Siam Cement Group (SCG), the country's leading industrial conglomerate, is trying to develop its new corporate leaders to steer its expansion in Asean in the next few years.
The group's leadership profile framework, which has been introduced to address the internal and external business landscape, is its next step to enhance human resources to accommodate its ambitious expansion plan.
"The leadership profile approach is being used for the next 12-15 months to build our new leaders, who will come up with not only competency but also knowledge-attributed business outcomes," said Pimjai Wangkiat, the director for corporate organisational development.
The leadership approach comprises three pillars _ engagement, imagination and excellence.
The engagement pillar involves diversity, meeting stakeholders' demands, making emotions matter and ensuring the value of people.
The imagination pillar concerns the ability to deal with leverage opportunities, differentiation, delivering values and making the organisation crisis-proof.
Excellence involves qualities such as being change-ready, increased dynamism, having the ability to deal with business complexity, providing a home for talent and being Asean-wide.
SCG has put a lot of effort into corporate transformation since 2007, when chief executive Kan Trakulhoon set a new vision for the group to go regional and become Asean's sustainable leader by 2015.
He also set a 50% target for sales generated from high value-added products, up from 4% in 2006. Commodity products account for other sales.
Mrs Pimjai said SCG has encouraged staff to have the right mindset about the changes and to take part in the transformation.
"How could we transform a big conglomerate with more than 100 subsidiaries and 38,000 employees? Staff still felt uncomfortable about the changes," she recalled.
SCG has five business units _ cement, chemicals, paper, building materials and distribution. Leading management consultancy the APM Group was brought in to help each unit cope with the changes and to define the new culture it wants.
"It's not easy to get cooperation from all five units and go in the same direction, as they have different natures and cultures. But we tried and got a positive move," said Arinya Talerngsri, the APM Group's managing director.
Speaking at a conference hosted by the American Society for Training and Development and the Singapore Training and Development Association in Singapore recently, Mrs Pimjai noted that progress was seen after a lot of activities had been done with staff.
"The foundation work has already been laid, and we're more than halfway through the transformation. Sales from high-value-added products generate up to 34% of sales already," she said.
SCG now earns 74.3% of its revenue from Thai operations, 14.6% from Indonesia, 5.9% from Vietnam and 2.9% from the Philippines.
During the first nine months, it posted a net profit of 16.7 billion baht on revenue of 315 billion.
Shares of Siam Cement (SCC) closed yesterday on the SET at 450 baht, up 12 baht, in trade worth 895 million baht.