[00:00:00]
Speaker: Picture this. It's the end of the quarter and you're the managing director for Asia Pacific. You dial into the global leadership meeting. Head office is on the screen. Maybe that's Tokyo, maybe Frankfurt, maybe Chicago. Your numbers come up. Revenue is on plan. Margin is on plan. The slide is green. Someone says, "Great quarter, APAC." You say, "Thank you," and you move on.
Let me show you the slides nobody put up.
In Manila, two of your best team leaders resigned last month, but said it was for a better offer. Neither of them told you the real reason. While in Brisbane, there's a bullying complaint sitting with HR, and it's been there for about three weeks. In Bangkok, your team has gone very quiet in meetings.
Everyone smiles, everyone nods, nobody raises a problem. In Shanghai, a key [00:01:00] engineer is on extended sick leave, and in Auckland, your team pushes back hard on the new operating model. You overrule them. Now they stop pushing back at all. None of that was on the slide.
Six months later, it will be. A delayed project, a lost customer, a claim, a margin that slips, and nobody can quite explain why.
Everyone will be surprised, but nobody should be. Because this is a composite, by the way. I've changed the details, but if you run a region, I'd put money on it that at least one of those lines sound familiar.
Here's the idea I want you to leave with today. Your P&L is the last place a people problem shows up.
By the time it gets there, it's expensive.
Today's episode is a bit different. Normally, I talk to sales leaders or commercial leaders. Today, I'm talking to the person who actually owns the [00:02:00] whole region.
You might be the MD or the GM for Asia Pacific. You report into a global leadership team, often in another country. You sit on a local board, so you carry director duties, and your region crosses borders, languages, and very different ideas about what a good boss looks like. Now, you're measured on growth and profit, of course, but you're also measured on safety, culture, retention, governance, and transformation.
Earlier in my career, I ran a European region for a Fortune 500 company. I spent around 200 nights a year in hotels. I covered two territories that normally took two people. One of them grew from six countries to 15, and I reported into a head office on another continent with its own culture and its own way of making decisions. Then in 2010, I moved from Belgium to Australia, and I had to relearn almost everything I thought I knew about [00:03:00] communication.
Belgium taught me to explain my reasoning first and my conclusion second, whilst Australia wanted the conclusion first. Australians are direct about some things and surprisingly indirect about others. "Yeah, nah" is a whole language on its own. Since then, a lot of my work has been here in the Asia Pacific.
Australian businesses with teams across the regions. Leaders from Singapore, from the Philippines, from China, from Japan, from Thailand, from New Zealand, all in the same leadership team. And very often, the same sentence means something completely different depending on who says it and who hears it.
I remember one instance, for example, where I dealt with the CEO of a business and every time when we sat down, it looked like he wanted to do business. But yet it took meeting after meeting. All the signs that things were coming to a fruition, [00:04:00] but only to stall, delay, and defer. As a result of that experience, I just realized how much these cultural differences actually come into play. So whilst this person showed all signs of agreement and wanting to move forward and being a quick decision-maker and hedging his risks and making sure that he had done his due diligence and so on, which you would expect of a CEO, the Chinese background was quite different for me at the time to deal with.
I didn't have any experience with it, so I didn't know how to read it and deal with it successfully. Now, these instances here are just examples. It's important that I share with you that I have a master's in psychology. I've worked with leadership teams in 25 countries over more than 20 years, and the methodology I've built from all of it over time, which is called Communication Mastery, is what I license to corporate clients as an operating system to build high performance that you can measure.
[00:05:00] Every managing director I work with has a dashboard. Revenue, margin, pipeline, cash. Those numbers matter. Nobody's arguing with that. But there's also a second balance sheet underneath the first one. It doesn't show up in the monthly pack. It has five lines. Line one is productivity. How much your people actually get done with the hours that you're paying for.
Line two then is absence. Sick days, stress leave, people who are physically there but mentally somewhere else. And line three then is tenure. How long your good people actually stay. Every time someone experienced walks out, they take knowledge, customer relationships, and trust along with them, and you pay to rebuild it all.
Line four then is claims. Bullying, harassment, safety incidents, psychological injury. [00:06:00] The things that end up with lawyers, regulators, and insurers.
And the fifth line is agility. How fast does your region adapt to a changing world around them? Now, here's the thing most leaders miss. These five lines aren't separate. They move together. Gallup has been studying this for decades. Their latest analysis covers more than 180,000 teams. They compared the most engaged teams with the least engaged ones.
