Client Stories
Fuji Electric Malaysia – A Case for Leadership Training in Technical Industries
Interview with Chong Nee Hwa, Executive Director of Fuji Electric Malaysia
by Ashvini Pandian
Originally from Sarawak, Chong Nee Hwa began his career in 1984 at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Penang as a manufacturing engineer. Twelve years later, he moved to a (then) start-up called Fuji Electric Malaysia with a unique opportunity to grow the company from the ground up as one of its pioneers. A practitioner of The 7 Habits since his early days at AMD, Mr. Chong shares the impact The 7 Habits had on him and on his approach to developing people at Fuji Electric Malaysia (FEM).
How did your career in leadership begin?
I first became a leader while in Operations at AMD. I was very junior then, compared to the other leaders. AMD at that time was very committed to leadership development – it started with The 7 Habits in the early 90s, and before that, we had other leadership programs. When The 7 Habits came in, I had the opportunity to be trained and certified by Mr. Pandian in Port Dickson, after attending the class by Dr. Dee Groberg in KL. I was a fairly junior facilitator at that time. By the time I left AMD, I was the department head for Facilities.
So your 7 Habits journey started back at AMD when you were a new leader. How did the 7 Habits come in once you moved to FEM?
When I came over to Fuji Electric, it was a new start-up company, and I was a pioneer with other managers. When we started settling down with the start-up, we planned out our human resource development. Naturally, with The 7 Habits being a proven program before at AMD, we brought it in for FEM. Over the years the training went up and came down again because other priorities kicked in – operational priorities and business needs. In more recent years we brought The 7 Habits training up again because it is a core item for the young engineers and young managers to learn. We do this in order to maintain a consistent leadership method and language in the company. Our company values and mission statement were built on the foundation of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
The Habits were there almost from Day 1, then! How big was FEM when you were first rolling out The 7 Habits training?
Initially we had about 600 people and then we grew over the years to 2200 or 2300. Now we have about 1600 people. When we first started, we were making magnetic discs for hard disk drives. Now, we are fully a semiconductor IGBT and semiconductor wafer fab and back-end assembly manufacturer in Malaysia.
Was it your goal to have everybody at FEM trained in The 7 Habits?
Primarily we trained the exempt staff (engineers, officers and above), and then the senior management. Those are the people that we want to target, as they are the ones that can influence change, and can decide for the rest. I would think probably a couple hundred of our staff have been trained to date. We didn’t train those on the production line – the operators.
How did soft skills training help the leaders at FEM?
One of the leadership challenges we had was trying to bring people up to the level of understanding where when you talk in certain terms, even with 7 Habits language, they understand what you’re referring to. We aimed to make The 7 Habits already a part of you, and a part of everyone. Today, if I talk to those who have been trained at the company and I say “Is this a Quadrant 1 item or a Quadrant 2 item?” they know what we’re talking about. If it is Q1, then you do it straight away. And if it’s Q2 then perhaps you schedule a time to sort it out – take care of the Q1 item first.
I must say, when I look back at the material in The 7 Habits, Leadership Greatness, and The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team which we subsequently enrolled in – when I look at those, there are still fundamental principles inside which I could use 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, five years ago, and even now, because they are based on fundamental principles, and principles don’t change, right? It’s only the way you deliver and apply it that changes as you evolve with the times and with technology.
Is this training still relevant for the younger generation in your workforce?
Yes, I think the leadership challenges over the years remain the same whether this was 30 years ago, 25 years ago, or now. Gen Z and Millennials are more exposed to the internet and to social media, so whatever we got exposed to 25 or 30 years ago in about one month, they can now get it within one day, or a few hours perhaps, because of technology. They can just Google something about leadership, and there are so many different things coming up – but which do you use?
In the organizational context, once we established that we believe in The 7 Habits at FEM, we made it a part of our system. It became the core curriculum they learn and they will continue to explore from there. It gives them a foundation. So whatever they learn from other avenues, for example other leadership programs, it will be part and parcel to complement the foundation they have in The 7 Habits, rather than to contradict it. That’s how I think things evolve over the years.
One of the challenges that organizations face is justifying spending their training budgets on “soft skills” or leadership training, especially for highly technical industries like manufacturing and engineering. Having now experienced the rollout of The 7 Habits at 2 highly technical organisations, what do you see as the business case for running soft skills training?
That’s a good point. Soft skills training is usually not easy to justify especially for supervisory or management level leadership, because people don’t see the results immediately. If you have hard skills training, you will see some results immediately after you teach them – by the next day or hour. It can be applied straight away.
For soft skills and leadership training, it’s going to take a while. Measuring how people effectively lead others may not be directly visible. Top management might say “Enough of all this soft skills training, I’d like to spend the money on hard skills training that’s directly related to the day-to-day operations and KPIs.” But when you do a survey of the organisation, you can see the peoples’ sense of belonging – how cohesively they are working together, how motivated they are, and how they believe in their managers or their department. Those are key indicators from leadership training which we can see over time, and which have an impact on the company. So I’m a very firm believer of leadership training.
