Leadership The Southeast Asian Way

I do most of my reflection while training for my ultra marathon races. Last week, I ran with a friend who happens to work in the same industry, but for a global recruitment and search firm.

While enduring the humidity of the jungle, he shared with me some of the leadership challenges he was facing across Southeast Asia. He commented that his country managers are not measuring up against his company’s expectations.

I was intrigued, and I asked him to elaborate further. Our conversation led me to write this post about the perceived leadership gap in Southeast Asia.

This is a tricky topic to cover. It’s complex and we aren’t dealing in absolutes. Nevertheless, I wanted to share my thoughts to start a wider conversation about this topic, as I am interested in what others have to say about it.

We can probably agree, as per McKinsey & Company, that the countries in Southeast Asia are projected to be the fourth largest global economy by 2050.

But with that growth projection, and with my friend’s feedback, comes one big question as Southeast Asia becomes a major economic power – does it have the right leadership in place?

Learning to leverage differences.

I probed my friend further to try to understand which yardsticks his company was using to compare the perceived leadership gaps against. As he elaborated further, the penny dropped.

His company wished for their local leadership teams to speak up more, perhaps even express different views and lead conversations, as they considered this to be leader-like behaviour.

Having worked in Asia for over 10 years, I’ve observed that in Southeast Asia reflection is often valued over importance, harmony over disagreement, introspection over feedback, and humility over attention-seeking behaviour.

Secondly, his European headquarters were struggling with identifying who their leaders in this region were. However, I would argue that they failed to recognise that developing personal visibility is a challenge in Asian cultures where self-promotion may be considered undignified.

Finally, his European colleagues wanted to see more networking between their Southeast Asian businesses and the rest of the world. The issue here is not that Western networking skills are any better than those of East Asians. In fact, they all connect well amongst themselves, but may struggle to connect with others.

There are differences in how goodwill is built between colleagues in each region. For example, as per MITSloan’s research – ”individuals from collectivist cultures put a high premium on enduring without complaining (sportsmanship) and giving advance notice (courtesy). To Western eyes, an employee’s reluctance to self-disclose, participate actively, or disagree publicly is seen as a lack of confidence, competence, or trustworthiness – deficits that can be hard to correct.”

I have since met up again with my runner friend and told him that perhaps they should embrace the Southeast Asian leadership style more and not compare it too much with Western ideologies.

I agree with MITSloan’s conclusion, because his company headquarters might end up ostracising their regional leaders, who could miss out on stretch assignments, training, and exposure. It could even make them lose confidence when there was nothing wrong with their style in the first place, and they were actually a good fit to lead in this high-growth region.

Gap in Perception. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Harvard Business School recently published an interesting article discussing how to fix the Southeast Asian leadership gap, but I came to a different conclusion.

Perhaps Western leadership excellence was universal in the days of global corporation domination. However, when we look at all the recent Asian disruptive start-ups (Grab, Lazada, Tokopedia, SEA, Traveloka and Go-Jek) and even the more mature companies that have established themselves out of Asia as global players (several of them have gone from local businesses to global players – Didi and Alibaba come to mind, having bought Western companies along the way) then that should be strong enough evidence that the leadership capability in Southeast Asia is doing something right.

The leadership gap in Southeast Asia does not need to be bridged as there is no gap – although there may be a gap in perception between the two styles. If anything I would argue that the Southeast Asian leadership style could be used as a fertile learning ground for Western organisations to complement their own perceived leadership excellence.