and provide feedback throughout. The development experience is richer and the capability is more likely to stick.

Formal learning has its place, and she is careful to say so. What changed is where she starts. Her opening question is rarely what training to provide. It is what capability or performance problem the organisation is actually trying to solve.

Beyond Performance: The Readiness Question

At Aramco, Abokhodair supported the development of more than 6,000 engineers across multiple departments, with different competency maps and career paths. That scale gave her a structured answer to a question most organisations still handle on instinct: is this person ready for the next level?

Her starting position is that being excellent at your current job is not the answer. As people progress, the nature of their contribution changes. Someone who succeeded because they personally solved problems may need, at the next level, to enable others to solve them. An engineer can be technically outstanding and still not be ready, because progression asks for something other than more technical knowledge.

What the competency maps allowed was a sharper question. Not whether someone is performing well, but whether there is evidence they can operate one level up. Readiness was never read off a single indicator. It drew on the competencies expected at the next level, demonstrated performance and behaviour, input from managers and subject-matter experts, and how much exposure the individual had already had to broader responsibility.

Which is why she rates learning agility so highly. Past performance tells you what someone has already done successfully. How they learn from new experience, respond to feedback and operate in greater complexity tells you considerably more about what they are ready for next.

Behind Every Athlete, a System

Abokhodair is precise about her remit at Team Saudi. Developing athletes is not her job; that belongs to the technical teams, coaches and federations. Her focus is the people working around the athletes and across the wider sports ecosystem.

That vantage point has sharpened a view she now applies everywhere. Performance in sport is never created by one person alone. Behind every athlete sits an ecosystem of coaches, technical experts, federation teams and support functions, all contributing to the conditions that make performance possible. Sport also makes the timeline honest: no athlete prepares for a major competition through a single intervention, and she sees no reason to expect employees to build complex capability through one training programme.

Her experience across the talent lifecycle points the same way. No single HR process creates performance. You can recruit an exceptional person, but if the environment does not develop them you may never see their full contribution. You can deliver excellent learning, but if the manager creates no opportunity to apply it, very little changes. And you can assemble individually talented people who still do not perform together, because high-performing teams are not simply collections of high-performing individuals. They need trust, clarity and a shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve.

Beyond Workforce Targets: Empowering Saudi Talent to Lead

Saudisation, she says, has changed the talent conversation significantly, and for the better. As more roles across functions and levels are localised, Saudi professionals are taking on real responsibility across the Kingdom’s economy. For Abokhodair, the opportunity now is to build on that momentum.

Seen this way, Saudisation goes beyond workforce targets. It is an investment in people: continuous development, specialised expertise and leadership growth that allow Saudi talent to shape the organisations they work in, not simply fill roles within them.

Knowledge transfer is central to that. Where experienced colleagues hold deep technical or institutional knowledge, she sees a valuable chance to pass that expertise on deliberately, so it grows within the next generation of Saudi specialists and leaders.

The signs she looks for are encouraging ones: Saudis moving into critical roles, building specialised expertise, leading teams and functions, and mentoring the generation coming through behind them.

The same thinking applies to the Kingdom’s next phase. Saudi Arabia is not only growing existing sectors, she points out, but building new industries, institutions and ways of working, with Saudi talent at the centre of that transformation. Technical expertise will remain essential, and she sees stakeholder management becoming just as valuable, because so many current ambitions require government, the private sector and multiple organisations to work together. Delivering outcomes beyond your own function is becoming a core capability rather than a senior-leadership nicety.

AI Can Answer in Seconds. That Does Not Make It Wise.

This subject is closer to her than most, because her MBA research examined the correlation between AI-driven training tools and employee engagement.

What interests her is not that AI produces content faster. It is the prospect of development becoming genuinely personalised and available at the moment of need. In sport, she imagines AI-powered simulations that let athletes and technical teams rehearse competition scenarios, analyse decisions and receive immediate feedback before they meet those situations for real.

Her caution is specific, and it is about capability rather than risk. As AI becomes embedded in how people work and learn, AI literacy becomes essential for everyone, not only technology specialists. People need to know how to use these tools well, ask the right questions, critically evaluate what comes back, and recognise when human judgement is still required.

She does not expect AI to replace learning professionals or human development. She expects it to force the profession to be far clearer about where humans actually add value, which is a more demanding proposition than replacement.

“I Think You Can Do This”

Asked what organisations can do to help Saudi talent grow into long-term leadership, Abokhodair names three things: confidence, exposure and accountability. Her point about confidence is particularly direct. It is rarely built by attending a programme. It is built when someone is trusted to lead a difficult project, present to senior stakeholders, make a decision, recover from a mistake, and conclude for themselves that they can handle it.

That also places a clear demand on managers. Developing people is part of their job, not something owned by HR or L&D.

She knows the mechanism from the inside. Her own career offers no single defining moment, and she is clear that this is the point rather than a gap in the story. It was built gradually, through years of work, continuous learning, difficult challenges, and a repeated willingness to step outside her comfort zone. What she credits most is other people’s judgement of her, arriving earlier than her own. There were leaders along the way who trusted her with opportunities before she was completely sure she was ready for them.

As a Saudi woman, she does not treat the present moment casually. She has watched the opportunities available to women change significantly over the course of her own career, and now finds herself leading in a sector she would not have imagined for herself when she started out. It has shaped the kind of leader she wants to be, and it closes the loop on everything else she believes about capability. If potential requires an environment that knows how to develop it, someone has to be willing to extend the opportunity first.

Doing Less, Not More

For someone whose work is helping others grow, the question of what she is still working on produces an unusually candid answer.

She is learning that leadership is sometimes about doing less rather than more, and about being more adaptable when things do not go to plan. She likes ownership, structure and getting things done well, and she holds high expectations of herself. As her responsibilities have grown, she has had to accept that she does not need to be involved in every detail, that others can be trusted to approach things differently, and that more than one route can produce a good outcome.

She is also being deliberate about balance. She loves the work, and she recognises that long-term success is not only professional achievement. It is making time for yourself and the people you care about.

What she is learning about herself, then, is how to hold ambition alongside adaptability, trust, and a little less perfection. It is a fitting place for her to land, given the argument she has spent two decades making. Nobody performs at their best alone, and that includes the person building the system.