Calypso Consulting

This article originally appeared in Forbes China in September 2011.
I was conducting a workshop in Beijing with a well-known European company.  The participants were middle-managers who were selected because of their high potential.  One man, an IT team leader, said that the primary job of a leader was to achieve technical and functional results.  "It is the job of the Human Resources Department to worry about the people," he said.  Some of the others in the workshop agreed.

The following article was first posted in the HBR Blog in December 2011.

This article originally appeared in English in Forbes China Magazine.com in January 2012

Leading from the heart is an essential trait of admired leaders in China.  Unfortunately however, many Chinese business leaders do not lead this way.  They arose to their positions through shrewdness, cunning, aggressiveness or opportunism.  

Coaching means that the leader identifies an individual employee and helps to unlock that person’s potential to maximize their performance.  It is a methodology that every manager and leader must apply to help their teams achieve the best possible results.

The recent news out of south China about all of the deaths at one company is very disturbing. Taiwan owned Foxconn, one of the world’s largest makers of mobile phones, has already experienced 10 employee suicides this year.

(A version of this article was first printed in Chinese in CHO Magazine in August 2009)

(This article was extracted from my book, Business Leadership in China: How to Blend Best Western Practice with Chinese Wisdom, John Wiley and Sons, 2008.  A version appeared in Chinese in CHO Magazine in July 2009).

(A version of this article appeared in Chinese in CHO Magazine in June 2009)