Leadership And Talent Challenges In Asia

We undergone for two Months of research across Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo) and interact with dozens of Human Resources and business leaders with the help of JMRB Technologies in India. It was a fascinating discussion and I want to share a few thoughts.

Acute Leadership Gaps:  Asian Leaders Behave Differently.

It’s easy to generalize about Asia (ie. the economies are growing rapidly, nationalities vary widely, distances are long) but in many organizations the challenges companies face are similar or identical to those in other countries. I met with banks, hospitality companies, a few government agencies, and a variety of insurance and financial services institutions.

In each case HR leaders are dealing with leadership issues. We did a workshop on high-impact leadership development in Hong Kong and most of the large organizations there are quite advanced in their thinking. Do competency models vary by country? Do we want to look for different leadership styles in different countries? Yes, people confirm that leaders must have tremendous cultural agility and awareness in Asia, but ultimately leadership is leadership.

As the figure above shows, there are differences in leadership styles by culture (here we tend to value the “rugged individual” style). So while core leadership capabilities are the same everywhere, people agreed that style matters and leaders have to adjust to the needs of the local culture. (This is often called “cultural agility.”)

One of the senior leaders reflected that their young leaders are the most culturally agile and that differences in leadership culture are getting lesser as young people enter the leadership ranks. And it is important to build leaders locally – expatriate leadership is difficult, so companies want to accelerate development of leaders from the region.

According to my View: there is a vast opening in India for all level of talents in India, but there is a lack of skills from candidate and the expectation from company is also so high, so we can't balance the equilibrium of the expectation can't fulfilled, so the fulfilment ratio is getting less & we are get into the challenges.