Giving speech at the seminar, Dr. Nguyen Quoc Viet - Director of Research and Partnership Development Office, said “In organizing international seminars and workshops, UEB’s strategy determines to become the connection of world leading institutions in delivering advanced knowledge and experiences in economics, public management policies and business administration to Vietnam”.

At the beginning, Dr. Johnson stated “Using psychology to help organizations be successful, while also developing the success and well-being of the people within the organization”. The speaker also mentioned, leadership and HR management cannot be separated that explains the title of the seminar.

Leaders, managers and senior staff from enterprises, universities
and UEB’s alumni in the seminar

The main topics of the seminar: (i) leadership/HR today - merging: leadership challenges in Vietnam, exploring leadership (culturally neutral views), emerging views of leadership; (ii) leadership tomorrow: skills needed from now on, developing useful leadership skills.

According to Dr. Johnson, the influences of national development, climate (geographic) on leadership style are even greater than the national culture. The presentation gave main current issues in Vietnam are employee: strikes in private firms, reasons and impacts of those strikes. Some other significant information about development in Vietnam such as economics, industry and social issues were also given.

The presentation summarised studies related to leadership and explored the implications of their outcomes, and fit them in with our existing models and practices. The scale of Transactional and Transformational gave by the speaker to measure employee’s commitment. Moreover, significant needed skills for leader in different period of time (1930, 1980 and 2010) were listed. Today, when selecting leader, it should depends up on factors: IQ (intelligence quotient) + EQ (Emotional Quotient) and CQ (Cultural Quotient).

Recent findings about: Organization performance (organisation alignment, conversation quality) and Emploee performance (changing - explaining 68%, impact of workplace friendships) are analysed deeply by Dr. Johnson. The speaker pointed out “People with 3 or more close friends at work were 96% more likely to be extremely satisfied with their lives”. Dr. Johnson showed today needed skills for leader are: motivated by mystery, risk tolerance, scans ahead, tackles tough issues, creates excitement, flexible, simplifier and focus. Furthermore, in order to develop the EI (Emotional Intelligence) and CI (Cultural Intelligence), Goleman gave 5 competencies: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy an social skills.

During and at the end of the seminar, audiences raised many practical questions that they faced such as: who can become the leader? Is is ideal to have close friends at workplace? How to improve the employee’s engagement? Solution for workplace relationship issues, etc.

The summary of survey and evaluation form submitted by attendances showed positive feedbacks about speaker, the new important information and how the given studies are useful to their situation also indicated. Most of the audiences satisfied for the seminar in terms of: organizing, welcoming and detailed information.