Global Asian Leader – from Asia, for the World

We have been fortunate to continue our partnership with the Center for Creative Leadership and bring the conversation to HR Leaders Malaysia. This roundtable session was held in partnership with Generali Malaysia at their offices in Kuala Lumpur, where over 20 HR leaders came together to discuss the challenges and opportunities to develop global Asian leaders.

We were honoured to have Diana Khaitova from Center for Creative Leadership joining us once again and for sharing their continuing research in this area. We then had an intriguing panel discussion with our panellists – Alexander Teoh, Chief People Officer at Generali Malaysia; Anjali Menon, APAC Director and HR Head at Sibelco Group; and Aiza Aryati Kasim, Head of HR at Principle Malaysia.

Here are our key takeaways:

Asia is clearly a growth region with tremendous opportunities for the future. Looking back, the past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented shift of global economic growth from West to East. Sustained economic growth in Asia has increased the purchasing power of Asian countries, which in turn has spiralled the consumption of goods, products, and services, making Asia a critical yet relatively untapped market for global enterprises.

The region is growing more rapidly compared to the rest of the world, offers the largest market, is a potential catchment area for talent, and is a hotbed for innovation and entrepreneurship.

To enable growth, we need to have the right people, the right culture, and the right leadership in Asia and globally. However, CCL’s study shows that Asian leaders representation as part of global executive leadership teams in large Multi National Corporations are still low – so low it is in single digit in terms of percentage.

Despite our best efforts, the reality is we don’t even have enough Asian leaders to fuel our growth in Asia, let alone grooming Asian leaders for global roles.

Diana Khaitova, Regional Sales Manager, Center for Creative Leadership

So what are the opportunities and challenges?

Talent in Asia brings some unique strengths to the table, with a particular stand out area being more VUCA-friendly (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) and therefore more adept at dealing with uncertainties. They generally embrace diversity, and show strong attributes in empathy and humility. They typically demonstrate strong work ethics and are quite agile in decision makings.

However,to become successful global leaders, they also need to demonstrate strong attributes in curiosity, courage, influence, trust, strategic thinking, and aspiration. And these are the areas Asian leaders tend to be perceived as having gaps. Culture is a reason for a lot of these, but not an excuse. To bridge the gap and step up, Asian leaders need to develop growth mindset and ability to deal with dilemmas; build capabilities and demonstrate must-have global leadership attributes. To accomplish this they will need to seek experiences to develop comfort with discomfort and span cultural boundaries and take proactive action to access and succeed in global roles.

From an organisation perspective, our panellists and participants shared best practices in how to promote access and success factors for Asian leaders:

• Provide early-career opportunities to stretch talent out of their comfort zone.
• Provide exposure to young talent in shadowing senior leaders on strategic planning
• Encourage and enable mobility with the systematic talent programs
• Provide role models, mentors, and more importantly, sponsors to talent with aspirations.

Global sponsors at the executive level must take the lead in advancing Asian leadership development initiatives. This implies that efforts to promote diversity in leadership without top-level support and commitment might not gain sufficient traction or resources. With this support, regional leadership teams and HR leaders are called upon to facilitate access for Asian leaders to global succession pipelines. This means creating pathways and opportunities for Asian professionals to advance and take on higher leadership roles globally.

With Asia fast becoming the world’s driving force, organisations must have Asian leaders who can take on vital roles in their global strategy. These global Asian leaders need to effectively direct local and regional businesses and contribute to and execute the joint global growth plans.

While talent must identify their key gap areas, organisations, leaders, and the HR team must help them close the gaps by putting them through the most appropriate leadership development interventions. Collectively, we can nurture stronger global Asian leaders – from Asia, for the World.