The role of Procurement is transcending from service function to business strategy partner. The necessity for top procurement executives to manage talent well is not only pressing but complex. What qualities are important to identify and develop in order for Procurement to remain true to your corporate strategy? How to build the right culture for strategic forward thinking and what are the risks to be recognized as functionally disabled? How to tailor talent plans to address different regional needs and business objectives? How to differentiate in the talent marketplace by going beyond financial incentives and creating customized retention strategies?

The report is a brief summary of the event aimed to provide readers with an overview of the essential information discussed at the Supply Chain Leaders Round Table hosted by VCIntegration on November 25, 2015, in Shanghai, China.

What kinds of talent you are looking for?

Many sourcing organizations find it difficult to recruit the right people, but I think the fundamental question should be: What kind of competencies we are looking for? What I am hearing is that he or she is looking for someone with good technical background, with excellent communication skills, and also can do a lot of things.

I think we need both soldiers and generals. My experience is, it is never difficult to find procurement people, it is difficult to develop procurement leaders. At the lower level, I take whatever I could get, they are not the best people, I invest a lot in training and coaching, I try to build up slowly from one side, the hard skills, and on the other side, the soft skills, which is more important. But for middle to high level, if we look at requirements of Procurement today, it's very different from what it was 20 years ago. I need talent to create new strategies, to transform the purchasing function, and to bring the organization to the next level.

We are global companies operating in Asia; the headquarter is so far way so what is happening in China? And we all know China is getting more and more important. We do not need guys to take the decisions back from the headquarter, we need those who can influence the headquarter to make the right decision for the region. I believe leadership, influence and innovation are the top 3 attributes.

I need people with engineering or technical background (better to be category specific), with good commodity knowledge, but then, I found most of them are hands on guys, they do not speak good English, which makes it difficult when we need to have global meetings or oversea conference calls.

I was in BD with IBM, Deloitte, and Ariba. IBM sells IT solutions, instead of talking to the CIO, we talk to the CEO; because CIO do not understand business. Later when I was with Ariba, we sell spend management solutions, instead of talking to the procurement people, we talk to CFO and CEO, because we know procurement do not understand much about the financial language of CEO and CFO.

So the important question here is: If language is an important skill, is it all about English?

Do we really understand the needs of our internal stakeholders and communicate on the basis of shared value? Do we really understand the business language of our CEO or CFO?

Years ago, I asked a journalist: When do you think it is successful to be a professional? He gave a simple answer:if your boss comes to the office, you are the first guy he wants to speak to, and then you are successful. I believe it’s very simple and very true. Procurement is cross-functional. It‘s a cute function interfacing with almost everyone within the organization. We should avoid using the same language talking to different stakeholders. We need our people to get the right people to talk to, and communicate with the right language, it is not easy.

If Procurement is about selling to internal stakeholders, so how much will sales fit into the position?

We heard successful stories of companies moving their sales talent to sourcing organization, those people has no background in procurement at all, but they influence the internal customers, get talent together, and get the things down, plus they can go international.

When I was in retail business, the important attributes of Procurement are always leadership and influence. You get clever people to do really fancy presentations, you drive cost down and then you reward them with extra bonus. Its never a difficult game to play: employees take ownership of their development. That’s how retail works.

Now I am in HMLV industry, my problem today with Japan is that all my procurement people become engineers, and that‘s because they could not get engineers to do the job. So I was thinking that before I try to train an engineer to be a business leader, which is difficult, because it’s personality change, what about the other way round?

We have experience moving sales to procurement function, and I think the deep transaction could be very difficult. The first thing is that when you look at corporate policies for sales and procurement, it could be very different; The second thing is that they might have problem moving from sales to procurement, particularly, the listening capability are limited, they talk a lot. But I think the most difficult part is now the clients are within the company. They need to move over the company and interface with different stakeholders, and then they could be successful outside.

The next question is if they are that good, why will they join procurement?

We have many different words for procurement, like sourcing, purchasing, supply chain, etc. But we do not have one particular word for procurement as a profession, even in English. So what does it mean? When you are in sales, you know what is sales; When you are in marketing, you know what is marketing; When you are in R&D, you know what is R&D. But when you are in procurement, you have different roles, even with the same title. And the problem behind that is: people join procurement for the experience; they do not grow and stay.

I think the most important thing is to make yourself attractive, and build the environment, to make people believe it is a respective place to work.They grow inside, and they know they will get more opportunities outside. I came from engineering background, and had different roles in sourcing and supply chain, then I move myself to program management, and now I am CEO at a local Chinese company. You need to show them examples how we could open door for sourcing to be as CEO, CFO, COO, PE and VC etc. in long term career development.

Finding the right person can be a difficult and expensive exercise in its own right, developing them more so, so what to do?

The reality is that at the lower levels, it needs probably a couple of years before an employee starts to deliver a significant amount of value. But then, after all of the work has been done, it‘s at about this stage that the job offers come flooding in.

We experience very different turnover rate at lower level and at higher level. In our case, it’s actually what kind of turnover rate we are looking for? Unfortunately, we lose the best guy, typically, the bad guy, they stay.

My people once left because the competitor  was offering a better salary, but after one year or two, they came back to us. I always tend to believe that some companies do have the unique mechanism, or you may refer to as culture, that helps generate a strong sense of loyalty among high achievers. It might take a lot of management efforts to invest in developing at the beginning, but you know that it is much more powerful than financial incentives.  And trust me, no one else expresses your corporate culture better than your middle level managers, you will learn until you lose your employees, they will get you know that they join the company for the reputation, and they leave because of their managers.

Will moving talent outside your APAC organization, act as a driver to retain the top talent?

We heard that many Chinese managers, though competent, lack a view of the world outside China because of limited overseas living and working experience. This makes them less capable to take on multinational managerial responsibilities.

I think to some extent, cultural issue is preventing Chinese from being successful in US. Americans challenge a manager. They give you a hard time at the beginning, whether you are Chinese, Indian, or anyone. Chinese very much like to be a learner, when they get there, they learn, Americans do not need a learner, they respect a leader, those guys are good, but they are team players. But if you assign Chinese to Asia Pacific, it is a different story. They think they got to be the leader, but they are not so accepted by those countries, India, Japan…you can imagine, they do not accept you Chinese as leader in my country. You do not have this problem in US, as long as you prove yourself good, you build your credit, they respect you as a leader. I think for international posting, the statistics for success is low, and we need to be careful sending the right guy to the right place.