Abbreviated from: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/capability_building_in_china?cid=china-eml-alt-mip-mck-oth-1307
Capability building in China
Skill building must be rewards-based, rooted in real work, and tailored to local conditions.
Capability building—leadership, managerial, and team-based skills rather than technical ones—has become an urgent imperative for many companies in China. As the country loses its extreme low-cost-labor advantage, businesses must look for ways to increase productivity and internal collaboration, to better understand consumers, and to develop a more sophisticated appetite for risk.
Companies in China face many of the same challenges—a lack of up-front planning and inadequate resources—that bedevil capability-building exercises everywhere. But certain “China factors” stand out. For starters, the demand for managers with strong leadership skills and international experience is growing significantly faster than the supply of qualified candidates. That imbalance makes it more difficult to pull off successful skill-building efforts, even for multinationals that typically invest more in training than Chinese companies do. (Indeed, one implication of China’s white-hot war for talent is that outside trainers brought in by multinational companies to set up and run new programs often move on before relevant tools and internal processes are in place.) Another perennial challenge for multinationals: the Chinese context and culture, which may require local tailoring of global approaches.
Then, of course, there are China’s state-owned enterprises. Many of them only recently converted from government departments into commercial entities and are still working to adapt to a competitive environment and adopt a true business mind-set. These companies generally lack a systematic approach to nurturing employees moving up the organizational ladder. They misconstrue capability building as a classroom activity, missing the impact of linking it to actual business. And they are too inflexible either to fire underperformers or to reward and promote employees, including managers, who change their behavior and adopt the necessary mind-sets.
While the challenges facing multinationals and state-owned enterprises differ, our experience with leaders at both kinds of organizations (as well as with private-sector Chinese companies) has highlighted the importance of some common, broadly applicable principles. In this article, we describe three that should help companies overcome many of the obstacles that have frustrated capability-building efforts in the past.
1. Relate capability building to real activities
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2. Instill incentives and create opportunities for promotion
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3. Don’t forget China’s unique culture
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The solutions may sound obvious: developing Chinese teaching materials to help solve problems, building day-to-day business problems around products that participants would find in the Chinese market, and localizing global training materials through culturally appropriate metaphors and examples. But we know from experience how easy it is to overlook these issues. In our own work, we routinely use a case involving a coffee machine to teach managers about the seven types of waste and how a “lean” perspective can address them. When we recently used this case at a Chinese state-owned enterprise, however, the managers couldn’t make sense of the story, because they had never used a coffee machine. We have now adapted the context to tea making.
About the authors
Karel Eloot is a director in McKinsey’s Shanghai office; Gernot Strube is a director in the Hong Kong office, where Arthur Wang is a principal.
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