How Founders Grow Talent – And What Their Techniques Tell Us in the AI Era

As AI reshapes industries, executives are asking where tomorrow’s future-ready talent will come from. Asia’s leading founders offer a solution: building from within, stretching talent and evaluating them over the long term.

There is a conventional approach to assembling talent: buy it. Recruit the best people, pay what it takes, and watch them build a business. It’s not a bad strategy, if expensive, but it faces challenges in Asia where the availability of skilled labor struggles to keep up with expansive and dynamic economies.

There, founder-entrepreneurs have spent half a century doing something that many companies are only now discovering they need to do: treating talent not as a resource to be acquired and discarded, but as a capacity to be cultivated, stretched and retained. These founders are the exception rather than the rule – even within Asia, many companies still manage talent conventionally. But the practices of these standout few are worth examining, because they speak to a challenge every organization now faces.

As generative AI reshapes the workforce, displacing some roles while creating demand for capabilities that didn’t exist three years ago, the instincts that guided Asia’s greatest founders look like a competitive advantage. Leaders around the world can learn from their techniques.

Hiring for Character and Fit

It is striking how personally these founders engage with hiring. Many of them stay involved in interviews, seeing the selection of people as one of the most critical choices they can make. They value character that shows a willingness to learn and adapt, because they have learned that the workforce must reinvent itself repeatedly. They want people they can build a culture with, so that they thrive in the company by understanding the values and ambitions of the whole enterprise. As Jaime Augusto Zóbel de Ayala, whose family has run the Philippines’ Ayala Corporation for seven generations, says: “There may be tremendously talented individuals out there, but all these would be for naught if the right values and attitude are absent.”

At Japan’s consumer goods company Unicharm, CEO Takahisa Takahara is directly involved in all final senior interviews, and says they are “not ceremonial. It is an opportunity to determine whether the person is really needed by the company.” To make that determination, he wants to know about motivation and character. “We dig deep into the roots and ask questions to find out the essence of their motivation for applying for the job.”

Stretching Talent

A key principle in the Asian founder approach is to develop people by giving then more than they think they are ready for.

“If we are to maintain talent, we have to give them something very challenging to do,” says Suphachai Chearavanont, the third-generation leader of Thailand’s CP Group, one of Asia’s largest conglomerates. “With opportunity, if they succeed, it’s almost like incubating a start-up.” Anand Mahindra, chairman of India’s automotive manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra, wants his company to “become a factory for talent of the kind you want both culturally and talentwise.” That means creating a system strong in interventions and training, making it easier to fast-track people and push them to achieve their potential.

Employees in such an environment receive stretch assignments and opportunities to learn, develop and grow. Mahindra once gave a country head role to someone who had no relevant experience and had come through as an executive assistant, based on a sense that the employee could handle it. Today, that individual is president of a key Mahindra & Mahindra division. Owner-CEOs pride themselves on taking risks on people, looking for indicators of potential rather than traditional CV credentials. They also understand that taking these risks requires them to offer psychological safety and mentoring to employees as they are stretched, solving problems together and serving as back-up when big decisions need to be made.

But stretching is not only about challenge. These founders are aggressive about mobility, moving people between roles and functions so they never settle into a comfort zone. The emphasis is on rotation rather than retention in a single role. Often, they build policies to encourage this. Sanjiv Bajaj of India’s Bajaj Finance introduced a rule that if an employee wants to move to a role in another group company, managers have 90 days to make it happen. “So the bureaucracy, the idea that the boss can hold you back, doesn’t apply,” he says.

Equally important is building a sense of ownership. These founders give people the freedom to act and to own their decisions, trusting that this responsibility will turn capable employees into leaders. The combination of push, mobility and ownership is what stretches talent: people grow not because they are told to, but because they are given an environment that allows growth and rewards it.

This approach is particularly important in an AI-disrupted workforce. As automation reshapes some roles, an organization that has built a culture of stretch and rotation is better equipped to redeploy people – and to retrain them for work that did not exist a year ago.

The Movie, Not the Trailer

This approach requires a specific type of evaluation and reward. An employee who is hired and nurtured for the long term must have their performance reviewed on that timescale too. Dilip Shanghvi of India’s Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, a leader in the global life sciences industry, has a distinct approach to talent: “We have both a current and a savings account.” In other words, an employee’s historic contributions – their years of loyalty and resilience, their savings account – should not be erased by a spell of underperformance. “Before I ask people for loyalty, I am prepared to be loyal to them.”

This is not a sentiment. It is a calculation. Shanghvi has learned that durable performance flows from people over years, not quarters, and that the founder’s job is to create an environment in which long-term performance can flourish. The logic extends to risk-taking: if you want people to push themselves beyond what they think they can do, you have to tolerate the failures that come with it, and even celebrate the good ones – the ambitious bets that didn’t pan out but taught the organization something valuable. “Innovation requires tolerance for failure,” says Fang Hangbo, CEO of China’s appliance manufacturer Midea.

Ho Hung Anh, who has chaired Vietnam’s Techcombank since 2008, says this approach isn’t easy but is important. “In theory, talent development is the same everywhere, but what is important is whether you choose to go short-term or long-term,” he says. “I’ve decided to choose the harder way, which is the long-term way.” By reviewing performance over the length of the movie, rather than the highlights of the trailer, an institution cements loyalty and fosters cultural alignment between employer and employee.

A workforce built upon principles of continuous learning, alignment on a shared mission and reciprocal loyalty is better placed to flourish in a changing environment than one built upon more rigid hiring practices. In an era when so much capability can be generated by a machine, values and attitude will be a lasting differentiator.

Gautam Kumra is chairman of McKinsey's offices in Asia, based in Singapore.
Cheryl Lim is a partner at McKinsey, based in Kuala Lumpur.