“Where were you a year ago?”-- A comment after a recent international level leadership mentoring getaway.
Sadly, I hear it often and it can range from understanding workplace protocols to miscommunications between the Korean and Western teams.
That begs the question on when is the best time to ensure new western leadership and teams receive an immersion in Korean workplace norms, practices, expectations and mindset?
Immediate, a few days into the new job, or after they are on the job and caught up with all the urgent matters?
Having provided mentoring and coaching to a number of CEOs, COOs, VPs of Marketing, Sales, and Service, as well as teams, how company and leadership view timing has varied.
Many top leaders recognize from their own experience that with immediate mentoring and coaching the new employee will better tackle the issues and challenges set before them. In the best cases, I am onsite Day One….
Why?
Failing to have a grasp fully the Korea facing side of the business in for example decision making, approvals, communications (often one way), risk avoidance, and the what is the “Role of a Coordinator”…. will and does impact the new executive or team member.
As one veteran manager shared that a new executive can easily make costly mistakes or miscalculations without considering all the Culture nuances.
So where are the challenges?
- Huge workload demands dropped on the new employee… their days overbooked with meetings although they do recognize the benefit of mentoring and coaching.
- Local Korean teams seeing value in the mentoring, but feel best put off for a while. (Code word it costs money and unless a crisis let’s delay and we may not need). A caveat to this is if there has been a turnover of western executives (fired or resigned) due to poor understanding / conflict with the Korean side of the business, etc., they want the mentoring ASAP for the new executive.
- New executive or team member feel they have a grasp of the Korea side of the business—often because they have worked for other international OEMs like the Japanese.
All said, there is no escaping the need to get you and the team mentoring, coaching and skills sets. I am here to support. Just a call away.
My personal assistant Stacey at stacey@koreabcw.com can coordinate a time for us to chat by phone, meet or handle by email.
One more thing, if you are not already subscribing to my YouTube channel take a moment and click the subscribe link.
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