If the story of TNT’s transformation in China were compared to a play, then most people described in this book would be actors on the stage, interpreting and playing their various roles. Continuing this metaphor, Robert and Angelina may have been the key actors in helping me, the director, determine how these dynamic interpretations should be integrated to bring the entire play to life. However, Helena Yang actually co-directed the play with me. She and I discussed in great detail the design, development and implementation of our culture program, the implications of our strategy for TNT’s human networks; when, how and who to coach through the process; and the right pace for change.

Helena joined TNT a year after we had initiated our cultural change, the same time I had the opportunity to bring together a new management team. Due at least in part to the intelligence and forcefulness of Helena’s predecessor, in 2007 and 2008 the HR team had been restructured and rebuilt, with many basic procedures put in place, such as a solid compensation and benefits structure. While her predecessor went to manage another part of TNT’s business, Helena inherited a team that had made a lot of timely strides forward, returning a basic notion of fairness to TNT. From that foundation, Helena began to lead the HR team to become constructive advisors to the other business leaders and their teams.

Helena’s character can best be described as a combination of a youthful girl and a wise mother. The young girl in her likes fun and attention and tends to be an insecure overachiever. Although she is outspoken and brave, willing to stand for her principles, she also craves popularity. As the wise mother, she is a calm, confident leader, considerate and caring, ensuring the feelings of most employees are being understood. She has a strong sense of fairness and can be strict when necessary.

Helena’s dual personality developed early in her life. She grew up in the seventies in Xi’an, the eldest daughter of a science professor at Jiaotong University; her mother worked as a university administrator. In an effort to develop the Western part of China, the government encouraged the establishment of Jiaotong University, historically one of China’s famous universities in Shanghai, in Xi’an. As a result, although born into a real Xi’an family, Helena was raised around a lot of Shanghainese people. She describes herself as a Western Chinese - direct, strong, impatient and fiery - but with a lot of‘Shanghainese understanding.’ The Shanghainese are known as shrewd businesspeople, cosmopolitan, proud to be China’s ‘window to the world.’Shanghainese women are especially famous for their toughness and being the boss in their family. Shanghainese men are expected to be able to share housework duties such as cooking and cleaning, while their wives make the financial decisions. In this sense, Helena is a Shanghainese woman. Although she consults everyone in her family on major decisions, she calls the shots. Once she explained that normally Chinese women manage the family's finances, because they remember the challenges of poverty and are generally more cautious than the men regarding spending.

Growing up in a university environment, Helena endured constant pressure to be‘number one’ in everything. On campus where they lived, the status of parents was strongly linked to their children's school performance. Helena’s parents worked all the time at the university; as a prominent party member, Helena’s father had to attend meetings most evenings. Thus, Helena learned to be independent at a very young age. As an eight-year-old girl, she was doing all the household chores and mostly taking care of herself. Being so independent, she loved new experiences and was often ‘naughty.’A very popular teenager, she often attended dancing parties and watched movies and shows, but her schoolwork did not interest her that much. Her father, also an independent character, usually let her do what she wanted to, but occasionally he would get really angry at her and punish her severely.

She developed her motherly skills at a young age. Helena’s brother was born when she was seven years old, and she played a large role in raising him. Today she still feels she has to take care of her brother, who in her own words “is spoiled and needs much more discipline.”

Helena stayed in Xi’an until after she graduated from both high school and Jiaotong University. She then moved from her hometown for the first time to Shenzhen, where her father accepted a job in business. Helena had a tough initial adjustment in Shenzhen. Her communication style was much too open and direct in the eyes of the Southerners, who interpreted her passionate, outgoing nature as silly, even a bit dumb. At the time, she worked as an HR assistant at Siemens and she struggled to adjust. She had grown up being very competitive, so she sometimes pushed the people around her much too hard, while at the same time trying to become everyone’s friend. Balancing these opposing desires proved difficult.

