Alex Jensen: It is Tuesday December 14^th, you’re listening to Koreabizcast with the KBLA. I’m your host Alex Jensen, how certain are your plans for 2022 on a scale of not very to about as much as they can be. I asked because nearly half of 101 firms among South Korea’s top 500 have no investment plans for 2022 or yet to decide on them according to a poll commissioned by the Korea Economic Research Institute, perhaps some of our business leaders would benefit from the advice of our next guest who has decades of experience consulting and coaching across Seoul, Singapore, and New York city. Before that, let me give a shout out to our sponsor making today’s episode possible. The Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, stylish elegance in the very heart of the city.

Alex Jensen: As we go in search of guidance and inspiration, we can now welcome Chris Sotomayor, Head of PERSOLKELLY Consulting Korea. Thank you so much for joining us.

Chris Sotomayor: Thank you, Alex. Glad to be here.

Alex Jensen: Now, I think we got to start with your own part of the story first. You’ve been in Korea multiple times already in multiple guises. Can you talk us through that place?

Chris Sotomayor: Sure. So overall my career, I spent the first 10 years of my career after graduating from Harvard in Management Consulting, and I came to Korea, and I worked for McKinsey in the Seoul office. And then later I worked for Samsung Electronics and their global marketing operations team is kind of an internal consultant. And so, my first time in Korea was from March of 2000 until December of 2004. And I went back to the US, I kept doing consulting and then the global financial crisis hit. And it was really like a nuclear bomb, a lot of things that I thought were certainties turned out to be completely uncertain. So, I decided to make a shift, I left consulting and I started focusing on coaching. And I came to Korea, and I started working with lots of Korean clients. And I ended up working with clients from virtually every major Korean conglomerate, Samsung Group, LG, POSCO, Amorepacific, Hyundai, KOLON group, and lots of others. I ended up doing individual coaching and I did group coaching, and I did programs for universities like Seoul National University, and I did programs for the Korea Financial Investment Association, and for the Asan Academy. So, I really enjoyed working with people, you know, both a combination of helping them improve their communication skills as well as helping them improve their leadership development. And that took me up to 2015, where I had an opportunity to go to Singapore, and I joined INSEAD, and their Career Development Center, and I coached MBAs and executive MBAs who are looking for postgraduate career opportunities. So, we work with lots of companies coming to recruit. That took me through, I went back to the US, my father had gotten ill, so I wanted to go back to the US and be closer to him. I joined UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School as a coach, I work with MBAs on their financial students in the finance sector going after investment banking and corporate finance jobs. And then I went out on my own, ran my own coaching practice until my wife was Korean. And I decided to come back to Korea this year in March. And when I came back shortly afterward, I met Yumi at PERSOLKELLY, and we hit it off really well. And I’m helping to grow our Learning Academy Business as part of PERSOLKELLY Consulting Korea that brings us to today.

Alex Jensen: It’s an amazing story, what a resume and that’s probably the short version, right? So, it there’s a lot to dig into especially with this latest part of your journey. But to sketch out some of the background a little further. How does working Korea compare with some of those other places that you’ve been based in and how is it also developed over that time?

Chris Sotomayor: Well, I think the amazing thing about Korea, and what keeps drawing me back to Korea is just Korean people are really awesome. They have so much heart and passion. And they really like to learn, and they embrace new technology. But at the same time, they really, really respect their traditions. and their culture. And they really like it when you learn about their culture, and they love to share their culture with you. So, you know that that’s really what I love most about Korea. What I find fascinating is, you know, when I first came to Korea back in the year 2000, it was quite different. You know, I can tell you one story, when I was working for McKinsey, we were working for, you know, Hanil Bank which later became part of Woori bank. And we were doing a pilot project for the first CRM to launch in Korea. And we were doing, we were working with this the senior level Korean executive in the IT department, and he really didn’t like the McKinsey consultants very much. And we had this simultaneous interpreter who would work with us so we would speak in English, and she could immediately translate it to Korean. And then the executives would speak in Korean, and she would immediately translated back to English, she was really good, the simultaneous interpreter, and she had this nervous habit, she would spin around this pencil while she was listening, you know, before she would do her simultaneous interpretation, well, this executive got really angry, and was yelling at us, and in fact, started cursing at us. And she got so shocked, she snapped the pencil right in her hands in the middle of doing interpretation. So, you know, at that time, I Korean was really bad. So, I had no idea what the guy was saying. But I could tell from her pencil snap, it was obviously, something really, really not pleasant. So, you know, there was a time when working with Korean companies could be really tough and very strong hierarchy, like a senior level person who doesn’t even really want to talk to somebody have a more junior level. But I think that that culture is changing, and Korea is becoming, you know, a little less hierarchical, you know, it’s adopting more of the cultural norms of the West. But I hope that doesn’t happen too soon. Because I think part of what makes Korea great is that it is different from the West in, there are some unique things about Korea that make it a great place to work.

