Ritchie Bent, Group Head of Human Resources, Jardines explains how the group has achieved buy-in from the top, and developed their HR roadmap for successful T&D.
What makes corporate learning successful?
What would you say makes a successful staff training programme or a successful learning experience?
I have to talk about the managerial level because that’s what we tend to deal with here. What we deal with is leadership development. What makes effective leadership development in an organisation is firstly, it has to have buy-in from the very top. And what gets buy-in from the top, is that those at the top clearly see what is being done is linked to what they want to achieve in terms of their business goals. So for example, it may be that you provide customer service training, but in actual fact on a managerial level that’s not what’s needed because it may be that at the moment it’s about building relationships with joint venture partners, etc. So you may be giving one thing, but what’s actually needed is something completely different. Strategically you may be very much going on a growth trajectory; and that might be growth organically or through acquisitions and joint ventures and so on and so forth, therefore, the skills that managers need may not be related to customers, but actually developing and strengthening partnerships with people of different cultures and different industries.
A practical example I can give you is that one of the programmes we run, the Director Development Initiative, was a response to the board asking: what development do we have for people now that have gone beyond business school and who are now Chief Executives? What can we do to develop them? We already knew they had been to business school and there was only limited value in sending them back there. So we looked at this particular case and asked: what can these people benefit from? These are people who have run successful businesses and they are therefore quite steadfast in their ways about what makes an effective business, they have developed these habits. They are either MDs of small companies (15,000 staff).
So we had this group of people who are already very comfortable in running effective businesses, and we knew they weren’t likely to listen to consultants or business school professionals. So whom would they listen to? We decided they would listen to other successful Chief Executives from elsewhere who were effective in what they do. So that created an initiative where, every year, we take a group of ten directors all over the world to meet business heads in non-Jardine companies and the overriding theme for this project is leadership and change. Then through the interview process of the ten candidates, we tease out what the sub-theme to this initiative should be. For example, one we did recently was ‘Leadership and Change’ and another was ‘Building Businesses in Emerging Economics.’ So we might say, we are great at taking a business that’s already big and growing it and making it better, but we are not so good at developing businesses, grass rooting them in emerging economies and growing them from nothing. Then we created a simulator, which in this case was done in Switzerland, where we went to look at big multinationals and what they were doing. This simulator was a good model for Hong Kong, because Switzerland is similar in terms of the size of its economy and the fact that it attracts multinationals. We went to these multinationals and asked questions to find out what they were doing that made them effective in building businesses in emerging economies.
Then we went to emerging economies, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, we saw the bosses of companies there and asked them what they had done to make themselves effective as a business in an emerging economy.
We would listen to their advice and then ask, “What does the Head Office do that helps, and also hinders you in being effective and growing your business in an emerging economy?” That roughly outlines a simple business model. The year before that, we looked at rejuvenating mature brands and mature markets.
We went to see big names such as Christie Hefner and Hank Paulson, who are like the David Beckhams of the business world. The question to Christie Hefner, then Chairman & CEO of Playboy Enterprises Inc. was, “What have you done to the Playboy Enterprise to rejuvenate the brand?” She then shared all that she had done from online gambling to streamed videos to apparel that they sell.
We went to Chicago and New York and other parts of the US. There Goldman Sachs was in a different situation because they were going from a small company to a much bigger one, and we learned how they kept that small company intimacy while growing into a big multinational—and it was a form of rejuvenation.
We looked at big businesses in Sweden, met people like the Wallenberg family and also went to look at the IKEA Head Office. Each of the companies we visited were all having certain problems with their brands; in some cases they were fantastic brands that continued to grow, in other cases they were fading brands or brands that had got into a bit of trouble.
What the trip highlighted was that you’ve got to get buy-in from the top, and what gets you buy-in is them clearly seeing that this is going to have an impact on their business.
That’s what a good HR person does, he or she is able to sell their idea to the top, then it becomes not a HR driven initiative, but a business driven initiative and that’s absolutely critical for it to succeed—it has to be business driven not HR driven.
Getting buy-in from the board?
Do you find people in HR are good at getting buy-in and making the link between HR-driven initiatives and business-driven initiatives?
Yes I do, it’s a growing process and they’re getting better in Asia generally. I’m not talking about the big multinationals here; I’m talking about middle-sized companies and smaller ones, where they have had to grow their own processes and practices within Asia.
Big multinationals, whether it’s Jardines or other MNCs, have these practices being developed in their own countries and then they import them into Asia. So the job then is to convert them, so they fit into the Asian context and, of course, support the business goals - which is the primary focus of everything that should be done. So it’s easier for them.
But when you’re a smaller company that has just started here - it’s tougher for them.
It’s harder for them because they don’t have the tried and tested expertise and they haven’t had the cultural overlay of a big American or European company already in place that’s already receptive to the way they do things in the West and will be adapted to the East.
Advice for SMEs
What advice would you give to help SMEs transition from an SME into a larger organisation?
Firstly, they [smaller companies] should seek opportunities such as those provided by organisations like the HKMA to tease best practices out of big companies like HSBC, Cathay and so on.
They [large companies] basically tell people what they have done, smaller companies really ought to tune into this because this is stuff that is given away, that consultants would charge like wounded bulls to tell you, and often not know because in many cases consultants are more advisory than implementers, whereas these companies are companies that have actually done this and have had to live with the consequences.
So smaller companies should firstly, seek advice from organisations such as the HKMA and similar public organisations.
Secondly, I think they ought to show more willingness to look for and copy best practices locally because there’s a lot of SMEs, but there are only small segments of them that compete with each other. Each of them in their own way is doing great stuff, but they’re little bits and pieces all over, so get to know what other SMEs are doing.
This is where something like the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC) is a fantastic meeting point to meet up with other people and discuss best practices and so on, more so than the Britcham or the Amcham or anything else, because the HKGCC is the representative body for SMEs in Hong Kong in my view.
The HKGCC continuously organises events that bring people together, and I think if people have the objective of understanding best practices in HR training and development at SME level – then that’s exactly where they are going to find it.
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
