LEADERSHIP SKILLS

Kia Motors is a car manufacturer from South Korea. Since 1998, it belongs to the Hyundai Motor Group, the fifth biggest automotive manufacturer in the world. The Hyundai Motor Group employees are a key factor of this success. To build on its success even further, a globally unified leadership competency model was developed.

In order for the model to be understood and accepted by the employees, they need to be well informed and convinced of its effectiveness. Hence, Kia Motors Europe, the European headquarters in Frankfurt, opted for a dialog picture method to explain the concept. Over a period of three months, a small task forced team created the new dialog picture “Leadership Competencies”. Already at a first glance it is clear what makes this dialog picture unique: The picture world is located in the interior of a Kia Sportage, which our illustrator replicated true to life. The message behind this picture world is both simple and strong. We know that our employees are capable of great things. And they need strong leadership to reach maximum speed.

Only then will we zoom ahead to the right direction. The dialog picture was divided into five areas, each of them represents one of the five leadership competencies in the model. They are easily recognizable thanks to the different colors of the ties and scarfs worn by the managers. For each competency, four specific behavior attributes are illustrated as scenes.

This is all about communicating the KIA vision to staff. The female manager actively shows the way with the vision sign, while the male manager sets concrete goals which will lead to the achievement of the vision.

This scene is about promoting staff development. The managers should establish a broad range of possibilities leading to development and make them available to staff. This is symbolised by the image of a car simulator. The employee uses the simulator to improve her driving skills, which can then be implemented on the street.

This scene refers to managers′ decision-making skills when it comes to strategic issues. Here, the manager is tasked with finding alternative decisions for the achievement of her goal and weighing them up against each other. Varying interests should also be taken into consideration here. In the end, the manager decides on solution A, because one of its advantages is that it offers the best customer satisfaction.

Equally important to KIA is the personal development of their staff. Managerial staff, too, should aim for continual personal development in order serve as a good role model and, ultimately, to make good decisions. With the aim of making good decisions, the manager here sharpens his pencil before he starts.

Laura Wilcke
HR Development Specialist Kia Motors Europe

"We, at Kia Motors, have a clearly defined vision and strategy for the coming years. That bears exciting challenges for us which we are going to tackle in collaboration with all of our employees. We know that our employees are capable of achieving great heights. In order for our colleagues to reach their goals and potential, we need to support them and offer guidance along the way. Therefore, as a first step, our HR team wanted to create a leadership culture in which our managers are empowered to manage their teams best. To reach this goal, a competency model was developed on a global level and communicated to the different regions. We, in the European Headquarters in Frankfurt, were looking for an additional tool, that enables us to even better communicate this competency model. It had to be something easily understandable, that connects with our managers on an emotional basis and creates motivation. Since we already have a dialogue picture for our Onboarding process, we knew that this method is appropriate and appreciated by our colleagues. The professional advice and creative implementation from Dialogbild during the conception phase proved that we were on the right track. During the workshop in Hamburg we designed a scene for each behavior attribute of our leadership competencies and brought the scenes together to form our dialog picture. The further development was done in the same constructive and professional way and within a short timeframe we received our final lively workshop sketch. We would like to thank the whole team for their incredible work and for providing us with yet another dialogue picture which enables us to communicate our competency model in an understandable and illustrative way!"