IATA has launched an original intercultural training program called I-Lead to prepare its Western and Chinese executives for working in China. The program pairs executives, with one Western and one Chinese person in each pair. These 20 "change agents" from different IATA branches will work together on projects while focusing on intercultural sharing and developing leadership skills across cultures. The goal is to train replacements who can work successfully across cultures. This approach aims to avoid past failures experienced when expanding businesses in China due to cultural differences and lack of preparation.

1. Le Temps
Friday 30 November 2007 Careers
IATA’s innovative solution to preparing its
executives for working in China
Management: The association representing the air industry is training its Western and Eastern executives in
pairs.
Fabienne Bogadi
Western businesses dream
about China. It is a vast market.
Once there, however, the dream
can turn into a nightmare. The
misadventures of Tim Clissold, a
young Briton in love with China,
are famous. He invested half a
billion dollars of American funds
there and lost everything, despite
the energy spent restructuring
around twenty businesses bought
as a joint venture. In his biography
published in France a year ago*,
he explains his failure was due to
the weight of Chinese history, the
different perception of time, the
ambiguity of the language and the
multitude of different rules and
regulations which seem to have
been invented to be ignored. It’s a
representative experience of the
cultural gap that exists between the
East and the West.
How can the setbacks
experienced by Tim Clissold be
avoided when starting up a
business there? In the context of
the gap of mentalities, the training
and preparation of executives
seem to be key factors to success.
The International Air Transport
Association (IATA), whose
activities in China have
quadrupled in 4 years, is well
aware of this. It has just launched,
in partnership with the
management and consultancy
company Brimstone Consulting
Group, an original intercultural
training program for executives,
entitled I-Lead. “There are several
solutions for managing our
placements in China”, explains
Guido Gianasso, vice president of
the IATA Human Capital sector,
who will present his model next
week at the University of
Geneva**. “But none of them
seemed satisfactory to us. That’s
why we chose a company
solution”.
You have to show respect
and look for a common
language and acceptable
compromises for everyone
concerned.
In brief, there are three
options. The first possibility is to
send an expatriate executive with
the increased likelihood that,
through ignorance, he will fail; the
second is to employ a boss of
Chinese origin on site but in this
case, the risk may be a total loss of
control of the situation; the third
option, preferred by Western
companies, is to employ a
multicultural executive, a Chinese
person from Taiwan or Hong
Kong, or a Chinese person trained
in the West, or even a Western
person raised in the East and
steeped in both cultures -- but
these strong prospects are in great
demand, and as a result are rare
and not particularly loyal to their
employer.
“We explored a fourth
option. It consists of eliminating
any intermediary, teaching our
young Chinese as well as Western
talents, to work together”, explains
Gianasso. “It is a partnership
solution where we count on our
own troops”.
The program head chooses
around twenty strong prospects
from different branches
worldwide. They come from
Geneva, Singapore, Montreal and
Hong Kong. These “change
agents” work in pairs, with a
Western person and a Chinese
person in each pair. There are four
women among them this year.
“We hope to encourage a common
culture overtaking the divergences
of each to form a multicultural
philosophy belonging to our
group”, expands Guido Gianasso.
In the first step, these twenty
people met in Beijing in October
to attend a launch seminar there,
organized by Giovanni Bisignani,
the Director General and CEO of
IATA, and with executive
committee members present. The
seminar concerns the company
strategy and also includes training
on the two cultures.
Next, each couple chose
ten local talented personnel, who
for their part attended a “cultural
awareness” seminar. Currently, all
of these young people work
together on specific projects based
on a theme -- for example, the
environment. “But the aim is not
so much the success of the projects
as the intercultural sharing, the
identification of future strong
prospects, the development of
leadership and especially the
training of a culturally educated
replacement on site, capable of
working across the two cultures”,
emphasizes Gianasso.

2. The experience seems all
the more interesting given that the
lack of talented personnel
constitutes an endemic problem in
China. Its staggering growth since
the start of the 1990s has as a
result that the demand for a
qualified workforce is much
greater than the supply. This is at
least the analysis of Winter Nie,
professor of Operations and
Service Management at IMD and a
Chinese-American. “In China,
young people are often very well
trained. The country has no less
than 500 million engineers”, she
explains. “But those who have
international experience or
education are rare”. What is her
advice in this context? To invest in
young prospects, offer them career
and development plans. And
planning programs of succession.
However, the majority of
observers agree that the success, in
China, is possible for everyone.
“There are some Westerners who
manage very well without training.
They have developed abilities
enabling them to react positively
whatever the context. It’s a
combination of know-how and
interpersonal skills, a mixture of
sensitivity to the other person,
flexibility and perseverance”,
observes Gérald Béroud, founder
and director of SinOptic, a
company offering all sorts of
services related to China,
which includes courses and
specialized seminars, specialized
in accompaniment of delegations.
Winter Nie tells the same
story. According to her, training or
not, career plan or not, an open
mind is a tool for success that is in
everybody’s reach. “When
Westerners come to China, they
tend to be arrogant, to use their
own cultural framework to judge
who will succeed. Personally, I
would advise them to show respect
and to look for a common
language enabling to find an
acceptable compromise for each
person”. This is a simple matter of
good sense.
* Mr. China: A Memoir. Tim
Clissold, HarperCollins, 2005,
272 pages
** Tuesday 4 December at
18:30h: “What’s new in
leadership development”,
Unimail, Geneva, info:
karen.longden@hec.unige.ch