The Pied Piper of Tianjin

It was early Saturday morning and the light was just beginning to permeate through my curtains. As it was the weekend, I was looking forward to rolling over and enjoying two or three more hours of blissful slumber. Unfortunately, my plans were wrecked by a rasping voice piercing the silence from outside. In a vain effort to escape the awful din, I pulled my pillow up over my head to block out the noise. Alas, it was to no avail. So, crotchety and bleary eyed I shuffled across my bedroom floor to my window. I pulled the curtains back to see what was going on.

Beneath my apartment block is a large hair salon.Considering I lost my hair at 20, this place normally has no impact on my life whatsoever. However, on this particular Saturday, things were different. The manager was standing in the doorway of the salon holding a megaphone, screaming at his employees. The situation made me chuckle. The manager was clearly irked about something, and was making his feelings known. Unfortunately for him, his employees seemed oblivious. I could tell by their blank stares and vacant expressions that absolutely nothing was sinking in.

This leadership style is one that I have seen countless times in northern China. It is one in which managers and supervisors do not look to stimulate or motivate their teams to help generate new ideas and better performance. Instead they just expect them to blindly follow instructions. This reminded me of the old children's tale the Pied Piper of Hamlin. In this story a town in Germany is infested with rats and is desperate to remove them. So, the mayor hires a piper to play beautiful music to make the rats follow him. The piper does this and leads the rats to the river where they are all drowned. Everyone in the town was delighted. However, when the mayor refused to pay the piper, he used his music to lead all the children in the town away, just as he did with the rats.

The manager of the salon was trying to emulate the piper. Unfortunately for him, he did not have a magic flute and his staff were certainly not following him.
This is an all too common scenario in China. Too many managers believe leadership is simply about making others follow their lead. Sadly, because of this, their employees grow increasingly de-motivated. Here are a couple of examples that I have encountered:

1. My first example came when I was training staff at a major multinational in Tianjin about meeting skills. I asked how useful - on a scale of 1 to 10 - they thought their meetings were. To my surprise, I heard lots of 2s and 3s. "Why, so low?" I asked. "Our managers" they replied. "They talk, we listen. And, then, they make the decision .... We do not even need to be there."
2. The second example was a little different because the manager in question actually realised there was a problem. She was the sales manager for the DongBei office of a major multinational and was frustrated because her staff were reluctant to offer ideas and simply wanted to follow her lead - whether she was heading in the right direction or not. There were two reasons behind this (i) her predecessors followed the pied piper school of leadership and expected obedience rather than ideas from the staff, and (ii) the sales manager was imposing both in physique and personality and, as a consequence, scared her subordinates. The problem was that even though she recognised the problem, she did know how to solve it.

It took me a little time to grasp the relevance of the manager who woke me that Saturday morning - I was still pretty sleepy after all. As I am sure you will have read in my previous entries, top-quality talent is in desperately short supply here in China. The area where this shortage is most acute is in qualified managers. There is a McKinsey report that I have quoted several times in Network HR that illustrates this clearly. It found that by 2015, China would need 75,000 MBA qualified managers to ensure its continued growth. However, in 2005, it had less than 5,000. To make up this shortfall, most organisations still look away from mainland China for their managerial talent. By simply importing managerial talent, China is handicapping itself - it needs to develop homegrown talent to plug the leadership gap. China needs to put down the megaphone and major organisations need to invest in training to help develop leadership talent.