The facilitators are equally important, because how do you lead the participants to believe that this is the right method or skill to use, either now or in the future? I was personally very impressed with the facilitators at Leadership Resources Malaysia, both back then, and even today I am still very impressed. Facilitators like Mr. Pandian and Mr. CF Wong, they were the initial pioneers of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and they each had their own way of delivering the program, which got it into me – I could internalise it easily. I could appreciate it. And it made me believe that The 7 Habits can change me for the better.
So, another justification for running these training courses is a matter of believing that it is workable. There may be people thinking that other programs are better, but other programs are kind of hit and run to me. They come in and they’re not sustainable in months or years to come. But The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it has been here for at least 30 years now. And over the years it has evolved. I believe it is necessary for the younger generation to learn this, even though it’s not easy. But if I have 100 people, and I can get about 60 of them to be successful, or even 50, that’s good enough.
You mentioned that you had run several different courses over the years – The 7 Habits, Leadership Greatness (now called The 4 Essential Roles of Leadership), and The 6 Critical Practices for Leading a Team. Why did you select these programs?
They are built on the same principles from The 7 Habits. It all comes from personal greatness first, and only when you get to personal greatness, can you move on to organisational greatness. We think there are strong connections there. The facilitators from Leadership Resources Malaysia are also aligned on these fundamental principles of leadership.
Now we are also engaging Leadership Resources Malaysia for Crucial Accountability and Crucial Conversations training.
Effective leaders should be able to listen attentively and know when to speak up and when to sit down and let other people talk. That is the art of being a great leader.
Do you think it makes a difference to have internal certified trainers versus having Leadership Resources Malaysia come in and run the training?
I think having external trainers is more effective. Over the years I think internal trainers are good for hard skills training because you can associate the issues and the problems much better and it’s much more real life when you deliver the training. But for management leadership skills training, sometimes it is a little bit difficult to get things through because the participants may have a perception or paradigm of you, being in your current position at the company. So there could be some conflicting perspectives on how things run in the company. But if you are a totally independent facilitator from outside, it’s easier for the participants to see that you are objective and neutral. So, it is much easier to get things through and there’s a higher chance they will listen to you attentively and believe you because they don’t have an existing perception of you. They may be more willing to take in the information because they don’t feel you have another agenda to convince them of.
There’s a difference though if the internal trainer is a highly respected person within the company, such that even by standing there without doing any teaching, they would have listened to her or him already. Whatever she or he says, it goes. Then it’s a big difference.
What would you say was a defining moment for you as a leader?
Well, the most satisfying moment is seeing my staff or one of my managers be successful. When they have done great, that’s a very satisfying moment for me – knowing somebody can carry the baton, whether internally or externally as a leader in another organisation. Everybody has their own way of doing things – I’m not trying to duplicate them like me, because I have my own way of doing things and my own personality. And they have their own personality, and their own different EQ. As long as they can be successful on their own, that’s the goal, right?
That’s a perspective you don’t hear very often – many leaders want to mold their people to be just like them! When you develop leaders, what are the top traits an effective leader should have?
Listening skills. Most classical leaders can’t wait to speak. They like to speak and share their thoughts and make their point. But as a leader, you need to be able to listen. In the Malaysian culture if you are quiet as a leader, you are perceived as passive or weak. But being able to listen attentively is not easy – you need to be patient. Effective leaders should be able to listen attentively and know when to speak up and when to sit down and let other people talk. That is the art of being a great leader.
Leaders should also be able to influence others and expand their circle of influence. To do that they must also carry themselves very professionally and be a respectable individual.
Lastly, they should be able to communicate very clearly whether it’s verbal or written. The art of being able to deliver your thoughts clearly is very important. Sometimes we have a good leader, but they are not able to communicate and most of the time they get misunderstood – then they end up in disasters. So it’s Habit 5, seek first to understand – listen first. Then articulate yourself well afterwards.
If you were to pick, what has been your biggest takeaway from The 7 Habits? What has really stuck with you until today?
There are many points that have stuck with me. The Private Victory is important. We always have a choice. We all have a choice to react or to respond, rather than having no choice. It’s a matter of what we want to give up and what we want to maintain, but the choice is always there. In reality it may not be so easy to make because we want this and we want that. If I take this, I’m going to lose that. That is the reality of our lives. Keeping that principle in mind, or Habit 1 in mind, it helps us to make conscious choices aligned to our personal missions.
The other point is also part of the Private Victory – beginning with the end in mind, Habit 2. This is not easy, and sometimes if you are not clear on the end in mind, you can be moving around in circles for a while.
Thinking win-win will be the one that I would add. How can we help each other meet objectives. Can we find an optimal outcome together? The Private Victory is the foundation, because without that, we can’t move on to organisational internal cooperation – interdependence.
As you look back over your career, is there anything that you think you would do differently?
I would probably be more aggressive in terms of approach and widen my circle of influence a bit more. My health too – I would work on the four dimensions of renewal in Habit 7 a bit more – body, heart, mind, spirit. I would encourage people to continue to Sharpen the Saw now while they are young. Once you have worked on all four dimensions early, you can continue to polish it, and today you’ll be a very different person.
I would like to also influence young people, including our own children, into The 7 Habits – and not just those in the organisation, but also the people around me.
Thank you for your time, and for sharing the impact of our training programs on your career journey and on Fuji Electric Malaysia, Mr. Chong!
