Meenaz Suleman started working at eighteen because her family needed her to. Nineteen years later she runs HR for a Dubai conglomerate spanning oil trading, petrochemicals, shipping and hospitality across four countries. What she has learned along the way has less to do with policy than with the space beyond it.
Meenaz Suleman, SHRM-CP, is Head of Human Resources at Al Baraa Group, a Dubai-headquartered conglomerate with operations across Turkey, Singapore and China, where she built the group’s HR infrastructure from scratch. She has more than nineteen years in HR across multinational, free zone and high-growth environments, and was named HR Manager of the Year in the oil, gas and energy category.
Editor’s note: As AI reshapes how organisations hire, assess and develop people, the question of what should stay human is no longer abstract for anyone leading a workforce in the Gulf. Meenaz Suleman has spent nineteen years answering it in practice, across free zones, factory floors and boardrooms.
HR found her
Meenaz Suleman did not choose this profession. It found her, in a call centre, while she was doing something nobody had asked her to do.
She began working at eighteen, before finishing her degree. Her family was going through a difficult phase and a job was not a career decision, it was a necessity. Customer service taught her to listen. But the turn came at HSBC, where she noticed that resolving a customer’s problem interested her considerably less than helping the person beside her get better at resolving it. Whenever she found something that worked, she could not keep it to herself.
None of that was in her job description. She was simply a team member who liked mentoring colleagues and helping new joiners find their feet, until the organisation caught up with what she was already doing and made her a subject matter expert, then moved her into a full learning and development role.
Her first training session left a mark that has outlasted everything else from that period. She was extremely nervous, and what she took away was that good training is not a performance: it is about creating an environment where people feel comfortable enough to participate. When the time came to choose a specialism for her degree, the decision was already made for her. She picked business management, because she wanted to understand organisations and the people inside them.
The difference between where she started and where she ended up comes down to depth. In customer service you help within fixed boundaries and rarely find out what someone is really carrying. In HR you understand people past a single interaction, and you get to change something over time. “I don’t think I chose HR,” she says. “HR found me. I kept following the work that gave me the greatest sense of purpose.”
Leadership begins with listening
That instinct, to understand before acting, became her method. Meenaz has built HR functions from nothing more than once, and she is firm about what comes first on a blank canvas. Not a policy. Not a system. The business.
At Amusement Services International there was no HR function to inherit. Rather than importing a framework, she spent her early months learning how the company actually ran, meeting leaders, mapping operational requirements and getting fluent in UAE Labour Law so that whatever she built would be workable as well as compliant. The architecture came afterwards: recruitment, policies, employee lifecycle, performance, compliance.
The result showed up in adoption rather than design. Because the foundations fit how the business really operated, people experienced HR as support rather than bureaucracy. For Meenaz that is the whole test of the function. Employees need to feel heard; leaders need confidence that HR is moving the business forward. Balance those and HR becomes a genuine partner instead of a service desk.
The same resistance to imported formulas shapes how she handles a group operating across oil trading, shipping and several countries at once. One culture, in her reading, does not mean one operating manual, and flattening the differences between industries and jurisdictions would be a mistake. What stays fixed is narrower and harder to fake: respect, integrity, fairness, transparency. People should know they will be treated fairly, given equal opportunity, and able to speak without fear of being judged.
Culture is not something policy manufactures. Policies supply structure, but what people actually experience is the daily interactions and the behaviour of their leaders. And Meenaz has little tolerance for process defended on the grounds of habit. As a business evolves, HR has to evolve with it, which means being willing to challenge how things have always been done.
“The biggest measure of success isn’t the policies I’ve introduced. It’s when colleagues stay in touch years later and tell me I made a positive difference.”
Fairness is not sameness
The experience that reorganised her thinking arrived at FAM Recycling, where she took on HR and administration for more than 500 employees, the majority of them blue-collar, during the pandemic, while the company relocated operations from Ajman to JAFZA. Almost everything in her background until then had been white-collar. She calls it one of the hardest stretches of her career and one of the most rewarding.
What she learned cuts against the way the word fairness usually gets deployed. Fairness is not treating everyone the same. It is treating everyone with the same respect, dignity and genuine care, whatever their role or job title.
She is blunt about how routinely that workforce is underestimated. They are the backbone of the business; without their skill and commitment, production does not happen. Earning their trust had nothing to do with her position and everything to do with being approachable across differences of language and background, and making sure people knew someone was actually listening.
Then she acted on what she heard, pushing for better accommodation and transport, more appropriate medical insurance, compliant overtime payments and improved benefits. Those conversations were not always comfortable. Her argument was that wellbeing and performance pull in the same direction. Her experience has shown her that when people feel respected and supported, they are more likely to do their best work.
The verdict came on her last day. It was not the management team who gathered to say goodbye. It was the blue-collar employees and supervisors, some emotional, some carrying messages of thanks from their families. Leadership, she concluded, is not measured by the policies you introduce or the position you hold. It is measured by the lives you touch and the trust you earn.
