Risk, Reward, and How Angel Yu Got to the 32nd Floor

The story of leadership in China came alive for me as I stood in Angel Yu’s office, some 300 feet above the streets of Shanghai.

Up to that point in a three-week reporting trip in China, I’d learned that the country lacks enough homegrown managers to satisfy all the demand at multinational firms doing business in the fast-growing Chinese economy. I’d also discovered that the resulting hasty promotions of young Chinese leaders amount to a risk for companies, the country at large and even the rest of the world.

But these matters can be largely impersonal, abstract. Angel Yu helped me see how much the topic of China’s leaders is about individual people who’ve often made courageous choices, collectively achieved dramatic results and who are trying to create a new leadership style—one that may be particularly well suited for the 21st century.

Yu, 42, is vice president for human resources and administration at clothing firm Adidas for the Greater China region. In January, I interviewed her and the president of Adidas for Greater China, Sandrine Zerbib, about how the company handles leadership challenges in the country. My findings from that discussion and talks with some 30 other company officials and consultants will be published next week in a Workforce Management special report.

After the hourlong interview in an Adidas conference room, Yu walked me to her office to give me a report naming the company as one of the top employers in the Shanghai region. Yu’s office on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai high rise has a sweeping view of the bustling, still under-construction city.

It—and Yu’s possession of it—became all the more stunning to me as she described her career history. The daughter of Shanghai-area factory workers, Yu attended college and worked as a teacher in the early 1980s. This was back when the Chinese economy was still largely run through central planning, and individual choices were limited. Fed up with the restrictions governing her job, she quit and headed to Shenzhen, then China's free-market outpost. By doing so, she gave up the security of the "iron rice bowl"—guaranteed employment—in hopes for a better life. "I took a risk," she says.

It has paid off. Yu worked for four years at direct-marketing company Amway, and has been an Adidas HR manager since 1999. She now has responsibilities for mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She’s even playing a leading role in worldwide HR initiatives at Adidas, Zerbib says.

If Yu were haughty, it would be easy to see why. She has reached a powerful position, and once a week a headhunter tries to lure her away to another job. Instead, she is gracious, warm and soft-spoken.

Her story parallels what’s happened in China. Beginning in the late 1970s, the country essentially placed a big bet on free-market reforms. That gamble has largely succeeded, in the form of rapid economic growth and newfound prosperity. Problems still plague the country, ranging from human rights abuses to the immature manager dilemma I found in my reporting.

But at least on the latter front, executives and other officials in China seem aware of the issue and are determined to tackle it. And as they do, there is growing talk about blending the best of the East and the West when it comes to leadership. There’s even an argument that the Chinese capacity for handling complexity could be a key strength as the entire world grapples with tricky issues such as economic inequality and climate change.

Angel Yu may be an example of a new generation of Chinese leaders prepared for an ever-more integrated globe. She’s clearly comfortable with Western management principles. But she also says many Chinese values are worth preserving in a business setting, including loyalty and the importance of personal relationships.

Can Yu and her peers pull it off? Can they solve the many leadership problems facing the country? I can’t say for sure. But I will be following her story, and China’s, closely.

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