Developing Future-Fluent Asian Leaders: Myths We Must Debunk

Developing Future-Fluent Asian Leaders: Myths We Must Debunk

Humanity is facing the greatest disruption of our lifetime. The past few months have challenged all of our assumptions on business models, workflows, technology, and people.

As the future scenarios and projected health and economic impacts change on a daily basis, organizations are scrambling to pull together their best people as ‘guides’ to find the way out of the current chaos. Human resources and leadership functions are under extreme pressure not only to develop leaders to deal with the here-and-now challenges, but also to proactively prepare organizations for the recovery. And fast!

Disruption is also an opportunity to reset the leadership development function, and view it with a very objective lens, without biases and prejudices. Myths and urban legends are aplenty in the leadership development world. Just to name a few:

• Asian leaders and female leaders are harder to develop for global leadership roles, or leadership development should mainly focus on the executive teams
• Attending (only) classroom-based leadership development programs will make better leaders
• Digital training is less impactful than face-to-face development

If organizations continue to hold on to these relics, they will struggle to develop leaders at the required pace. It is certainly time to debunk leadership development myths and energize the function. This research aspires to do just that.

We believe this is the time for the business community, business leaders and political leaders across all countries in Asia-Pacific and the world to rise up and commit to bold and coordinated actions, within their own business and beyond, that support humanity to win the battle against COVID-19.

The Center for Creative Leadership has spent the last 50 years focused on inspiring this type of enlightened leadership and cultivating qualities of courage, empathy, agility and multidimensional thinking that have become more important than ever for leaders right now.

We take this opportunity to thank the senior HR leaders who participated in the research, and helped shape the key findings.

We hope you find Developing Future-Fluent Asian Leaders: Myths We Must Debunk research useful and timely as you prepare your next cadre of Asian leaders to take on perhaps the hardest challenge of their professional journey.