“Titles may define our responsibilities, but they should never define our humanity.”
Where the rulebook ends
Which brings us to the story she returns to when the subject is what leadership actually costs.
An employee suffered a serious accident on duty and lost two fingers. Treatment was arranged, his family informed, the insurance was in place and every procedure followed. By any measure an audit would recognise, the matter was closed.
Meenaz could not leave it there. The man was his family’s sole earner, and she did not accept that the employer’s responsibility ended where the paperwork did. Not everyone agreed, and arguing for support beyond the statutory minimum was neither the easy position nor the popular one. She held the line, and eventually he received the support she believed he was owed.
“Compliance establishes the minimum standard,” she says, “but integrity asks for more.” Leadership, on her account, is not tested by the decisions that are easy. It is tested where the minimum has been met and someone has to decide whether that is enough.
The power of a constructive no
The belief that has changed most across nineteen years is the one she began with. Early on, Meenaz thought a good leader was someone who could make everyone happy, and that her value lay in being the person who said yes: to employees to keep morale up, to leadership to prove her worth.
She now sees that as the trap. HR sits between employee expectations, business realities, budgets and long-term goals, and indiscriminate agreement fails in both directions. Say yes to every request and you put the business at risk. Say yes to every executive decision without question and you forfeit your people’s trust. The skill she wishes she had acquired sooner is the constructive no.
It has not made the conversations easier. She has turned down employee requests that were not sustainable, and challenged leadership when she believed a different approach was fairer. What she discovered is that people do not, in fact, expect a yes. They expect honesty, transparency and respect, and they will accept a decision they dislike when they understand the reasoning and believe the process treated them fairly.
That same reframing is how she gets things funded. In one organisation, informal conversations kept surfacing the same themes: employees wanted financial flexibility, clearer development paths, a stronger connection to the business. Presented as demands, those read as cost. So she presented them differently, showing the leadership team how leave encashment flexibility, air ticket allowances and leadership development would strengthen engagement and retention while reducing turnover and recruitment costs. The conversation moved from expense to investment, and the changes went through.
Staying close enough to hear those themes in the first place is deliberate: lunches with different teams, informal coffees, time spent on the floor. Those moments, in her experience, reveal considerably more than any formal meeting or engagement survey. She does not treat strategy and daily employee experience as separate concerns, because the finest strategy in the world still depends on the people delivering it.
“Nineteen years ago, I measured success by how many people I could make happy. Today, I measure it by the trust I’ve built.”
What should never be automated
On AI, Meenaz is an unfussy pragmatist. It is already making HR more efficient, analysing data, screening CVs, identifying trends, absorbing administrative work, and she welcomes anything that buys the profession more time with people and less with paperwork.
Her line falls around one thing: empathy. The moments that matter most in a career cannot be handled by a system. Supporting someone through a personal crisis, managing conflict, delivering difficult feedback, recognising potential, helping someone navigate a decision that will shape their life, all of it requires emotional intelligence and genuine connection.
Her reasoning is the same thread that runs through the accident, the fairness argument and the constructive no. People do not remember the policies. They remember how they were made to feel at the moments that counted. Trust, as she puts it, is built through conversations, understanding and authenticity rather than algorithms. Technology makes HR efficient. Humanity is what makes it mean anything.
You already belong there
Meenaz arrived in the UAE nearly two decades ago, leaving everything familiar behind. She credits it above all with perspective: a daily life spent among people from everywhere, sharing meals and traditions, which dismantled boundaries she had not realised she was carrying. Underneath the differences she found consistency, because wherever people come from, they want to feel safe, respected and valued, and to build something better for their families.
What she admires most is the refusal to stand still, a country that keeps reimagining what is possible rather than resting on what already works. Living inside that made complacency impossible, and it reinforced her belief that growth is continuous. It also gave her something she did not arrive with. She came as a young professional trying to find her place. She looks back now as a stronger and more independent woman who has learned to lead through change.
Asked what she would do differently if she could build the career again, she does not reach for a strategic move or a missed opportunity. She would tell her younger self to stop waiting to feel completely ready, and to stop believing she had to prove her worth to everyone else before she was permitted to look after herself.
The version of leadership she once practised meant carrying the organisation on her own shoulders, saying yes too often, measuring her value by how much pressure she could absorb. She has since concluded that leadership is not about carrying everything alone. It is knowing when to step forward, when to ask for support and when to protect your own wellbeing. You cannot pour from an empty cup.
Which leaves one thought she would hand back to the eighteen-year-old who went to work because there was no other option, and which lands just as squarely on anyone reading this from the edge of a room they are not sure they have earned.
“Spend less time trying to prove your worth to the room, and more time realising that you already belong there.”
Perhaps that is the thread running through all of it. Meenaz Suleman has spent nineteen years building the structures that let organisations function, and almost none of what she is remembered for appears in any of them. The point was making sure that the people inside them knew they belonged.
