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What is Asia’s next leadership challenge?Putting that question central, we organized a week long retreat in Bali during the summer of 2016, with a combination of young (generation Y or GenY) and experienced leaders from five Asian countries: Indonesia, China, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Using ValueFraming © (a communication adaption of Spiral Dynamics ©) as a common cultural analysis approach, it helped us avoid the usual pitfall of comparing local (Asian) cultures (a popular habit with cultural analysis programs) and instead focus on discovering common patterns and challenges.

During this week, we researched Asia’s next leadership challenge thoroughly, bringing different perspectives together. And that brought us the next six insights and challenges.

1. We are all the same

First we focused on our personal quests and individual challenges, using the path of Theory-U and our insights in our personal communication profiles. Instead of our usual focus to quickly find solutions and jump to conclusions, this process allows us to connect to our deeper personal inspirations, through observing and suspending easy judgments, and finally to prototype new and personal ideas. During this process we learned of our first insight: the cliché of Asian people holding back personal emotions is completely invalid. At most we could conclude that in the Asian organizational context, there is more focus on control. So it takes more effort to create a safe environment that people can trust.

2. The Generation Gap

The next insight was that the gap between the experienced leaders, with their focus on compliance, company loyalty and practical targets and the young GenY-s, focusing on society, purpose and individual autonomy, is a worldwide theme. But this gap is wider in Asia than in Europe or USA. GenY-s are typically impatient to become new leaders as they are generally highly educated, completely at ease with modern technology and social media and therefore very effective in modern marketing methods. On the other side of the gap, we see loyal leaders with more traditional values, careful with the inheritance of a long period of hard work and economic growth. They tend to use trusted organizational structures and methods, and keep their positions as long as possible. In Spiral Dynamics terms, we see a deepening conflict between traditional values as company loyalty and job commitment (‘blue values’) and personal development and autonomy (‘yellow values’).

In our group, the GenY-s were helping the more experienced leaders use their smartphones to the max and introducing new social media, while some time later they were both involved in firm discussions about autonomy and personal and social responsibility. These discussions demanded a big mutual understanding as we realized that the perspectives were far apart.

Realizing for instance that in 2020 70% of Indonesia’s labor force will be made up of GenY-s, this means that this mismatch in goals and values might become more urgent then we expected so far. This altogether means that this part of Asia is facing a higher speed of change and a wider generation gap. The challenge there is to connect extremes! In our retreat the U-process was a big and almost necessary help to really connect the generations.

3. The iceberg of ignorance

The organizational challenge that all participants witnessed in their local organizations is the strong emphasis on top down steering and communication, leading to, what we called, the iceberg of ignorance. The loss of crucial information in the bottom up process, keeps organizations from effective decision-making. Enough time, resources, and room for growth have kept this problem from being recognized as a top management priority so far. But when agility and flexibility are becoming key success factors in increasingly competitive markets, this might become the ‘Achilles heel’ of every professional organization.

Where, and more important why, is this loss of information happening? Our collective analysis is that the introduction of corporate organization structures is relatively new and mainly imported from outside (western) influences. So they

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miss the natural foundation in a local traditional inheritance, and therefore use a small ‘subset’ of the original repertoire of management tools: Command and control (in Spiral Dynamics terms associated with the ‘blue value’) and setting targets (in Spiral Dynamics terms associated with the ‘orange value’). Both leading to fear, preventing employees of speaking out freely about information that would help an organization to learn and adapt. The ‘blue value’ (focusing on order and loyalty) creates the fear of not complying with the rules and being punished by the system. The ‘orange value’ (focusing on goals and results) creates the fear of not meeting targets and missing out on

promotions and other career advancement.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, the next step towards the freedom to share this crucial information is the introduction of the ‘green value’. This means a new focus on building personal relations, on empathy and individual well-being, within the context of the organization. This can only be achieved by creating an atmosphere of individual trust and safety.

The first step is to introduce individual coaching. Coaching will help individuals recognize their emotional needs and barriers and to empower them to express those needs in collective settings.

