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Andersen Consulting has just completed a world-wide survey into the leadership skills of CEO's, involving nearly 90 companies from the US, Europe, Australia and Japan and emerged with 14 criteria for tomorrow's corporate leader. Among them - an ability to think globally, appreciate cultural diversity, foster teamwork, share leadership, and be on top of technology. A small sample for sure, and the criteria are not particularly earth-shattering stuff, but it does bring attention yet again to the question of whether success factors of management at the highest level are global or local. In other words, can we really define universal success factors that apply to every top manager regardless of industry, nature and size of the enterprise, diversity of their human resources, ethnicity, nature of their customers, and whether they are based in London, Hanoi, Rio, Frankfurt, New York or Wagga-Wagga?Graham Henry, Australian-based Anderson partner probably thinks so.
The day of the command and control CEO is ending... the "stick" part of the carrot-and-stick" is gone. ...Asian companies are typically run by a powerful leader who is often a member of a family that controls the company. That structure will have to change, ...otherwise Asian companies risk being left "stuck in the mud".The younger generation of workers, says the report, will have to lead by consensus rather than direct order to manage their twenty-something workers, who are even more self-centered than older employees and prefer alternative work styles. OK, so what do Asian CEO's themselves think? Singapore based Steven Morris Associates a group which coaches top executives has also done a focus group survey of their own with 40 CEO's of Asian-owned and Western multi-national companies. Interestingly enough, Steve Morris notes that "contrary to popular belief that Asians, particularly in a group situation, won't express what motivates them or what their needs are, inhibition among focus groups members usually melts away in about five minutes".. Possibly Steven may have had to feed his group lots of Kickapoo Joy Juice first to get his mates so loquacious, nevertheless in the end he concludes that "Asian employees aren't much different from workers elsewhere in the world". (See also the Orient Pacific Century guide on Running focus groups in Asia for a slightly different view). However, says Steve, there are some cultural differences that top managers should keep in mind when shaping corporate culture in Asia...
Asian workers generally seek a sense of familial belonging in their respective workplaces. In contrast, US workers, for instance, place more emphasis on independence. Asian workers take more pride in their organization they work for that in their individual jobs. In many Western countries the attitude is a lot more "me-centric" with employees tending to put more priority on their own work.For various cultural reasons, it's harder for Asian leaders to give individual recognition says Morris, but Asian workers often say in focus groups Morris runs things like "...Well, I know the boss appreciates me, but it would mean an awful lot to me if he'd just tell me....". In his focus groups, Morris found his CEO's remarkably forthcoming about their failures. Top executives cited a lack of listening skills and and inability to empathise with their employees as major leadership shortcomings, and they also worry about insufficient corporate vision and a lack of capacity to coach and develop skills of future managers. Asian companies often rely on structured questionnaires for feedback from employees says Morris, but this may be misleading because the "questions themselves may be off the mark". Sounds like Steve is a qualitative man through and through... We are sure Steve also took into account the fact that Asian people always tend to like to tell people what they think they would like to hear when face to face in particular, and especially when the enquirer is an "outsider" or foreigner. The Rat was once perplexed with the response of one group member when asking a group of managers of the skill that was most important to success in their organizations... "...the ability to guess...", was the response.... When asked for further clarification, the group member replied that his managers without exception never gave feedback on performance. He was never sure whether what he was doing was what was wanted. All good research we are sure, but it is important not to generalize too much from research like this. Indonesian and Thai managers for example seem to have very different management styles than their Hong Kong, Japanese or Singaporean compatriots. And within these cultures too, management styles differed markedly depending on personality. Managers educated in the West often are inculcated with Western management styles as well. Managers in different cultures need to develop their own style best suited for their industry, business environment, customers and employees. Asian managers may just as easily move to a global management style as easily as they adapt to other global brands like Coke, Mercedes, Armani and Heine ken, but whether that is a good thing or not may remain to be seen... (See also the Orient Pacific Century Guide to team building in Asia)...
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The views expressed here may not necessarily reflect those of Orient Pacific Century or partners of the Asia Pacific Management Forum
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