Pointers for Asian business leaders

THE secret of a successful leader in Asian companies lies in the answer to four questions:
Where are we going?
How do we get there?
What is work like when we get there?
Who stays and who goes?

By answering these questions and taking the subsequent actions, an effective business leader devotes attention to a crucial set of institutional and organisational processes, two American management gurus behind a book, 'Asian Leadership: What Works' says.

If you, as a leader, only focus on a few of these factors and have not delegated the remaining factors to skilled and trusted colleagues, these blind spots will eventually pose a profound risk to your company.

Ulrich is Professor of Business at Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, while Sutton is Professor of Management Science at Stanford Engineering School say the answer to the four questions are found in eight factors that those at the discussion deemed most essential to their success, along with the skills required to accomplish these actions.

The factors are:
1) creating customer-centric actions;
2) implementing strategy;
3) getting past the past;
4) governing through decision making;
5) inspiring collective meaning making;
6) capitalising on capability;
7) developing careers;
8) and generating leaders.

Along with the four questions, these eight factors are especially crucial to being a successful leader in Asian companies. The factors cover the distinct challenges of the Asian setting; the role of the leader; the competencies they must show; the paradoxes they manage; and the actions required to get there.
In creating customer-centric actions, leaders must spend time with customers in emerging and new markets - and find ways to understand and satisfy unmet needs of both existing and potential customers.

When it comes to implementing strategy, Asian leaders must know how to dream - and make the dream come true. Asian leaders need to have the creativity to discern an unknown future and build the agility or capacity to act to get there.
Tradition and old ways may hamper their thoughts and actions, so they must learn to manage that. But this should not amount to dumping the cultural heritage of the country they operate in.

Asian leaders would have to master the skills of respecting traditions without being so strongly bound to them that their company's performance, and their people's well-being suffer.

In making decisions - the governing through decision making factor - Asian leaders are required to do it in a way that help their organisations simultaneously leverage scale and size and deliver on a sense of small and focused. At the same time, they must also build a governance process that deals with relationships (who is involved in the decision), roles (what positions and roles shape decisions) and rationality (what are the criteria for the decisions).

To retain talent, which is an especially scarce commodity in Asia, Asian leaders need to help employees make their work meaningful or purposeful. When employees believe in their work not only for financial gain, they offer more of their discretionary energy to doing their work well. This means managing beyond skills and rationality, and making sure that employees feel emotionally connected to the company.

Other steps for building talent retention include :

- Grow competencies, situationally. Look for opportunities to put people into challenging situations where their skills and competencies will grow.


- Meet one-on-one, routinely. Conduct regular, but brief one-on-one meetings between manager/leaders and direct reports. Begin by asking, “What’s on your mind?”– then listen and act.

- Make retention everyone ’ s respon sibility. Encourage all members of the work group to feel responsible for the retention of their peers and to be alert to problems that can be fixed.

- Be a career builder. Talk to people about their long-term career aspirations and help them use or build the skills and competencies they need for the future.

- Help people get an “ A ” . Give the gift of being clear about what an “A”level performance looks like.

- Manage the meaning of change. Move toward people in uncertain times, including personal and organisational change. Be there and be open. Check in with people often.

- Walk your talk. Be aware that people are always watching and assessing you and your actions as a leader.


Helping staff to build and manage their careers and putting in place the next generation leaders, another two factors that go into making a successful Asian leader, would be in the job description of any leader.
But to manage the paradox of individual and collective action is rather a unique challenge in the Asian context.
Asian leaders have to help individual employees develop and apply their distinct talents and abilities to be productive and creative. Yet at the same time, they have to get them to work as a team.

'There are times when Asian employees submit their personal identity to the collective, but doing so undermines the ability to do creative work or to see a complex decision from multiple perspectives,' Ulrich and Sutton say. When this happens, Asian leaders need to adopt and invent ways to encourage individual thinking, constructive disagreement and solutions that weave together diverse and, perhaps, clashing perspectives.
At other times, as when collective action is called for to achieve a common goal, individual employees who put themselves above their teams can undermine performance.