The most engaged teams had 78% lower absenteeism. They had 63% fewer safety incidents, and in organizations like most of yours, where turnover is under 40% a year, they had 51% lower turnover. Now, that's not one metric improving. That's the whole second balance sheet improving at once.
Gallup also found the patterns that holds across countries and [00:07:00] industries. It's not just an American thing. Now the bad news. Global engagement dropped 20% in 2025. That's two years of decline in a row, and the steepest drop was among managers. Managers are now no more engaged than the people they lead.
Now, think about what that means for you. Your managers are the engine. If the engine is running on fumes, everything downstream slows down. And here's my first point. Absence, turnover, and claims are not HR metrics. They're cost lines and risk lines, and as the MD, you own them.
So why do these five lines move together? Because they share one root cause.
Now, if you listened to this show before, you'll know a model that I come back to often. I call it "the brain elevator". Your people's brains work like a building [00:08:00] with three floors, and you can only go up in order. Floor one is the reptilian brain.
Its only job is to scan for threat. Is this safe? Is my job safe? Is my boss on my side? When it detects a threat, it reacts in one of four different ways: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Now look at your second balance sheet through that lens, please. Fight shows up as conflict, snippy emails, complaints, accusations directly in people's face.
Flight shows up as resignations or as sick days, which is just flight on a smaller scale. Freeze then shows up as silence. Nobody raises the problem until it's too late.
And then the last one, fawn, shows up as obvious agreement. Everyone nods in the meeting, yet [00:09:00] nothing changes afterwards.
Now, floor two is the limbic system. That's where trust and goodwill live. So when people trust you, they give you discretionary effort, similar to what I did back as a regional sales manager in Europe. I went out of my way to give my all and covered way more than I was paid for. Those people then end up staying. They tell you the truth, including the problems and the difficulties that might affect progress.
Floor three is the neocortex. That's where problem-solving, creativity, and adaptation happen. That's where your agility lives. So where people embrace and drive change for the sake of the organization and its customers.
Now, here's the part I want you to sit with.
Two of those three floors are fully emotional. Only the top one is logical. So you can't strategy deck your [00:10:00] way to floor three if your people are still stuck at floor one or two. You can't restructure your way there either. The elevator has to go up in order, one after another. Now, I talked about this a few weeks ago in the episode on psychological safety.
I used to think it was a bit fluffy. I don't anymore. One root cause, five symptoms. Fix the cause, and every line on that second balance sheet starts to move.
Let's spend a few minutes on line four, because this is the one that keeps directors up at night. In Australia, psychological injury is now the most expensive kind of serious workers' compensation claim. According to Safe Work Australia's latest figures, the median payout is around sixty-seven thousand dollars.
Now, that's about four times the median for all serious claims, and the median time of work is around thirty-five [00:11:00] weeks. Think about that. Thirty-five weeks. That's most of a year without one of your people. And the leading causes, you might ask? Harassment and bullying, work pressure, exposure to aggression.
In other words, how people treat each other.
The law has moved too. Employers in Australia now have a positive duty of care to prevent sexual harassment, not just respond to it. Prevent it. Psychological hazards now sit in the workplace safety law alongside physical ones, and officers, which includes you if you're a director, have a due diligence duty.
You can't simply rely on management telling you that everything is fine. Now, of course, I'm not a lawyer, and Singapore, the Philippines, India, Thailand, China, Japan, and New Zealand all have their own rules. Get proper legal advice for each country. But the [00:12:00] principle travels everywhere.
The person signing as a director owns the cultural risk, and prevention isn't a policy document. It's a leadership behavior.
Let me show you what it looks like in practice. A while ago, I worked with the operations division of ASC, the company that builds and maintains Australia's submarines for the Navy.
If you want a safety critical environment, it doesn't get more serious than that. Operations had a problem. Safety incidents were costly, not just in dollars, but in time, in disruption, and in reputation, and engagement had also taken a hit, which if you remember the brain elevator, is no coincidence because those two numbers, they move together.
We didn't fix it with a poster campaign. We did three things.
First, we ran an emotional intelligent leadership course for the leaders and [00:13:00] managers in operations. How to read people, how to manage their own reactions under pressure, how to have the hard conversation early in a DISC-friendly way instead of after an accident. Second, we ran workshops where the team co-created the strategy to change and lead transformation, and how they'd execute it, along with scorecards and everything that goes with it.
Not a plan handed down from above. A plan they built, owned, and could defend. See, people don't resist a plan that they wrote themselves.
And third, we gave one-on-one coaching to the managers who were having a hard time. Every leadership team has a few. You and I know it. They're often good technically and struggling with the people side.
