2010-07-27
Americas self made man times 10. Goal focused self confident and with a knack of knowing when it’s time to move forward. It’s not unusual to see resumes where the career has gone from basically technical engineer in a rural area to area manager or even country manager stationed in Shanghai with a western salary, in little more than 10 years.
Extreme growth and lack of companies and people that has been around in the business word longer than 20 to 30 years has created a very young middle and top management.
Its fierce competition to be the best in a country with 1.3 billion people and the managers are hard working and goal focused.
Competent people always have a new opportunity to climb the ladder here. So, it’s also common never to have stayed longer than 2 -3 years at a position.
That means never seen a company structure be created and grow into place. Moreover, up to present, most managers at any level have never had any management training, running teams, divisions and maybe whole country units. Who have had time to go to management training when the economy is growing with double digit GDP numbers year after year?
One essential part in all careers, but especially as a manager when you need to lead others is to understand yourself. Something we in the west have been become more or less obsessive with. Who am I, how and why do I react as I do. Who hasn’t done a personality test?
Everything from doubtful techniques as “Which animal are you?” to recognized test as the DISC and OPQ tests, or our own MPS Personality test. That has not had the time to happen here yet.
All signs show that China is on the brink of shifting its massive force from low level manufacturing to high-end products and for example research and development. The means of motivation and leadership will automatically need to follow the shift. Hopefully the workforce will get some kind of soberness and maturity to stop the frantic “job hopping”.
Changing jobs will give new challenges and you will grow as a person a lot, which always is positive. But, in more complex positions and industries it’s extremely rare to do a good job and contribute to the company before, say half a year or even up to a year.
But there is more to it. This will not happen without the other side of the coin – the companies – start to see the employees as human resources. Not just resources.
It’s an exciting moment to see what will happen now. All the opportunities in the world are possible for both people and companies to grow and succeed but no one exist or develop without the other.
Companies are made of people as we say at MPS China.