Clifton Chua
FedEx Express
Managing director Singapore
What would you describe your leadership style as?
I am a firm believer of using different strokes for different folks. I do perceive participative and flexible leadership, or situational leadership, to be very important.
For me, understanding what drives an employee an individual basis is very important in order to engage employees and provide employment experience that employees are looking out for.
How do you engage employees in your company?
We have a strong corporate culture that we pride ourselves in which is called the “people service profit” philosophy. We are firm believer that if we treat our people well and give them the due respect, they would provide the impeccable service for our customers, and then the business would come to FedEx.
In recent years, we have launched the concept of Purple Promise pledge where every FedEx employee take a pledge to say that they will make every FedEx experience outstanding.
So we advocate employees, especially customer-interfacing ones, to delight and exceed our customers in terms of the customer experience. And whenever we see employees exhibit this behaviour, we make a big deal out of it – whether it is the direct manager in a workgroup meeting who would illustrate the behaviour, or myself, where I would include some of these examples in my regular business updates.
We also create a whole purple promise culture where we also have a set of simple tokens of giveaways to remind our employees. When we put employees who have demonstrated such behaviours on a pedestal by praising and recognising them, very quickly, the rest of the organisation sees that these are behaviours are important, and it rubs off on other employees.
What do you look for in job candidates?
At the end of the day, we are in the service industry. When you think about the FedEx brand, the couriers and sales executives are the ones who are interfacing with the customer. So the customer service mindset is of importance in our company.
But on the management front, there are three aspects that I look out for, one of it is ethics and ethos. That is a given as integrity is of extreme importance. The other aspect is interpersonal skills. Not only being able to delight customers, but if they are a manager, their ability to be empathic, to be and a negotiator, power-broker and the ability to network. The third aspect is that of basic logic skills, such as the ability to make a distinction between the symptom of a problem and a root cause.
How do you give feedback to your employees?
For me as a country head, communicating business results and what the external environment means to the organisation and our business is important. And we do this through newsletters, townhall meetings, small group informal meetings and even through a quarterly business update that I send out to employees.
On a more direct level for me dealing with my senior managers, having regular one-on-one meetings is important.
To me, feedback has to be timely. If something you see isn’t appropriate or positive and needs to be fed back, you need to do give your feedback within a day or two so that people would remember and understand the context of the feedback.