Alex Jensen: Great assessment. And I also wanted to ask you a bit about those roles, what would you say would be some of the big differences for you in both job satisfaction and your specific skill set between consulting and coaching?

Chris Sotomayor: So, I mean, I love consulting, and I recommend anybody that has an opportunity to get experience in consulting because especially if you have the opportunity to work for, you know, a management consulting company, where they’re working with the most senior level clients, you learn a lot, you really understand some of the most important challenges that companies are attempting to address, you know, growth strategies or turning around a business, those kinds of things, really, really amazing projects. So consulting is great. The issue with consulting, you know, as I saw, during my experience at INSEAD, and Kenan-Flagler where, you know, we would see, hundreds of MBAs graduate every year. And consulting is a really huge industry for a lot of MBA graduates. But the reason that those firms are recruiting all the time is because the turnover is really high, the lifestyle of a consult of a management consultant is really tough. So, if you know, typically, you’re traveling four days out of five, you’re going to another small town, it’s not like you’re doing work in the most glorious locations, regardless of where your home office might be, when you’re working for a client, you’re probably going out to someplace that may not be so glamorous, you’re away from your family, you’re staying in a hotel, eating hotel food all the time, working very long hours, the clients often really strongly dislike you because they’re always afraid, when a management consultant shows up. You know, what happens if a management consultant makes a recommendation that results in me losing my job. So those things make consulting really tough. If you’re trying to raise a family, you know, consulting is not really the best industry for that. Although, you know, many consulting firms are making stronger efforts to make it a more hospitable environment for people that have, you know, the one to raise families and stuff like that. But it’s, you know, at its heart, it’s really hard, long hours, often not so respected by clients, but you learn a lot and you work with really intelligent people. So, you know, that part is great. It’s just not for everybody for a long time.

Alex Jensen: Yeah. And switching to the coaching side of the story, how is that very different?

Chris Sotomayor: So, what draws me to coaching is, you know, a lot of times as a consultant, you’re brought in to help solve a problem. And the problem is not so much structural, it’s not really a problem of the business or the market per se, very often the problem is the leadership team, the leadership team often creates the very problems that they have to hire consultants to come in and help them fix. So as a coach, you know, you’re really working one on one, or in a small group coaching, you may be working in a group, but more often than not, in my experience, it’s been one on one, you’re working with an executive, and if that executive is coachable, you know, that they can really understand get some honest feedback from a 360 of people reporting to them, or peers, or sometimes their superiors letting them know, where they need to make some improvement where they need to make some change. And a coach can sort of be that objective guide to help them to make that change. So, you can really see leaders change. And if a leader improves that can have a huge impact on the culture of a company on the success of a company on the growth of a company. So, for all those reasons, coaching is immensely rewarding. And, you know, a lot of the reasons why people sometimes leave consulting is you often hear consultants say, you know, I don’t really feel ownership of the work I do. We know a consulting project might be two or three months, you do intensive research, you present some recommendations to a client, sometimes the client says, “Hey, thanks so much, appreciate it”. And then that report just ends up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. Whereas when you’re coaching, like, if you’re engaged with your client, and you’re meeting with him or her every week, or every couple of weeks, you know, over the course of six months, you can really see a change because oftentimes you’ll do a 360 assessment before the coaching engagement begins. And then at the end of six months, you do another 360 assessments. And you can see the scores change the area that the person you know, wanted to change, they’re usually successfully able to change it. And again, design an executive coaching engagement, that’s going to be successful, you’re going to focus on just a few small changes, you’re not asking somebody to change everything, but you work on, you know, two or three things at one time. And somebody can really make a change, and it can really improve an organization and improve somebody’s career.

