Firms identify key failings of Thai leaders

"Having a sense of where the future goes and being able to imagine a range of possibilities will be a huge advantage," Bruce McKenzie, president of the Australian consulting firm, said last week.

"You have to start to build this forward thinking … not because we have to get it right but because we can’t afford to get it wrong," he told a conference in Bangkok held to commemorate his company’s 20th anniversary.

The findings came out of their ongoing research to identify the types of leadership required to run businesses beyond 2020.

Arinya Talerngsri, managing director of APM Group, said people are going to be living in a world in which they don’t know what is going to happen.

"Nonetheless, we don’t find many people trained to cope with uncertainty or something they have never seen before.

"From my experience working with organisations, people always wait to hear what their boss will say. They don’t have the ability to think on their own feet," she said.

The second Thai leadership gap is not "leading with flexibility to improvise and innovate". McKenzie said that unlike some, Thais are not short of creativity. However, Thais often expect someone else to fix their problems, he said, citing some creative solutions implemented by affected Thai firms during last year’s floods which, nevertheless, had not come up before the flood hit their factories for three weeks.

Every employee has some ideas every day but usually they don’t go anywhere except between the employee’s friends. Leadership, in this regard, is about releasing or creating an environment that will help build a "continued stream of ideas" within their organisations.

conversations across generations

The third gap involves not "leading conversations across generational boundaries". McKenzie told the story of a brilliant 30-year-old Thai executive who was granted a scholarship from his company to take a course at INSEAD, a world-famous business school, but left the firm soon afterward because he did not receive a chance to try out his ideas, as he was regarded as being "too young", while his classmates from China and India got a promotion and were able to initiate new projects upon their return to their companies. The Thai executive left to join a start-up founded by people of similar ages, which turned out to be successful.

"But he felt very sad about the story (that happened at his previous company)," McKenzie said.

Arinya said leaders need to have the ability to maximise the potential of all workforce generations, not only generation Y, which currently comes under the focus of most companies, since each generation has different "assets".

The fourth gap is not "leading to restore and sustain confidence and trust in leaders and their institutions". Research has shown that "charismatic" leadership, which was the approach popularised in the 1960s, is the worst type of leadership in the present age.

McKenzie spoke about the difference between "followers" and "supporters". Leaders should be surrounded by their "supporters" so they continue to receive the best information and ideas, which they can use for improving the organisation.

The fifth gap is not "leading into the future through continuous learning". McKenzie said people cannot learn in a judgmental environment and companies also have to change – not to celebrate "sameness" but to celebrate "differences".

"If HR hires the same type of people, they actually kill the organisation because no one can learn," he said.

The last gap concerns not "leading simultaneously in both short- and long-term frameworks".