Why leadership is not for everyone

How I ended up in Vietnam 02:05

How did you end up here in Vietnam?

I have been in Vietnam for over twenty years now. I came in 2002, initially as a bit of a career break. I had just finished my masters and I genuinely did not know what I wanted to do next.

I came into the travel industry. Almost as soon as I arrived I set up a travel company, ran it for three or four years, then sold the business. After that I went back into management consulting, specialising in leadership development. I spend a lot of my time working one to one with senior executives and with senior leadership teams here in Vietnam. That is the technical side of what I do, and alongside it I run a management consultancy.

The belief I had to get rid of 04:08

What leadership belief has guided you most over your career?

It is not a belief that guided me. It is one I had to get rid of very early.

I grew up and was educated in Australia, where there is a strong assumption that everyone is equal and that society is flat. I held that firmly when I was young, and I rejected authority.

Then, fortunately or unfortunately, my first career was as an officer in the military. So I walked into an intensely hierarchical organisation carrying a belief in a flat society, and I was going in as a leader.

I got myself into a great deal of trouble. I pushed back constantly, because of a belief that was simply wrong for the situation I was in, and the military has the means to punish you when you push back.

It took me five years to start adjusting it. I began to realise I was part of the system, and a leader within it. If I wanted influence, if I wanted any real ability to change things, I had to start behaving like a leader rather than arguing with the structure.

The moment it changed 06:10

What was the defining moment when you realised that?

One of my bosses turned around and said: you are one of the leaders in this organisation, so start acting like one and stop being rebellious.

That was the moment. What strikes me now is that nobody had said it to me for five years.

The most underrated thing a leader needs 07:11

What is one of the most underrated skills a leader needs?

It is probably not a skill. It is knowledge, and it is something I learned fifteen or twenty years ago.

A large part of my job is understanding people deeply: their personality, their behaviour, what drives them. I use that every single day. It tells me why someone communicates the way they do, why they behave as they do, how they see the world and how they arrive at a decision.

It lets me adjust my own style to the person in front of me. When I am building a team it tells me which behaviours will complement each other, and where one person’s strength covers another’s weakness.

From an execution market to one expected to decide 09:14

What is the biggest challenge facing leaders in Vietnam today?

The theme I hear again and again is the new expectation that people step up, drive strategy and drive initiatives.

I understand why that is difficult. Vietnam has been very much an execution and implementation market, and it is excellent at that. But if you are an execution and implementation market, you are waiting to be directed. You are waiting to be told what to do.

The expectation has now changed, from a global perspective, a regional perspective and now a local one. Leaders and managers in Vietnam are expected to drive the strategy, to initiate and to innovate. That requires a completely different skill set.

Where leaders get transition wrong 10:15

What do most leaders get wrong about managing transition?

Workforce transition is quite a new area for Vietnam. Even five years ago this was a very dynamic market and most companies were growing. I used to joke that you could get up in the morning, do exactly what you did the day before, innovate nothing, and still record twenty or thirty per cent growth. That has changed completely.

So our experience in handling contraction is not there yet. The mistake I see most often is leaders taking a hands-off approach. They delegate it down to people who do not have the experience, and those people make a mess of it.

Where the experience level is low, leaders need to get in there, get their hands dirty, and guide their people through the change. We need to guide and we need to mentor. If the experience does not exist, we have to take a completely different approach.

What I find instead is a belief among leaders that it is best to be hands off, best to let people find their own way. When the experience is not there, that is exactly when we need to lean in.

The limits of empowerment 12:18

Can you do too much empowerment?

Absolutely you can.

I know from running my own business that if I do not get into something and handle it directly, either it does not happen, or it does not happen the way it needs to.

Personality travels further than culture 13:19

You have worked across several cultures. What lesson holds true between them?

I am not a great believer that culture has a decisive influence on the way people behave. My experience is that personality trumps culture. Two people with similar personalities are far more alike than two people who happen to share a nationality.

Culture does have an influence. But it is much more important to understand a person’s personality, and the behaviour that follows from it.

I came to that realisation properly at a workshop in Bangkok. There were about thirty people in the room and we were matched with the person whose personality profile most closely resembled our own. I was put with a young Thai woman, and I realised I had far more in common with her than with anyone else there. We used the same language for things, we saw the world the same way, we arrived at decisions by the same route. The Australian across the room, from my own country, had a completely different profile. We were chalk and cheese.

What makes a leader durable in trouble 15:22

What do you see in leaders who come through difficulty that others lack?

It comes down mostly to experience. Have they worked across functions? Across cultures? In different industries? Leaders with that range are far more robust than leaders whose careers have been narrow.

I would add that Vietnam is seen as a market where leaders get tested. I meet a lot of inexperienced young leaders who have been promoted quickly, and this market becomes their proving ground. They are easy to spot next to someone with a genuinely varied career.

Leadership is a lonely game 16:25

How do you stay grounded and positive when things get hard?

That one is difficult. Something I realised early is that leadership is a very lonely game to play. Nobody directs you. You rarely get recognition. There is nobody around you doing the motivating, so it has to come from you.

The way I handle it is to understand what actually motivates me, then deliberately build those things into my work and my life. I love seeing results, so if I am on a long project where results are not visible for months, I can feel my motivation dropping. I set milestones so that I get them.

I also love a challenge and pushing myself to the limit, so outside work I have taken up a sport that forces me to do exactly that. I am constantly injecting it into my life so I can draw the motivation from somewhere.

Just ask what motivates people 18:27

How can a leader help their people find their motivation?

This seems obvious to me, but a great many leaders and managers miss it. Ask your people what motivates them, and then give them that.

Do not guess. Do not assume. Do not rely on a theory about what this generation is supposed to want. Have the conversation, ask the question, and act on the answer.

