Severe pollution. Extreme economic inequality. Religious strife.
China suffers from all these maladies. But there’s a case to be made that a new generation of leaders in China is getting equipped to make progress on these issues—not only for their own country, but for the entire globe.
I know, that assertion seems ludicrous on its face. To start with, Chinese government leaders remain authoritarian—hardly the kind of leadership I would want to live under. In addition, my reporting on China over the past few months is full of anecdotes about immature managers and ethical foibles. Chinese leaders have a reputation for nose-to-the-grindstone operational savvy, not strategic thinking or people management.
In a recent Korn/Ferry survey about leadership in Asia, nearly half the worldwide executives polled doubted local talent in China will reach global standards within five to 10 years. The Conference Board says teamwork skills and leadership ability are not yet taught well in most of China’s universities and graduate programs.
But over the past decade especially, Chinese professionals have been picking up Western business and leadership skills from the multinational firms that are investing so heavily in the country. Better education is on the government’s agenda. And perhaps most important, a debate is brewing about how to marry the best of Chinese values with those of the West when it comes to leadership.
I asked Angel Yu, vice president for human resources and administration at clothing firm Adidas for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, for her thoughts about how Western and Chinese principles can be combined in leaders. She boiled it down to a simple phrase: “Balance performance culture and family-oriented culture.”
Performance and family. Taken seriously, that pairing amounts to a kind of holy grail not only for China, but for the world. It would mean economic progress that expands opportunities and standards of living—the best of the West, as it were. But also the Eastern attention to harmony and personal relationships that ideally would entail leaving no one behind, preserving the Earth for future “family” members and making room for philosophical or religious differences.
Beijing-based consultant Teresa Woodland sees positive signs in both the country’s business and political leadership. China’s most recent five-year national plan emphasizes blending economic growth with social harmony, notes Woodland, who worked for about a decade at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in China before starting her own firm recently. In her view, the roiling mix that is China today could well produce leaders capable of tackling some of the world’s most vexing problems, including climate change and social inequality.
“As its leadership capacity increases, it will be able to choose a path that is different from some of the paths other nations have chosen,” Woodland says. “One of the things that is really truly remarkable about the Chinese is their ability to deal with complexity.”
China is at once a repressive regime and one of the most permissive places I’ve experienced.
That seeming contradiction was one of the biggest surprises during my visit. I was prepared to enter a country that, while embracing the free market, nevertheless kept a tight leash on its people. After all, much of the reporting out of China highlights the government’s jailing of dissidents, crackdowns on protests and censorship. I don’t doubt the truth of those reports.
In fact, things may be getting worse. Tom Plate, a syndicated columnist and UCLA professor, recently wrote that draconian media policies appear to be on the rise in the country. He also argued that censorship threatens the country’s economic success. “People wonder how China can possibly move forward if its media policies are heading backward,” Plate wrote.
So yes, China’s free-speech restrictions are disconcerting. But day-to-day life in Beijing and Shanghai feels anything but oppressive—unless you’re talking about the throat-burning smog that is all-too common.
While sitting in a Shanghai park, I saw a young boy mock a security official who was telling him to get away from a pond. The boy ran off before the man could approach him, and I’m not sure whether he was a police officer or one of the many private security guards you see in China. Even so, the lad didn’t seem to fear authority much.
A trip I made to the imperial Summer Palace in Beijing illustrates the sense of extreme laissez faire in China. The complex sits on the shore of a lake, which was frozen in January. You can reach a spectacular Buddhist temple rising on a hill via a conventional footpath, but like many other visitors, I walked across the ice to get there. There was no formal entrance to the temple from the lake bed, however. So people clambered over boats resting by the shore and literally scaled the walls of this national monument.
Then, on a flight of stairs up to a Buddhist statue, an ornamental fence just a foot or two tall separated visitors from a fall of some 30 feet to a courtyard below.