I explored this dichotomy at length with Helena, because I have observed it in many other people - a competitive streak along with a desire to make friends. As a Dutch person, I grew up in a culture where social interaction was more important than competitiveness; in fact, being competitive was actually frowned upon. Yet Helena explained that she does not see these tendencies as a contradiction. Competing fiercely with someone for the top spot in class or on the team does not preclude also having a very close relationship with them. The key to maintaining this compatibility involves choosing where to compete - being the prettiest, smartest, or best in a sport - yet allowing ‘space’in other areas for mutual friendship.

Following Siemens, Helena joined Arthur Andersen, first in the internal HR department and later on the HR consulting team. For the first time, she was surrounded by lots of talented people. She recognized that being less direct could bring continued success, so she slowly adjusted her style of communication, especially where she wanted to be most successful - the ability to establish deep, meaningful friendships. Her experience working for a man from Hong Kong in a semiconductor company really helped facilitate this change. His upbringing had been very tough, featuring constant, dramatic struggles. His stories and humility made her grateful for her relatively easy life, and she realized humility might improve on competitiveness as a way to present herself.

Helena always stood for principle, and she did not compromise her values. This made her a wonderful person to work with. She consistently spoke both her heart and mind; if she supported my position, she would defend me, but if she disagreed, she made that clear as well. Not everyone recognized or acknowledged her consistency. Some people misinterpreted the fact that Helena had both Michael’s and my listening ear as an indication that she was telling us what we wanted to hear. In fact, Helena often offered the most forceful resistance to changes that I wanted to implement. Helena's talent as a peacemaker may have been her 'wise mother' side's most highly developed skill. She has that rare gift of being able to help people involved in a fight realize that their way of looking at the problem is not the only possible perspective, and that fighting is unproductive for everyone. Subtly yet forcefully, she created lasting peace between people. She mediated some of the most persistent conflicts within TNT and in so doing contributed in an important way to the development of a more positive, family-like culture.

Even in her private life, Helena is still both girl and mother. Although she wants to empower her daughter to be a 'free spirit,' encouraging genuine expression of feelings and the authentic, deep relationships that result from such honesty, she realizes that society (her family included) wants her child to be disciplined and studious. Seeing how little freedom her daughter enjoys to play with friends and simply have a good time often hurts Helena, but she realizes the need for compromise to ensure peace within the family.

THE TRADITIONAL ROLE OF HR IN CHINA

In many ways, Helena represented a new, enlightened view of HR in China. The traditional role of HR in China is 'command and control'. Indeed, typically, HR directly controls everyone's corporate life. The HR department maintains the 'personal file' or 'P-file' for every employee. This 'P-file' holds all the important information about every employee from University until retirement. The P-file is simply transferred from one HR department to the next when people move to a different company. Any unethical behavior or reasons for dismissal are noted at the discretion of the HR team; employees have only limited ability to challenge such information. This is why any employee who gets caught for fraudulent behavior will do practically anything to make sure he or she does not get fired. A note about the indiscretion in their P-file makes it impossible for that person to get another job elsewhere. Therefore, the power of the HR team reaches well beyond someone's time with a particular company.

In the Western world, the traditional role of HR may be less focused on exercising power, yet still emphasize control and administration. HR teams usually interpret their role as including the rules for any and all forms of conduct, from 'whistleblower' procedures to dress codes.

Beyond establishing and implementing such behavioral protocols, HR organizations in both Chinese and Western cultures claim as their prerogative the determination of Helena Yang - the role of HR high as well; almost every candidate we selected would ultimately accept our offer to join, and very few new recruits left the organization shortly after joining.

Second, Helena ensured that I remained practical. I would usually present my ideas about cultural change or personnel strategy in very conceptual terms, and then she would always 'drill down' to the realities of how to implement them and how they would be received. Without much history with the organization, initially, her 'eyes and ears' were not picking up that much insight, yet her intuition was still almost always correct. She instinctively knew where to anticipate obstructions, and she always advised me well about whom else I should involve to ensure successful changes. Her advice helped me build crucial coalitions and really improve relationships between people. At times, Helena simply made me slow down. I remember a conversation in which I was outlining some wild idea about what we could next. She stopped me, insisting that further initiatives would be risky, because the team was getting too tired. She highlighted a few team members who, despite high engagement levels, were having difficulty keeping up with the pace of change. Everyone had very little time to adjust to all our new ideas and programs; in addition, annual business growth topped 20%. Following her advice to match the rate of change with the employees' ability to adapt, we used' regrouping at base camp' as the theme for our annual conference in early 2011. In that conference we celebrated everything we had accomplished in the past few years, and we emphasized how we were really achieving success due to all the changes. Without Helena, I probably would have just pushed further ahead.