Leadership is not for everyone 19:28

What advice would you give a young leader today?

Leadership is not for everyone.

We are constantly told the career path runs from individual contributor to manager to leader. It is definitely not for everyone. I have been in the leadership game for over thirty years, and when I talk to people who have managed since they were twenty or twenty-one, we all reach the same conclusion. Managing people is hard. I have heard it put more bluntly than that.

You get disappointed. You have setbacks. People surprise you and people let you down.

So if you do want to go into leadership, you need one of two things. Either you genuinely enjoy a challenge and can recover from setbacks, because there will be a constant supply of them, or you have a real and deep love for people. That is not everyone.

Managing people means dealing with something unknown and highly unpredictable. That is where the surprises come from.

Title and identity 22:30

What have you learned about identity when someone loses or changes their title?

In a Vietnam context, a title and an identity are close to the same thing. With a title comes influence, position and standing. So if it is taken away, the impact is direct: it lands on who the person is.

The reverse is also true. Give someone a higher position and it comes with more influence, and it touches the ego and face directly. It has an enormous impact here.

In the United States or Australia, identity is not tied to what you do in the workplace in quite the same way. I have had people leave me for almost no difference in money, purely for the change in title.

Building belief rather than granting it 24:34

Tell us about a time someone believed in you before you believed in yourself.

I cannot point to a moment like that. Very early in my leadership career a different approach was taken with us. We were thrown into the deep end, put into situations where we could try, fail and succeed. Nobody said they believed in us. You had to build that belief yourself.

I still work that way with my own people. I put them in situations where they can test themselves and build their own belief, rather than telling them I believe in them.

As a general rule, if people are given more authority, a bigger title or wider scope, they rise to it. It does not need to be accompanied by a declaration of confidence. I put you in the position, and I want you to prove to yourself that you can do it. Most of the time, people do.

Strengths, gaps, and what development is for 26:34

If you were coaching someone on unlocking their potential, what would that look like?

There are two schools of thought. One says you unlock potential by focusing on strengths, which is where something like StrengthsFinder came from, and which was very popular ten or fifteen years ago. The other says the strengths are fine and will always be there, and what matters is finding the gaps and closing them.

I am firmly in the second camp. I am not ignoring strengths, I leverage them. But I am very interested in closing gaps. There is a real danger in focusing only on strengths, because the weaknesses do not go anywhere. They will surface.

Let me ground that. I worked with a senior leader, a woman running marketing in a leadership team of three: the general manager, the head of sales and her. Whenever the general manager and the head of sales got together, they treated every conversation as a chance to brainstorm new ideas, and it drove her to distraction. She was marketing. Her plans were long term. She had a plan and she liked to stick to it. So her response was consistently negative: that will not work, we have a plan. And they came to see her as a negative person.

If I had taken the strengths-only approach, that would not have fixed anything. What I had to do was show her the consequence of her own behaviour, and ask whether she could adjust enough to play their game as well. I closed the gap rather than leaning on the strength, and it resolved the problem.

Coaching someone who doubts themselves 29:35

When you coach someone who really doubts themselves, what is your first step?

This is a very common problem. Most of us carry doubts about our own capability, and they surface most strongly when we step into something new.

What I am usually doing is building the evidence with them. What are you actually here for? What were you recognised for? Once the case is in front of them in their own words, the doubt has something to argue with.

Technical skill is not the constraint 31:37

What do you look for in leaders who can move up a level?

When I am looking at whether someone can step up, their technical skill is rarely the question. The soft skill side matters far more to me than the hard skill.

Technical capability got them to where they are. It is not what carries them into the next role.

Promotion, expectation and the experience gap 33:37

What do you see around promotion and career expectations here?

There is a good deal of expectation, and some entitlement, around promotion that does not always follow. You have to take some ownership. You have to start demonstrating before we give you the opportunity.

I am not without responsibility here myself. When I was building the team I promoted a few people too early, because I needed them in those jobs and there was nobody else. I had an expatriate working for me at the time who watched people get promoted who probably were not ready, and one day he came to me and asked how many years he had worked before he got that job. Fourteen. I understood the point.

Businesses have grown very fast here and people have had to be promoted quickly. If you compare a mid-level manager in Vietnam with a mid-level manager in the United States, there is a considerable difference in age.

How I read a person 35:39

How do you assess someone’s strengths and weaknesses?

I do not rely on one input or one data set. I want as many as I can get.

I use personality assessments. I am also very interested in how other people see the person, so I talk to as many as I can: the general manager, human resources, their peers, to build the full picture. And I want to know how the person sees themselves, because there is often a gap between the two, and that gap is usually where the work is.

A common example: a company asks me to help someone become more outspoken, to share more ideas and contribute in front of the regional team. Then I meet the person, and quite often what I am looking at is somebody deeply introverted. So the conversation becomes a different one. I am not trying to change who you are. I want to change your behaviour for the twenty minutes where it matters, and then you can go back to being yourself.

What poor leadership taught me 37:40

What did you learn from the leaders you worked for?

Some of the most useful lessons came from people I did not want to be like. Watching how someone interacted with me taught me what not to do with my own people.

It is also worth understanding that other people’s motivations will drive them to do things that run against what you want. That is not necessarily bad faith. They are optimising for something you cannot see.

Understanding what drives people 40:42

How much of personality is fixed?

Western thinking tends to treat personality as fixed. You have a set of traits, they are stable, and the most that changes is how much you flex them.

There is a good deal of thinking in Eastern cultures that personality is not fixed at all, that it depends on the environment you are in and the relationships around you, and that it moves as those move. I believe in that.

It is also why I treat a personality assessment as a snapshot rather than a verdict. Run it again in five years, after a different job and a different set of people, and it will often read differently.