On the evening of October 27^th, Mr. Siming LI, who is a senior professional manager, CEO of UniTrust Finance and Leasing Corp., Vice Chairman of the China Association of Enterprises with Foreign Investment, and Chairman of the Leasing Business Committee, was invited to the Career Development Seminar at our School and teach the attending students how to become successful professional managers.

Mr. Siming LI, CEO of UniTrust Finance and Leasing Corp., sharing his tips on how to become successful professional managers

At the beginning of his speech, Mr. LI defined professional managers as a group of people who consider management work as their careers, have a certain level of professional knowledge and competence, and are given the rights to run their companies. There are a large number of professional managers in foreign-owned companies in China. However, Chinese professional managers account for just a very small ratio in the high-level management. According Mr. LI, it is probably because many Chinese professional managers are not fully equipped with the professionalism a professional manager should have. A professional manager first must be responsible at work for the stockholders and also for the market. In addition, a professional manager must have high professionalism and avoid mistakes that are intolerable professionally. Last and most importantly, a professional manager must have noble professional ethics.

Mr. LI reiterated the importance of planning in career development. He used his own experiences over the past 30-odd years as an example. He entered the Department of Foreign Languages, Xiamen University, at the age of fifteen and became a civil servant in 1984 soon after graduation. After a few years, when he was 24 years old, he faced a turning point in life and had to choose between studying at the MBA Program of HEC Paris for two years and working at the UN. He then chose to study in France and this decision helped to lay a solid foundation for his future career development as a professional manager.

According to LI, there are five steps for an employee to climb up the corporate ladder and become a CEO. First, he must start from managing himself to managing colleagues, from working individually to working with a team. Second, he must accumulate knowledge about the other people in the company and move from managing colleagues to managing managers. Third, he must know how to communicate with people from different levels or departments and move from managing managers to managing departments. Fourth, he must learn how to best allocate resources and think more about the interests of shareholders, moving from being a department leader to a high-level manager of the company. Fifth, he then must know how to build corporate cultures and decide the directions of the company’s future development, moving from high-level management to the CEO position. The final step will take a very long time to complete.

In addition, as Mr. LI pointed out, a professional manager must first know what the company core competitiveness is, then build professional management teams, develop quantifiable operation procedures and risk control points, cultivate professional talent, and last but most importantly, develop corporate cultures that will bring everyone in the company together.

At the end of his speech, Mr. LI stressed that an outstanding professional manager must have moral integrity, comprehensive professional knowledge, healthy mindset, good planning, and patience and persistence in order to continuously march forward along the long path of his career development.

Nov. 2, 2012