Addressing China’s Business Leadership Crisis: Dr. Frank Li on How Organizations Can Assess and Develop Leaders

China faces a shortage of world-class leadership. In a new webinar from Z.H. TANK, Dr. Frank Li explains the crisis and how organizations can better assess and develop future leadership talent.

Shanghai (I-Newswire) January 19, 2013 - Leadership development is a practice essential to the success of every large enterprise, yet according to research from the Hay Group, more than 60% of managers in China not only fail to develop their subordinates leadership skills, but actually reduce their effectiveness. This portends a potential crisis for Chinese companies, who face a massive leadership shortage if this trend continues.

As part of a continuing series providing business intelligence and experienced China market expertise, Z.H. TANK presents a new webinar with Dr. Frank Li, a noted expert in leadership development for Chinese enterprises, on how companies can improve their development and assessment capabilities to overcome the challenge of finding and creating next-generation leadership talent.

Titled “Leadership Assessment and Development in Modern Business Organizations”, Dr. Li addresses the crisis facing Chinese organizations. According to a study by McKinsey China, Chinese companies face a demand for 75,000 internationally-experienced managers and leaders in the next decade, yet the country only possesses 5,000 world-class managers of the type needed to face new global challenges. Dr. Li addresses why companies are failing to develop leadership talent and actively engage their employees.

Operating from a set of core assumptions regarding leadership development, the webinar introduces a matrix of essential management qualities and their capacity for development and assessment, including communication skills, integrity and moral internalization, conceptual thinking and courage. Dr. Li then goes on to address “validity killers”, or barriers to successful assessment of leadership ability.

Improper assessment and development of leadership ability leads to the creation of “pseudo-leaders”- people who have all the superficial qualities of a successful leader, such as a strong resume, professional appearance, and good self-branding and career management, yet lack the integral core skills of leadership. Promoting such people into leadership positions can be harmful to organizational success.

To address this problem, Dr. Li explains how to assess and develop what he calls “the big five”. Addressed in his book, BIG FIVE: DECODING LEADERSHIP GENES, these qualities fall in five clusters, which can be summarized as trustworthiness, a drive to excel, courage, strategic thinking and “people savvy”. From these qualities, Li explains how to use them in group and individual assessments, how to identify high potential candidates, creation of high-impact development programs, giving feedback and integrating the qualities into day-to-day management.

About FRANK LI
Frank Li is an independent consultant and author specializing in development and assessment centers, development workshops and executive coaching, custom designed work-related ability tests, personality questionnaires, and immediately scoreable interviews. He is the author of several books including BIG FIVE: DECODING LEADERSHIP GENES, and has worked with leading consulting firms, with engagements as a Research Director at Gallup Shanghai, Senior Consultant at PDI Greater China, and Leadership Assessment Director for Hay Group Greater China.

Dr. Li holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Hong Kong and a B.Sc. from Peking University. In addition to his consulting ventures, he was also the founder of Talent Shanghai, one of China’s top local talent management firms, and worked as a newspaper journalist for many years.

About Z. H. TANK
Z. H. TANK is an online library of webinars for Chinese elite business executives and professionals to sharpen their management know-how. Through customized webinars, homegrown and global industry leaders share with the audience the latest trends, best practices, hot topics, and technologies that impact the world of business. The bilingual library of webinars also aims to enable the seamless integration between global perspective, know-how and local business wisdom. Z. H. TANK is a sibling brand of China business intelligence specialist Z. H. STUDIO.

Media Contact:
Lan SHEN
Z. H. STUDIO