Left alone, they're where a lot of the threat in a team comes from. With support, however, they can become your steadiest leaders. The result? Staff [00:14:00] morale went up significantly, and safety incidents went down significantly. The executive manager of operations then introduced me to the GM of engineering, and that work spread across five GMs, every one of them an internal referral.
That's the second balance sheet in action. We didn't run a safety program and a separate engagement program. We worked on how leaders communicate and deal with other people. Both numbers moved because they had the same root cause.
Now, here's where it gets harder for anyone running a whole region.
Because floor one, the threat floor, isn't triggered by the same things everywhere. Let's take a typical APAC region. Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and a team in Shanghai. Five countries, one MD, one engagement survey, one set of company values on the wall. Now, a quick caveat before I go country by country.
These are [00:15:00] tendencies, not rules. Every person is an individual, so please don't stereotype anyone based on their passport. But if you lead across borders, these patterns are worth knowing.
Australia, fairly egalitarian. People expect to be consulted. They'll call the boss by their first name and question a decision in the meeting. If you go too directive, they won't fight you. They'll just quietly disengage. And watch the Aussie habit of understatement. "It's a bit of a challenge" can mean this project is on fire.
New Zealand then, even flatter in many ways. Humility matters. Relationships matter. Overselling yourself can cost you trust very fast. A leader who arrives and announces the answer without listening first can lose the room before they even started.
Next is the Philippines. More hierarchical and deeply [00:16:00] relationship-driven. Harmony in the group matters a great deal. Saying no to a senior person or delivering bad news in public can feel deeply uncomfortable. So a yes may mean, "I hear you," rather than, "I agree." Now, if you want the truth, you often have to create a private, safe way for them to share it with you.
Next is Thailand. There's a concept called kreng jai. Roughly, it means being considered and not wanting to impose, especially on someone senior. It's a beautiful value, but it also means people may not tell the boss there's a problem. Smiles and calm can hide real concerns. Face matters for everyone in the room.
Last then is Shanghai. Hierarchical, with a strong focus on face and on relationships built over time. [00:17:00] Shanghai is also fast, commercial, and ambitious, so people may push hard on results and still hold back from challenging a senior leader openly. Public criticism can do lasting damage.
Now, think about what happens when head office rolls out a " speak up" campaign across all five countries.
In Australia, New Zealand, people might actually speak up. Great. In Manila, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the survey might come back glowing, high scores, no complaints, and you'll think the culture is just fine. It might be. Or it might be that nobody felt safe enough to tell you otherwise. Silence is not safety. Silence is not agreement either.
So what do you do instead? Three things here. First, build more than one channel for the truth. Open debate works in some teams. In others, you need [00:18:00] one-on-one conversations, skip level catch-ups, or a trusted local leader who people will actually talk to.
Second, read your survey results by country, not just as a regional average. A regional average can hide a team in real trouble. And third, watch the leading signals. Absence, resignations, who stopped contributing? Those tell you more than a survey score in a culture where people don't like to complain.
So far, I talked about reading the people below you. But as a regional managing director, you're reading in two directions at once, down to five countries, and up to a global leadership team that has its own culture, its own pace, and its own way of making decisions.
I want to tell you about a time I personally got it wrong, properly wrong.
A few years ago, I joined an international company as general manager of sales and marketing. [00:19:00] Great product, growing market, a real chance to build something regionally. I came in with a strategy. Instead of selling to anyone who'd take the product, I wanted to build a high-performance dealer network. We'd invite expressions of interest from potential dealers, we'd negotiate hard, and we'd pick only the very best.
Fewer dealers, but better ones, more volume, everybody wins. Partners who would grow with us for years to come, not just opportunistically jumping ship and changing brands. The managing director said he liked it. Results-focused, but also warm, charming, and great in a room.
He said all the right things about leadership and teamwork and being one. I walked out of those early meetings feeling backed and energized. But a strategy like mine takes time to implement. You don't build a quality network in a quarter, and time, I found out later, was something we either didn't [00:20:00] have or he wasn't really willing to give me.
He may well have been under a lot of pressure from head office. I'll never know. What I do know is this: his concerns never came to me. Instead of raising them directly so I could adjust the plan, he started working on my exit with HR behind my back.
Five months in, we parted ways. Now, it would be easy to tell this as a story about a bad boss. I don't think that's the useful lesson, nor would it be fair on him. The useful lesson is about me. I took his words as agreement. I listened to what he said, and I didn't watch what he did. I pitched to floor three, the logical floor, with a strong business case.