There was something thrilling about these adventures. And it prompted me to question whether the United States is too obsessed with safety precautions and liability concerns. But then, partly because I was climbing those temple stairs with my two young children and the two young children of friends from Beijing, the paltry fencing alarmed me.
There’s something twisted about the way China’s government seems to care little about children possibly tumbling to their deaths, but plenty about fingers tapping out words on a keyboard.
And to Tai, vice president of Hyatt International Hotels and Resorts for China and Taiwan, smiling often isn’t just a friendly trait. It’s a business strategy.
Those at the top of organizations in China traditionally don’t have to smile at or thank those serving them, Tai told me over a dim sum lunch in Beijing. To promote a stronger culture of customer service and employee encouragement, he makes it a point to smile at every Hyatt worker he sees. “If the general manager smiles at you, then maybe it’s OK to smile,” he says. “We should show by example.”
Given the high stature of leaders in China, senior managers’ behavior sets the tone for other managers and the rest of a company’s employees, Tai says. He is one of a number of executives in China who use their personal conduct to send key messages to employees.
Those messages can be challenging to deliver in Chinese society. For example, China is heavily influenced by the hierarchical tenets of the philosopher Confucius. By contrast, many multinational companies these days embody egalitarian corporate cultures. And their top leaders in China are expected to breathe life into the global company values.
Consider computer maker Hewlett-Packard’s top executive in China, Cheng-Yaw Sun. When he took the reins of the organization several years ago, Cheng-Yaw said goodbye to a palatial, 500-square-meter office occupied by his predecessor. Cheng-Yaw now shares a nondescript desk with other mobile workers. He and his management team also are called by their first names within HP, a blow to corporate social stratification.
Mobile phone maker Motorola, for its part, is building egalitarianism into its new China headquarters on the outskirts of Beijing. Executives will sit in offices in the center of the building, while frontline workers get the window seats.
Trying to make sense of China’s street traffic, I think I found a window into its business culture.
During my trip in January, I took plenty of cabs around Beijing and Shanghai. Initially, traffic in China struck me as chaotic to the point of being life-threatening. Left-hand turners peel out in front of oncoming traffic as soon as the light turns green. Cars and bikes make right-hand turns into traffic without waiting for a clear opening. Vehicles change lanes not only frequently, but often without using turn signals.
Ultimately, I realized that a governing principle here was something akin to an organic sense of flow. For example, left-hand turns actually work pretty efficiently. As the turners cut across the street, oncoming cars inch forward until they make it impossible for any more would-be left-hand turners to proceed. And vehicles hardly ever get stuck in the middle of onrushing traffic.
That has something to do with another factor I came to understand: There is a lot of communication among drivers and pedestrians, even if it isn’t the kind I’m used to in the United States. Frequent, brief toots of the horn. Flashes of the headlights. Simple eye contact.
A third principle behind what seemed to be traffic madness is a constant openness to opportunities. Drivers keep trying out different lanes, or making up new ones.
It eventually struck me that a Chinese driver coming to the United States would find our road system confusing. Why so much dead time at traffic lights when no one moves? Why stick with one lane so long and be so formal about switching when you could be missing out on a better route?
My traffic lessons were repeated in my attempts to interview business leaders in China. Would-be sources seemed unwilling to set appointments in advance of my trip, and advised me instead to “call me when you get here.”
Once meeting times were established, they often were changed. A Chinese executive I was eager to meet changed our appointment twice before we finally managed to sit down. Another executive’s assistant sent a message that indicated the extent of the uncertainty that I was finding all around me. Even as she reconfirmed the appointment, she was telling me it might have to change: “We have fixed the appointment with you at 2:00-3:00pm on Jan. 23rd. However, as per the current schedule, we might need to change the time.”
Why all the fluidity in business appointments? Janet Carmosky, CEO of consulting firm China Prospects, prepared me for it by describing Chinese business culture as one centered on a constant search for better options.
“The Chinese live to maximize opportunity,” says Carmosky, who spent nearly 20 years working in China. “We in America place a very high value on committing and seeing something through.”