Helena also ably conceptualized the best direction for our HR brand development. She knew how to represent the company, how we should portray ourselves and where. She managed to include us in the competitions for ‘best employer in China.' Before her arrival, we did not spend any time on this aspect of promoting our HR brand. She pushed the agenda, because she knew that the quality of people that we could attract would largely depend on the quality of our brand.

Lastly, like Linda, Helena's understanding of Western people was remarkable. As someone who had never spent any significant time outside China and had only worked with foreigners while in China, she had an astonishing ability to connect with foreigners. Her frankness helped her a lot, especially in dealing with the Dutch people at headquarters. Although Helena certainly retained some complexity, she always made very clear whether she agreed with me or not - and why. She had a knack for knowing the difficulties Westerners have interpreting all the subtleties of Chinese culture, and she see who will accept a job. Therefore, with so many available candidates, enormous competition exists for the top students from the famous schools. Companies willing to think a bit more deeply, looking past this “first-round”of applicants to find “second-tier”candidates with the experience, aptitudes and interests that match their needs have a huge advantage. They can still recruit from a highly intelligent group of eager job-seekers; as an added bonus, these students tend to be much less self-confident, aeuphemistic way of saying they're less arrogant. HR departments commonly receive 10.000 CVs or more for a single job opening; thus, managing the hiring process represents a daunting task. Many big companies, including TNT, first screen this mountain of CVs using specifically designed software tools.

For successful job applicants with over two years of on-the-job experience, the job market shifts from an employer's to the employees.’ Anyone with experience, especially in reputable international companies, can expect to spend no more than a few weeks finding a new job, and salary increases of 30% with a promotion are common. The challenge facing companies recruiting from among these incumbent professionals thus changes dramatically to answering the question, how do we become an attractive company to work for?

Eventually, even companies that mostly choose recruits straight out of university almost always face the uncertain prospect of finding experienced staff as well, because so many employees jump to a higher position in a different company after a few years of experience. Many executives see this lack of loyalty as a key frustration of working in China - just when they develop someone for a key role, she/he leaves.

Therefore, the companies most successful in this war for talent aggressively recruit from university, but then work mostly on retaining these employees. Enterprises with flourishing retention efforts usually offer exciting careers that focus on education, training, development and frequent promotions, while accepting that inevitably, some talented employees will still leave for other opportunities. HR organizations that thrive at recruitment and retention both entice high-potential university graduates to apply and encourage skilled incumbent staff to remain, thus ensuring that their ‘talent funnel’remains filled. This dual strategy also allows the management team to focus on succession planning， development, promotions and compensation rather than on‘firefighting’ to find replacements for exiting employees.

Simply having a good HR team is not good enough to achieve such enviable circumstances. Instead, successful companies in China need a super HR team. In response to this demand for excellence, HR directors of great companies are often the highest paid directors. They need strategic insight, an ability to organize and delegate large, meaningful ‘chunks’ of work (such as processing all those applications and administering China’s complicated HR procedures and legal mandates) and the skill to influence the management team to focus on ‘preventive people work’(learning, development, and recognition), rather than on ‘recovery people work’ (convincing dissatisfied em ployees to withdraw their resignations and recruiting to fill open requisitions quickly).

HR directors and professionals with this breadth of talent are scarce, and they usually face some really engrained patterns of opposition. As described previously, most HR departments use rules and regulations to ‘control’ their companies. Even if a management team agrees to focus on developing and retaining talent, they often lack relevant knowledge of basic motivational psychology. Just as one example, it is perfectly normal for new employees in China to endure six months of‘probation’，during which time they are allowed no leave - not even to attend their best friend’s wedding - and receive no bonuses (which for sales people often means they earn about half a typical salary). After I arrived at TNT (where this example comes from)， I was surprised when bewildered managers complained that their young staff showed little or no motivation.