The second step is to introduce team coaching. This will help identify barriers within the teams to share personal needs and goals. It helps team members to be open as well as critical, by introducing feedback as a normal way to communicate. This will open the way of sharing crucial information within the team and as a team leader normally is part of hierarchically different teams, it helps the bottom up flow dramatically. As

if strong barriers are instantly taken away. This is a crucial step and needs a strong atmosphere of trust and safety.

The participants of the retreat expressed that such values might be new to their organizations, but are certainly not new in their social environment. There they recognized traditions known as ‘Mushawara’ (Indonesia) and ‘Bayanihan’ (Philippines), focused on collective decision-making after bringing in very personal insights and emotions. These social tools could be easily introduced as a necessary and locally valued addition to the existing management tools.

4. Gender inequality is holding back necessary development

One of the major cultural innovations from the introduction of the orange value in any society is the broad ‘use’ of talent, known as meritocracy. Talent is more important than roots or family status. In the USA for instance, this is characterized with the expression: ‘the American dream’ or ‘from newspaper-boy to millionaire’. This provides any society with an exponential source of workforce and talent. In Asia, the cultural division in social subgroups is holding back this development. Especially the wide spread gender inequality is becoming a major barrier in the development of female talent and female leaders.

For instance in the Filipino context, society (families) can expect corporate organizations to assume some social responsibility to protect young GenY girls for their safety. Being more and more highly educated they want autonomy and therefore leave the company. Together with the effect of the generation gap this creates a ‘turn-over’ of almost 30%. Any Human Resource department would be seriously challenged by that.

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In our group, the young GenY female leaders (still) had to fight for their right to make personal choices on studies and individual lives. They risked social expulsion, yet at the same time they had to take care for their mother when they were living alone. Because of these difficult circumstances they choose female emancipation as personal purpose.

At the same time we saw successful female leaders taking all the professional tasks combining with full family responsibility, struggling with work-life balance. These challenges ask for a special approach of this social reality.

5. Structure (strategy & processes) ánd culture (leadership & collaboration) need to change simultaneously

The best strategies and processes can falter faced with a non-receptive culture of strong resistance. As Peter Drucker says “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Successful change systems require structure change to go hand in hand with culture change. Processes, functions and behavior are just the tip of the iceberg. Values need to be aligned and judgments, cynicism and fear need to be addressed and transformed into new thinking. Both at an individual as well as at a group level. It can be done!

6. We need to accelerate and change the game of change

There is no historical precedent for the economic growth and scale of major changes in the past three decades in Asia, as it starts to assume its leading role in the world in the 21st century. Add to that the world’s major challenges like the energy crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis, all of which are indifferent to geography. Then it is clear that there is an overwhelming urgency not only to keep moving, but to accelerate the speed of change even further.

The challenge there is to connect extremes and bridge the differences. In our retreat the U-process was a big help to really look at these issues at a deeper level and connect to that sense of urgency. To see our own roles as a GenX or a GenY, and see that we are all part of the same system, before we moved on to new perspectives on how to deal with this.

Next to the U, ValueFraming helped in seeing the transition in values within the system. And how to maintain the strengths of different perspectives and see what is needed to bridge the gap. One of the conclusions of the week was that to build social capital in the current context requires trust based relations. This asks for more “green” to be injected in change process to deal with this challenge. Also we felt the need for a more “yellow” approach to connecting such differences; non-hierarchical structures with a different meaning of leadership, and open to the ideas and perspectives across the whole workforce. Considering the GenY’s, they want to feel understood and have the feeling that they can contribute significantly, but need the platform and safety of the established leaders to feel the space to engage. From top down to co-analysis and co-creation.

The six insights above about the next Asian leadership challenge may give some additional direction, and underline the urgent need and route for further change. Time to move!

Thanks to: Cath, July, Laila, Mai, Nurina, Su, Vimala and Wouter!

Flying Elephants, July 2016

Eveline de Wal Floor de Ruiter Henry Sprenkels