Carmosky’s observation, it seems to me, explains, in part, the ethical concerns that arise in the country, such as graft and intellectual property theft.
It also explains why my appointments kept changing. I suspect company leaders and consultants were constantly judging whether I—and the exposure they could get in Workforce Management–was the best they could do on a given day.
That may be putting it too harshly. People I met with were invariably generous with their time. The executive that “bumped” me twice ultimately spent over an hour with me and responded to numerous follow-up e-mails.
What’s more, sources in China consistently communicated about when meetings were canceled and offered to reschedule. And they did so politely.
The civility gets to something I came to value in China. Even when you understand a bit about the culture, the intertwining traffic and canceled meetings can be maddening. But a saving grace about people in Beijing and Shanghai is they are much more patient than their counterparts in San Francisco and New York. Just as I never had an interview go sour over scheduling conflicts, I never once saw road rage in China.
The story of leadership in China came alive for me as I stood in Angel Yu’s office, some 300 feet above the streets of Shanghai.
Up to that point in a three-week reporting trip in China, I’d learned that the country lacks enough homegrown managers to satisfy all the demand at multinational firms doing business in the fast-growing Chinese economy. I’d also discovered that the resulting hasty promotions of young Chinese leaders amount to a risk for companies, the country at large and even the rest of the world.
But these matters can be largely impersonal, abstract. Angel Yu helped me see how much the topic of China’s leaders is about individual people who’ve often made courageous choices, collectively achieved dramatic results and who are trying to create a new leadership style—one that may be particularly well suited for the 21st century.
Yu, 42, is vice president for human resources and administration at clothing firm Adidas for the Greater China region. In January, I interviewed her and the president of Adidas for Greater China, Sandrine Zerbib, about how the company handles leadership challenges in the country. My findings from that discussion and talks with some 30 other company officials and consultants will be published next week in a Workforce Management special report.
After the hourlong interview in an Adidas conference room, Yu walked me to her office to give me a report naming the company as one of the top employers in the Shanghai region. Yu’s office on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai high rise has a sweeping view of the bustling, still under-construction city.
It—and Yu’s possession of it—became all the more stunning to me as she described her career history. The daughter of Shanghai-area factory workers, Yu attended college and worked as a teacher in the early 1980s. This was back when the Chinese economy was still largely run through central planning, and individual choices were limited. Fed up with the restrictions governing her job, she quit and headed to Shenzhen, then China’s free-market outpost. By doing so, she gave up the security of the “iron rice bowl”—guaranteed employment—in hopes for a better life. “I took a risk,” she says.
It has paid off. Yu worked for four years at direct-marketing company Amway, and has been an Adidas HR manager since 1999. She now has responsibilities for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She’s even playing a leading role in worldwide HR initiatives at Adidas, Zerbib says.
If Yu were haughty, it would be easy to see why. She has reached a powerful position, and once a week a headhunter tries to lure her away to another job. Instead, she is gracious, warm and soft-spoken.
Her story parallels what’s happened in China. Beginning in the late 1970s, the country essentially placed a big bet on free-market reforms. That gamble has largely succeeded, in the form of rapid economic growth and newfound prosperity. Problems still plague the country, ranging from human rights abuses to the immature manager dilemma I found in my reporting.
But at least on the latter front, executives and other officials in China seem aware of the issue and are determined to tackle it. And as they do, there is growing talk about blending the best of the East and the West when it comes to leadership. There’s even an argument that the Chinese capacity for handling complexity could be a key strength as the entire world grapples with tricky issues such as economic inequality and climate change.
Angel Yu may be an example of a new generation of Chinese leaders prepared for an ever-more integrated globe. She’s clearly comfortable with Western management principles. But she also says many Chinese values are worth preserving in a business setting, including loyalty and the importance of personal relationships.
Can Yu and her peers pull it off? Can they solve the many leadership problems facing the country? I can’t say for sure. But I will be following her story, and China’s, closely.
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