In her constant efforts to implement a more enlightened HR strategy, Helena frequently confronted resistance from her own team. Some found it difficult to abandon their power. Earlier in this book I gave the example of when we introduced a performance bonus for the entire company linked to customer satisfaction scores. The HR team responsible for compensation and benefits used every weapon in their arsenal to block this change - in spite of having been present at the management team meeting when the proposal was adopted by unanimous vote.

In view of such fiscally conservative policies and the enormous resistance to employee-centered management practices, I have promoted the stance that people issues are too important to leave to HR - or rather, in the case of a great HR team, to leave just to HR.  The HR team needs to be forward-looking, creative, well - connected throughout the enterprise, and they should ensure that the management team adopts and supports a proactive perspective. Unless and until the general managers make the ‘people aspects’ of their job their top priority - spending time carefully thinking about HR’s policies and procedures, developing plans and strategies to align HR with business goals, and communicating continuously with staff and possible recruits - this enlightened future may well remain beyond tne reach of most companies.

THE END OF HUMAN RESOURCES, THE START OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

In a speech to the China-European International Business School in Shanghai in 2010, together with Jesse Price of Reya Group, I presented some of the views and tools described in this book. We also provided some insights about the future of organizational development, drawn from our own and other business authors’ ideas. Perhaps most importantly, we predicted that Human Resources as we know it will disappear. The very word ‘resources’ assumes that people are comparable to assets, which can be acquired, transformed and disposed of. In today’s world, most organizations still take the view that their employees should devote their best efforts to the success of the enterprise. If individuals benefit from that commitment through learning and personal development, companies tout this as a great ‘win-win’ - yet first and foremost the people exist solely for the sake of the survival and growth of the organization.

We contended that this presumption is slowly being turned on its head; organizations are becoming platforms on which people grow and develop, intellectually and even spiritually. Future organizations will exist for the sake of their people. This transformation will conquer once people become confident this switch actually benefits the health of the organization. Companies and institutions creating cultures based on staff freedom and empowerment are leading the way - demonstrating that trusted people do not necessarily abuse their freedom.

Another example of the need to overhaul traditional HR practice involves annual leave policies. Most organizations set clear rules regarding annual free time allowed, and then strictly enforce that policy, punishing abusers. However, a few enlightened organizations have dispensed entirely with fixed ‘annual free-time’，instead implementing policies that basically allow employees to take time off when they please, assuming they reach consensus with colleagues. In trusting environments this more casual approach usually works fine with little abuse. That should come as no surprise. Just as entrepreneurs rarely take excessive leave, engaged employees will be unlikely to seek shortcuts.

Organizations and their leaders need to accept the responsibility of becoming thriving communities of engaged people. To reach that goal, organizations must be defined as platforms for people’s growth and development, replacing the belief that people are merely ‘resources’.We concluded that the HR department with which we are familiar needs to close. Although administering policies and procedures such as payroll and similar functions will remain, the primary HR strategy embraced by company leadership will focus on ‘people development’ - with support from a learning and development team. In some organizations this process has already begun. Some HR Directors have been renamed ‘Chief People Officers’.Although I welcome such changes, I would argue that the CEO should endorse them only if he or she does not then‘outsource’ all people matters to their ‘CPO;’ the CEO and all other leaders should stay closely involved. Whatever the title of the ‘people function’ in the organization, its role should be to help everyone in the organization remain focused on the human development aspects of their job. Individual development, team development, culture, informal networks - all these elements should be understood and developed in future organizations. I am convinced that in the future, corporations will reflect this shift in the relationship between people and the organizations they work for (in the future), mostly because of the personal values held by members of younger generations now entering the workforce or‘climbing the corporate ladder’ Almost naturally, they anticipate and expect this fundamental change; they will embrace it and further develop its foundation and rationale. The new generations in China give me lots of hope - that is why I devote the following, final chapter to them.

(selected from ln China, We Trust by lman Stratenus, published by China Intercontinental Press in 2018)