Message from the President

China's economy although showing signs of slowing down entering 2012, is still doing better than that of most countries in the world. It still offers huge market potentials to local and foreign companies at large. However, much keener competitions in many industries are becoming also a common phenomenon. Key drivers for businesses are clearer and straightforward than ever: Growth. Growth in revenue (EBITDA); growth in market share; growth in profitability; & growth in return to asset are frequently heard words in business meetings.

Today's key challenges for C-level executives, perhaps, are not so much on mapping the right strategy to grow but more so on retaining and continuing the development of leadership talents who are instrumental to the success of any growth strategy. Incidentally, C-level executives are also becoming more aware of the pressing needs of identifying and grooming their successors. Most of these leadership talents are young and aggressive, promoted to their leadership positions rather quickly amidst the awesome growth wave in the last 10 years, lacking sufficient time to really test their capabilities to the fullest.

Now, when significant business growth has become increasingly difficult to achieve and sustain, these young leadership talents are experiencing somewhat hard time in meeting corporate goals and objectives. They often resorted into working harder and longer, stretching themselves thin to the extent of burn-out to meet their commitments. Thus, undesirable attritions at this level have been witnessed across numerous industries. As a consequence, the talent pipeline is interrupted and the prospect of finding the right successors within the organization is dimmer.

Many C-level executives and HR leaders respond to the situation by adopting the traditional approach of implementing more & different kinds of leadership training programs hoping to enhance the capabilities of these leadership talents. Unfortunately, structured leadership development & training programs at this time might not be very effective as most of these leadership talents could not afford 2 or 3 consecutive days attending training and very often the learning programs were not directly linked to the business, hence learning impacts were not obvious. As such, more and more courageous and visionary leaders inclined to engage executive coaching services to help address this strategic issue.

However, not all executive coaching services, could produce the intended results. There are too many individuals in the market, who after receiving some executive coaching skills training, believed that could be effective coaches. Based on TAG's successful executive coaching experience, the critical successful factors of executive coaching are:

1. A unique combination of qualities and capabilities of the executive coach
2. A well-defined and robust coaching methodology and process
3. Alignment among various stakeholders, including the persons receiving the executive coaching, on the needs and outcomes of the coaching services
4. Coaching themes should have strong linkage to business strategies and current business issues
5. Active participation of the sponsors and the coachees during the coaching process

We, at TAG, welcome C-level executives and HR leaders to explore with us how they may leverage on executive coaching to help them with the development of their leadership talents so as to sustain their competitive advantages in the marketplace and achieve breakthrough growth in their business.

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