Asian-style leadership
 Updated: 2004-10-25 08:53

Asian managers want to have more fun. Drawing from an article in the Harvard Business Review last month, a contributor to these pages, Mr Koh Buck Song, wrote in his column 'Time to loosen up - This is an order' that younger Asian managers are becoming more like their Western counterparts: They want hands-off superiors who offer help when needed, but otherwise leave them to their own devices to solve their own problems.

This, he reasoned, is coming to pass because children are increasingly being brought up to question authority, instead of being seen and not heard. As such, "old-school supervisors" who still expect their staff to be like unquestioning children are throwing up roadblocks to the way forward, Mr Koh reasoned.

Is this a widespread problem?

Since it hasn't been empirically studied, we can't be sure. What we do know, however, is that this is a very common hurdle to developing leadership capacity in Asian organizations. Or so claimed Insead professor of organizational behaviour Paul Evans.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) here prefer to use "third-country nationals," he said, because they find it too hard to groom local talent for the position.

Come, come, you say. There are lots of talented locals.

Perhaps, but apparently not when it comes to leadership material. Speaking at a conference hosted by Insead recently, Prof Evans gave an example of how a European MNC in China - where the talent pool is obviously many times larger than Singapore's - could not locate such raw material.

Vetting 18,000 Chinese applicants for a programme to groom domestic leaders for the next generation, the MNC found a surfeit of talent in two aspects: competence such as analytic capabilities; and achievement orientation, or the likelihood to take on challenges with gusto.

In the relationship dimension, however, there wasn't anyone who excelled. By this dimension, he meant "the subtle ability to show deference to your boss while challenging him."

Another speaker who runs his own investment advisory firm here, Mr Mark Daniell, pointed out that if Americans emphasize the legal, commercial and relational aspects of business, in that order, and Europeans stress a different order - the commercial first, the relational second and the legal third - Asians supposedly stress relationships, relationships and relationships.

Prof Evans suggested it may have something to do with how Asians are brought up.

While Asians have traditionally been brought up to do as they are told - so they execute commands very well - that isn't so good, he said, when it comes to getting people to do things differently, lead restless, high-performing individuals or develop creative solutions.

But he offered no evidence to back up this broadbrush generalization.

Writing in the journal Advances In Global Leadership last year, Linda Laddin, a learning and development practitioner who has worked with MNCs in Asia since 1981 - Singapore, China and Japan included - argued that "many American (and other) companies, whether they realize it or not, are approaching leadership development in Asia in a narrow and parochial way that limits the contributions of their Asian managers."

Instead of accepting and exploiting their cultural differences, these companies are either ignoring or expunging them by using "one-size-fits-all" global leadership development programmes.

Since context is important, locals should be asked to help design their training programmes as well as the criteria by which they are evaluated, she said.

As one conference participant noted, it was ironic that Westerners were setting up shop here to teach Asians about leadership when Asians had a thing or two to teach the West too - not least Sun Tzu, whose The Art Of War is now a staple in many an MBA course.

But the point is apropos: Before dispensing this spiel about how Asians do it wrong, these Western gurus had better make sure they are indeed capturing the right things with their Eurocentric methods of assessment.

Also, they had better be contextualizing their advice accordingly.

In this connection, is Insead - which has an appropriately polite yet strangely cold and distant European feel about it - the most appropriate institution to do this?

We shall see.

The Straits Times, Singapore

(China Daily)

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