Best-in-class companies in this high-growth region are extraordinarily open to new ideas. Yet to stay successful, leaders must be able to ‘embed’ what they learn as they are fast-tracked through their firms.
More so than anywhere else in the Best Companies for Leadership 2010 study, Asia is the place where companies are hungry to explore best practice however they can. Samsung, which heads the top 5 list, typifies this openness. It runs a program covering areas as broad as art, history and music to help potential members of its top team become ‘world citizens’. It goes to great lengths to ensure its people can succeed in different cultures around the world. And it’s happy to turn an ambitious, competitive internal department into a center of excellence.
The results reveal how comfortable leaders at the top 5 Asian companies are with a highly matrixed environment. Top companies give subsidiaries high levels of autonomy and accept their ideas more readily than peer firms.
Whilst the top Asian firms are in step with the world’s top 20 Best Companies for Leadership when it comes to working in a networked environment, they diverge on pay, bonus and promotion. Leading Asian companies are almost twice as likely as global peers to use higher pay and bonus opportunities to attract future leaders. This reflects the region’s rapid growth and its tough market for talent.
Fast-track promotion is more popular too, for similar reasons. However this carries with it the risk that leaders may not have time to ‘cement’ their learning before moving onward and upward. It could be one of the factors that ultimately limits Asian companies’ growth.
The region’s top firms also place more value on their leaders’ technical competence than in other parts of the world, perhaps reflecting the local hunger for knowledge and a cultural outlook that values ‘content’ as well as ‘style’ in leaders.
Asia also has the biggest gap between the ‘best’ and the ‘rest’ about responsibility. Who is responsible for what – whether up and down a hierarchy or across a matrix – is much more clearly framed in the top 5 companies.
However the stand-out feature of Asia’s Best Companies for Leadership is their openness – to cultural differences and to best practice from wherever they find it. This matches Hay Group’s own experience with regional clients, who are prepared to spend more time than their western peers visiting other companies and learning from them.