Alex Jensen: So, for you now bringing this all that experience, 24 years of consulting and coaching on strategy, technology, marketing, finance, and human resources to this table of PERSOLKELLY, can you tell us how you’ve gone about your tasks since March?

Chris Sotomayor: So PERSOLKELLY is a great company, it’s a combination Kelly Services which is an American firm which, you know, has a strong presence merged with PERSOL group, PERSOL group is actually based in Japan and PERSOL group is like the number one Human Resources firm, solutions firm in Japan. So, for an APEC, Kelly back in the US realized APEC was not we’re not it’s maybe not it’s its strength. So, but personal in Japan had a lot more expertise. So that combination of PERSOL and Kelly, Kelly is the number one recruitment firm, especially in Korea, you know, combined with PERSOL, we now provide the complete suite of HR solutions whether it be you know, recruiting staff, or developing your staff. I mean, because for any company to win in the future, it’s a constant war for talent. The companies that do the best job of recruiting people, developing them, retaining them, those companies are going to win. The companies that struggle to attract great talent, struggle to develop that talent struggled to hold on to that talent. They’re going to have a really hard time succeeding, you know, as especially as our economy continues to digitize so PERSOLKELLY is really about providing that complete solution to our clients. Whereas our historical strength has been in recruiting, both full time and temporary recruiting. And now we layer on top of that, a suite of consulting from organizational development to the learning academy and executive coaching to career transition and outplacement to advisory services. So, you know, there’s a lot that we do to help our clients because that’s conversations that were used to be primarily about recruiting. Well, it turns out that recruiting by itself, you know, may not be the full solution, there may be more that’s needed. And that’s where, you know, we step up to provide that full solution.

Alex Jensen: And with uncertainty still overshadowing just about everything, no matter what we’re really talking about these days, especially in the context of Koreabizcast. And the stats that I briefly mentioned earlier, further confirming the state of uncertainty hovering around us. How does that color the advice and work that you’re doing now?

Chris Sotomayor: So, what we hear from our clients is that they’re really anxious about the future. I mean, most leaders are really thinking about digital transformation. And in you know, what does that mean? It means they’re thinking about competing in the future, the spread of technology, the advancements in technology, have changed the way consumers find products, choose to buy products, learn about products, demands and expectations of customer service, I mean all of that. A lot of companies have legacy business models that that do need to change, and the way they change. Again, this goes back to what I spoke about a little bit earlier, the war for talent. I don’t think that companies have the exact answers yet. But if they have smart people and they unleash the capabilities of their smart people, you know, those people are going to develop those future solutions that are going to help companies when the customers of the future. And I think that a lot of executives we speak with, they’re uncertain about what they need to do, to develop their people to have those capabilities to compete in this, you know, this digitally transformed future where we’re customers are much more sophisticated. And so, what we do is focus on, we understand your people are going to need to be developed, you know, historically a lot of companies like to hire experts from outside, external, like, oh, where we get, you know, we’re weak at software development, let’s go hire somebody who’s really excellent at software development. But the research shows, sometimes when you hire somebody who’s an expert that success doesn’t always transfer to their new organization. Success has a context to it. And that support structure that somebody might have had at a previous company may not exist when they go to a new company. And so oftentimes, a hiring strategy of just going out and buying talent that can, you know, bring in new capabilities to your organization doesn’t always work so well. So, companies are going to have to shift a little bit more and focus on developing the talent they need inside their own organizations, and not just going out and hiring it. And so, it’s, build or buy. And of course, we can help companies to buy when they are seeking external talent. But they can’t replace every single employee of their firms. They need to, you know, help their existing employees upskill and reskill to have the capabilities to serve that customer of the future. And that’s where, you know, we step in, and we address a variety of different training needs, whether it be, you know, the next generation leadership, whether it be you know, future skills, whether it be health and wellness. I mean, one thing COVID has certainly brought, you know, brought to the forefront is how important it is to have a, you know, a healthy work environment, a healthy workforce, you know, in companies I think, are rising if they want to compete with, you know, the leading companies, then they have to create a work environment that’s really going to be competitive, that’s going to give, you know, that employee experience becomes super, super important, more important than it ever has before. And it’s exciting to be part of creating sort of that that workplace of the future.

