The Tumbleweed Effect: Petrol Up Your Process For Country Manager Success in Asia
I started my career as a sales rep out of Wichita, Kansas USA. I covered most of the state. Yes, I was referred to as “the Wichita Lineman.”
Since this was a large territory to cover, I spent considerable time driving. I remember one summer’s day when there had been a particularly bad thunderstorm, I had to dodge tumbleweed all the way from Liberal to Garden City. Pulling into the Best Western Motel for the night (this was one of those outside access motels) I noticed that a corner room of the motel had a stack of tumbleweed about 7 feet high from ground to ceiling. I remember thinking to myself, “wow, they are going to get a big surprise when they open that door in the morning.” Too bad there were no smart phones in those days or I would have had a great pic!
Since that time long ago in Kansas, I have spent much of my time in global roles focused on helping businesses perform through manager effectiveness, sales effectiveness, large-scale change initiatives and executive development. My travels have taken me all over the world and I spent the last six or so years living in Singapore and working across Asia in depth. This has given me great exposure to those around the globe known affectionately as “Country Managers.” For many industries and companies they are indispensable.
Over the years I have seen a curious phenomenon related to country manager performance, that I call the “Tumbleweed Effect.” I especially see this in growth markets like Asia. It is depicted below.
I have seen so many times where a business leader selects a person based on previous strong performance in country and appoints them as Country Manager, only to see things begin to fall apart. The next thing you know, the door opens and the Tumbleweed comes crashing in.
There can be many reasons for a Country Manager to struggle, but I find that frequently there are several that are quite common:
- Moving from a ladder role to a Country Manager role is an exponential leap in knowledge and complexity.
- High growth markets may see dramatic increases in size and complexity in relatively short periods of time, quickly outstripping the skill set of the Country Manager.
- Leadership can be contextual. Given the current environment, the talents of the individual are different than those needed at a particular point in time.
I would suggest a few strategies to move from The Vicious Cycle to the Virtuous Cycle of Country Manager effectiveness.
For the newly promoted country manager, I suggest the following to ratchet up effectiveness in your process. These are just a few, but food for thought:
- Be clear around performance metrics for the Country Manager role and make sure they are well communicated and measured.
- Build a checklist of key leadership/functional competencies, knowledge and relationships for role effectiveness. Be sure to include the context in which they will be managing e.g. poor quality service delivery, poor profitability, or revenue growth.
- Before promoting from a ladder role to country manager be sure to give assignments and roles of increasing complexity, making sure they are at least regional in scope and provide exposure to key executives. Having them take a regional role in another location is very effective, but often the employee is not willing or able to do this.
- Make sure potential Country Managers are assessed and have strong development plans in place. There are many good tools out there that are relatively inexpensive and are worth the investment. They give you a clear language with which to frame your development discussions and choosing the right tool can also give you benchmarks.
- It may be helpful to develop a pool of those being considered for future Country Manager roles across the region and work with them together on their development.
- Build knowledge and capability around financial reporting, leading people, making change happen and compliance.
- Assign a key executive as mentor.
- Conduct a formal onboarding and executive assimilation in the first 4-6 weeks of taking the role to accelerate their understanding of key issues and timelines, and to create shared understanding with their new team around them and their plan.
- Identify on going needs for further development and have regular follow up sessions to develop performance as well as to evaluate performance.
For the existing Country Manager where the business is accelerating in size and complexity:
- Ensure they too have an assessment and development plan in place and regularly meet with them to discuss progress.
- Partner them with a leader who has “lived” the same experience in a previous life.
- An external coach can be helpful in certain situations.
- Strengthen the team below them so it frees up the time of the Country Manager to do those things only they can do. Sometimes that means upgrading the country sales, finance and/or HR partner to compensate for blind spots.
- Always have succession plans in place and be actively working to prepare the next generation of country manager.
- Make sure and take the time to meet others in the market at your leisure that could move to your company in the event they are needed one day.
One of the most effective business leaders I ever worked with in Asia made it a habit of doing a business review on a regular basis with each country manager, asked lots of questions, helped identify areas that needed to be addressed and developed a written action plan with the country manager during the business review. It was always referenced for follow up on the next business review (Business review continuity). The regional leader brought their HR partner to each review and they had a closed-door post business review session where open discussions were held on strengths and gaps in performance and plans were put in place to continue their development. This session was also where issues not appropriate to discuss in a business review with lower level reports in the room were addressed. The business leader then de-briefed with their HR partner on the way back to the airport and specific follow up steps were again discussed and put in place as frequently the issues related to leadership, recruitment, low performers and succession.
Though these are just some thoughts and actual situations require more customized approaches, this may serve to prompt you to think about your own process and where it can be improved. This article focuses specifically on some things we can do to improve our selection, development, onboarding and coaching of Country Managers. In a future article I plan to focus on how to help the newly appointed Country Manager turn around a low performing business.