Meanwhile, he was probably on floor one or two, under pressure and worried about results. Think about his style for a second. The D in him wanted results and fast. My strategy asked him for patience. [00:21:00] And the I in him wanted to stay liked and to keep things positive and upbeat and energizing. So the hard conversation never happened in the room. It happened somewhere else without me.
If I could do it again, I'd do three things differently.
I build in early visible wins, something he could show head office back in Germany within weeks, not months. I'd ask him directly and more than once, "What would make you nervous about this plan?" Now, with an I style, you often have to invite the concern because they won't volunteer it. And I'd ask what head office needed to see from him and by when, because his pressure was my pressure whether I knew it or not.
Here's what it taught me. A strategy your boss doesn't own isn't a strategy. It's a proposal waiting to be rejected. And sometimes the boss who smiles and agrees is the one you most need to check in with.
And here's why this matters to you [00:22:00] if you own a region. Many APAC businesses report into a parent in either Japan, Korea, the US, or Europe. Each of those head offices decides differently. Take a Japanese parent, for example. Decisions are often built through consensus before the formal meeting ever happens.
There's even a word for it, called nemawashi, literally preparing the roots before you move the tree. Now, if your regional plan arrives as a surprise in the meeting, it may already be too late, however good the logic. So bring the APAC view early, one-to-one, informally. Find out who needs to be comfortable before the decision and what they're worried about specifically.
Match their pace, not yours. That's exactly what I didn't do. I'd love you to learn it more cheaply than I did personally.
Let's talk about line five next, agility. If you run a region right now, you [00:23:00] know the list. Trade tensions and tariffs, supply chains that change overnight, energy policy shifting from one government to the next, currency swings, and AI changing how work gets done faster than most organizational charts can keep up.
You can't forecast all of it. But what you can control is how fast your region notices and how fast it responds. And that comes down to one thing: how early does bad news travel to you?
In a team that feels safe, someone on the ground says, "I think we've got a problem with this supplier," weeks before it hits. In a team stuck on floor one, they sit on it. They hope it goes away. They don't want to be the one who brought you the bad news.
In a hierarchical culture, that delay can be even longer because the bad news has to travel up through several layers, each one softening it a little. [00:24:00] So agility isn't just a process. It's a trust metric first. Now, there's a second part to this.
When change does come, people don't all process it the same way.
That's where DISC helps as well.
Your D styles want to act. Give them the decision and the outcome fast. Your I styles want to see the vision, so paint a picture of where this is heading and involve them. Your S styles want to know what happens to their team. So slow down, explain the people impact and the steps involved. Follow up one-to-one and talk openly about their concerns by asking about them. Your C styles want the data. Show your reasoning, the risks, and the options, and give them time to think, to check it and think it through so that they can plan.
One change announcement delivered one way [00:25:00] will land with maybe a quarter of your people. So flex it for all four styles, and you'll move the whole region together with you.
So where do you start? Not with a region-wide program. Start with the people closest to you. The fish rots from the head down, as we've all heard it, the saying. If there are politics in your leadership team, they ripple through all five countries. Your country managers watch how you treat each other, and they copy it.
So profile your direct reports. Who's a D, an I, an S, and a C? Who's from an egalitarian culture, and who's from a hierarchical one? Then flex. In Communication Mastery, we teach leaders to mirror just three things: pace, as in being fast or slow; priority, being either people or task; and vocabulary, which is the words that person actually responds to positively.
Now, three levers, not 40. [00:26:00] Pull them deliberately for each person on your team, and you'll be amazed how much changes for the better.
Here's what I would love you to do this week. Ask yourself three questions. One, if you put absence, turnover, and claims on the same page as revenue by country, what would your board see? If you don't know, that is your first answer. Number two then, which country's silence are you reading as agreement?
And three, who on your leadership team brings you bad news first, and who never does? The last one tells you a lot about them and about you.
In closing, your P&L is the last place a people problem shows up. Productivity, absence, tenure, claims, and agility all show up first. They're your early warning system, and they all run on the same engine. How safe, [00:27:00] trusted, and understood do your people feel? The two P's I keep coming back to on this show are predictable and preventable.
None of what I described in the opening quarter was random. Every line was predictable. Every line was preventable. That's exactly the work we do with leadership teams through Communication Mastery, helping MDs and their leaders read people across cultures and styles, build trust deliberately, and move the numbers above and below the P&L.
If you run a region and some of today's episode felt a little familiar, let's talk. Book a free discovery call. The link's somewhere in the show notes. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you very much for joining us.