Alex Jensen: When you talked before about changing careers work culture without necessarily taking away some of the good things. Does that happen organically? or do people need to consciously and actively take steps that you would recommend?

Chris Sotomayor: So, I think sometimes it can happen organically, you know, what I observed from my, so there’s two kinds of companies in Korea there. They’re the Korean corporations that are, you know, that the native corporations of Korea, the conglomerates and their subsidiaries, and then you have the multinational corporations that are, you know, growing competing, they have branch offices in Korea, etc. And I think it’s interesting. You see, in the Korean organizations, there’s a lot of work being done to change the culture because they’re quite aware that the sort of that legacy hierarchical, like, a junior person cannot even speak to a senior person or ask a question that culture has to go away. Because that culture does not help that organization compete for the future. The multinationals, usually their offices in Korea, you know, there may be a regional office, and the regional office sort of sets the tone for APEC, you know, and they inherit the culture from global HQ whether that be in the US or in Europe somewhere. And then you have a regional office that might be in Singapore and Hong Kong and then you have your local Korea office. So, you know, with those companies, there’s a cultural component that sort of it’s organic but it’s being passed, you know, from the HQ, I think, within the Korean native companies, I think they are trying to change and you see often, you know, recently news announcements, like I think Samsung Electronics just recently announced that they were promoting a great number of young people to be senior executives for the first time, they were doing away with minimum, you know, minimum time requirements. I remember when I worked for Samsung, many, many, many years ago, I had asked, you know, how long does it take if you’re, you know, Gwajang (과장) which is a manager to be promoted to a Chajang (차장) which is a senior manager. And they told me “Well, you have to be at the company for a minimum of six years” and, you know, that doesn’t work so well for young people, young people, like a lot of the MBAs I’ve worked with, the graduates of INSEAD and other programs, you know, they want to be promoted really fast. So, for them if you say you have to wait six years just to get promoted one level, that’s really not going to work. So, I think that’s why Samsung just announced there doing away with those kinds of minimum time, you know, requirements before you can get promoted because putting those kinds of structures in place is going to make you lose talent. And again, the companies that win the future are going to have, be the, you know, the talent magnets, the companies that really attract the best and brightest people. And the companies that can’t attract and can’t hold on to their best and brightest, they’re gonna have a really hard time growing and surviving in the future.

Alex Jensen: Just finishing on your own personal note, I’d like to ask you about your track record, it says on your LinkedIn that you have a perfect track record of generating results to clients and I don’t doubt it but I’m just curious how you would measure success?

Chris Sotomayor: So, I measure success by asking my clients all the time when I engage with them as a coach, how do you define success? What makes it worthwhile to engage somebody like me to help you, and if they, you know, by their own standards, that’s what we strive to achieve. And again, as a coach, it’s much, much easier to deliver that kind of positive result. I think that when you’re a management consultant, it’s not always easy because there have been many cases where companies spent millions of dollars on consulting engagements. And at the end, they got a nice report, and that report does wind up gathering dust on a shelf. And, you know, no real action was taken. So that’s the other thing. Consultants sometimes are really great at making meaningful recommendations, but the clients may not have the capability to execute. So, when I say that I have a perfect record. That’s more on the coaching side, by the way, I would not state that about consulting. But you know, as a consultant if you design a consulting engagement the right way and you’re checking in with your sponsor continuously from the beginning of the engagement to the end, there should be, you know, no major disappointments but sometimes it still ends up happening.

Alex Jensen: Well, I personally love the idea of having a coach that I could turn to for all manner of things and for those who have benefited from this. Thank you very much to the likes of Chris for providing such services. Chris Sotomayor who is Head of PERSOLKELLY Consulting Korea, thank you so much for joining us today and taking the time to share your many insights from decades of experience around half of which has been here in Korea.

Chris Sotomayor: Thank you so much, Alex. It was my pleasure.

Alex Jensen: And I’d also like to thank again our sponsor for making today’s episode possible, the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, stylish elegance in the very heart of the city and see you again tomorrow.