Tuesday, 10 August 2004

The need for training young leaders of the future

GIFT Paper 5, Thomas Tang: Training tomorrow's leaders
Thomas Tang looks to the future and how securing a better one for society depends on giving tomorrow's leaders the training that they need now. There needs to be a new approach, he argues.

Introduction
Businesspersons leading today’s corporations and governments will be better placed to make decisions on key policies, strategies, international operations and investments if they are aware of some of the complex issues faced by the various stakeholders likely to be affected by their decisions. They will also be doing their shareholders a big favour by understanding these issues as they relate to protecting corporate reputations and brand value. Equally, young business leaders of the future will need training to absorb the knowledge and also experience real exposure to the globalisation-linked issues confronting communities.

Based on the complexities of the region and the threats as well as the opportunities arising from globalisation, it is now commonly acknowledged that there are gaps in the quality of the exposure and knowledge that leaders of the future gain through the more traditional training and education that most receive. This paper considers the ‘hands-on’ experiential training that managers will need to face up to the challenges of tomorrow’s world.

Textbooks alone will not be enough
In current management education circles, much emphasis is placed on the MBA-style of heuristic teaching and learning. This is not enough.

Textbook management courses (such as many of the latter day MBA courses) are adequate for relaying the theoretical fundamentals of political and corporate behaviour. However they fail to address the real-life issues in ethics and governance faced by corporations and governments in dealing with the many different stakeholders and their cultures and societies. Too often they are criticised for relying instead on ‘management by spreadsheets’; or succumbing to the pressures of ‘short- term-ism and distorted incentives’.

When faced with the realities of a corporate or political environment, young leaders often have no experience by which to judge politically, ethically and culturally difficult situations, which can result in erroneous and, sometimes disastrous, decisions.

Young leaders of the future can be much better equipped to understand their future markets and future customers if they get an early introduction to the complexities of doing business in Asia and the challenges facing the region, some of which on the face of it appear to be not business related.

A Young Leaders Programme
To fill the gap of training, exposure and knowledge in expected leadership behaviour, a programme to educate and train the leaders of tomorrow is needed in the form of a unique ‘life-changing experience’ for young executive managers who will one day become leaders in society. This ‘Young Leaders Programme’ (YLP) should be unique in its scope and mission but linked to an overall mission and the issues that it will seek to address. A key philosophy of the YLP should be to provide, through careful design and choice of location for the “life change experience”, real opportunities to experience the experience of others and to gain an insight into “future markets, future products and to meet future customers”.

The unique strength of the YLP is a life change experience where learning by experiencing the experience of others, witnessing the impact of decisions in remote areas, and connecting it to how global decisions are made in the lives of decision makers. In such a programme young leaders should have the opportunity to work on-site with a group of other young leaders from different industries, sectors, cultures and geography on projects that provide real exposure to globalisation-linked issues confronting communities.

These may include for example:

• Rural community in remote China with acute child nutrition problems;
• Edge of a dramatic rainforest in Borneo confronted with illegal logging but driven by demand for hardwoods from industrialised nations;
• Micro-credit scheme for women in Bangladesh;
• Village in India beset with water shortage;
• Slum in Manila confronted by delinquency problems;
• An AIDS education centre and clinic in Vietnam;
• Child labour issues in a community in Pakistan; or
• A conservation project in Thailand highlighting the conflict between human expansion and wildlife.

Bringing the messages home
The ideas for the curriculum obtained could be from a linked institution such as a think tank so that the themes are current and pertinent to globalisation. These will form the foundation for taught classes and field projects (the ‘Life Changing Projects’), and bring the young leaders into contact with leading thinkers and academics from different walks of life.

The following steps are proposed as an example of how such a course could be executed:

• A class of young leaders will be assigned a field project (e.g. a village commune, an irrigation scheme, an aforestation project or a cooperative bank) where there is a business implication and an opportunity to learn. An agency or local community organisation will be identified as a project partner;
• The field project will be selected with the involvement of the organisations or corporations from which the young leaders come from so that the course can be monitored by the organisation or corporation (there could be more than one project arranged depending on the size of the class – ideally not more than 20 to a project);
• The young leaders will be required to study on-site the taught theories of corporate governance, political reform, ethics, sustainability principles, diversity issues and social responsibility. This study will be complemented by the students working on a project (e.g. a village commune in China, an irrigation scheme in India, an aforestation project in Thailand or a cooperative bank for women in Bangladesh) where there is a strong link with globalisation issues, the role of the public sector and opportunities for business to make a positive impact;
• The goal of the ’life change’ training experience is that it provides an opportunity to learn by ‘experiencing the experience of others’ and thereby leaving a lasting impression. Amongst the issues likely to be encountered will be themes like building capacity, role of appropriate technology, environmental issues, gender mainstreaming, poverty etc. The teaching which will be a form of ‘immersion learning’ using less formal methods and will be conducted at the project site by various learned academics, local experts and invited thought leaders;
• The young leaders will spend time in the field working with villagers, local community leaders, government officials, local business leaders and aid workers. The on-site experience will range between 2-4 weeks. This will be facilitated through the project partner and each student will write a dissertation on a selected theme from a broad range of issues related to the field project;
• Feedback will be given to the young leaders by the project partner on the individual’s contribution and how links with the parent organisations or corporations could be fostered for continuity;
• The young leaders’ dissertation (short and action directed) will be assessed by a leading academic or thinker in the area of the topic as well as their mentors from within the organisations they come from; and
• The young leader, on completion of the course, will receive a certificate and be invited to join an elite alumni of future leaders who have gone through this experience.

Conclusions
To help train leaders of the future, an alternative method to the traditional text book approach is suggested. The Young Leaders Programme is predicated on the notion that learning will be engraved if it accompanies a life changing experience. Using experiential on-site learning methods in a community, it is believed that young leaders will take back unique experiences that will endure and later shape leadership decisions that will define corporate behaviour of the future.

“[There] was a Congressman who was asked whether he would be going abroad during the congressional recess and he responded, No, he’d already been there. We want to inculcate the opposite of that attitude in our students.”
Larry Summers (Harvard president, Time magazine, May 2004)

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