LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN ASIA: A PERSONAL VIEW

Abstract

I am not a scholar and this is not a scholarly article. This is a reflection on what I’ve observed and learned about leadership development during many years of living and working in Asia. I tell some stories, make shameless, sweeping generalizations, give highly opinionated views and offer totally subjective insights. I also do some lecturing. There are no charts or graphs and very few notes. I write mainly about American companies (with a bit about Japanese companies and a nod to the Swiss), because these are the organizations with which I am most familiar. By doing this I do not mean to let other companies and countries off the hook.

A bit about me – I am a learning and development practitioner who has been in Asia since 1981, so I have had the opportunity to observe a lot. The first 16 years of that time I spent in Japan, working for Matsushita Electric Industrial, Arthur Andersen, Union Bank of Switzerland and Morgan Stanley. In 1998 I moved to Hong Kong to join Merrill Lynch. I’m now an independent consultant. Since 1981 I have worked in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.

My premise is that many American (and other) companies, whether they realize it or not, are approaching leadership development in Asia (and probably elsewhere) in a narrow and parochial way that limits the contributions of their Asian managers, and thus is not good for business. Instead of accepting and exploiting cultural differences, companies are either ignoring them or trying to expunge them. Instead of the lockstep global systems of performance management, training and review, I argue for using something called indigenous design in which people get to help design the criteria by which they are evaluated. Their contribution becomes part of the global performance management scheme. Indigenously designed training programs can be used in conjunction with corporate programs to fill in the bits that are missing from one-size-fits-all global leadership development. Indigenous design is happening in architecture, technology and social welfare programs – so why not in corporate learning and development?

Citation

Laddin, L.E. (2003), "LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT IN ASIA: A PERSONAL VIEW", Advances in Global Leadership (Advances in Global Leadership, Vol. 3), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 373-385. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1535-1203(02)03017-4