The Wrong Brief: Why So Many Agencies Hire the Wrong Leader for Southeast Asia

There is a scenario I have seen play out more times than I can count.

A holding group or a founder-led independent agency decides it needs a new leader for Southeast Asia. The market is growing. The brief is ambitious. They move quickly. They look at who's available, who has the right agency network pedigree, who did well in London or New York or even Sydney. They make a hire that looks defensible on paper.

Twelve months later, the leader is struggling. Eighteen months later, they're gone.

The business has lost time, money, and momentum. And the people in the market, the ones who stayed, have lost confidence in the organisation's ability to understand them.

This pattern is not rare. It is, in my experience, the norm.

The question worth asking is: why does it keep happening? And what does getting it right actually look like?

---

The Brief Is Usually Wrong Before the Search Begins

Most briefs I receive for Southeast Asian leadership roles are written by people who are not based in Southeast Asia.

They are written by regional leads in Singapore who are themselves relatively new to the region. Or by global talent teams who understand the org chart but not the market. The brief captures what the business needs the role to do. It rarely captures what the market requires the person to be.

Southeast Asia is not a single market. It is a collection of distinct economies. Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and more, each with its own language, business culture, creative sensibility, and client relationship dynamic. A leader who thrives running a single, cohesive team in a Western market will often struggle to hold coherence across a region this fragmented and fast-moving.

The first pitfall is treating the brief like a skills checklist rather than a cultural and contextual challenge.

The Prestige Trap

The second pitfall is what I call the prestige trap.

Hiring managers, under pressure to justify a decision to the board or to global, default to names that carry weight in the industry. Award-winning creative leaders. Former holding group executives. People with impressive LinkedIn profiles and international conference speaking credits.

These things are not irrelevant. But they are frequently irrelevant to what Southeast Asia actually demands.

A leader who built their reputation on the back of large, resourced teams in mature markets will find Southeast Asia disorienting. The infrastructure is leaner. The client relationships are more personal. The pace is different. Decision-making is more relational and less contractual. What looks like authority in a global context can come across as distance in Bangkok, Jakarta, or Ho Chi Minh City.

Prestige hires often underestimate the market. That is the fundamental problem. They arrive with answers for a context they do not yet understand.

Why Local Knowledge Is Not Optional

I have been operating in this region for over 25 years. I lived and worked in Bangkok. I speak Thai at a working level. I have networks in every major Southeast Asian market, built not through databases but through relationships developed over time.

None of that qualifies me to assume I understand everything. But it does mean I know what local knowledge actually looks like, and how easy it is to mistake surface-level familiarity for genuine depth.

The best agency leaders in Southeast Asia tend to share a specific quality: they know what they do not know, and they build trust with people who do. They do not parachute in with a global playbook. They ask questions. They spend time in the market before they start trying to change it.

They understand that in many Southeast Asian cultures, how you say something matters as much as what you say, and that trust is built through consistent presence over time, not through a strong opening performance.

An outsider can do this. It requires a particular kind of intellectual humility and cultural curiosity that not everyone has. The mistake organisations make is assuming that any experienced leader from a major market will be able to adapt. Some can. Many cannot.

The screening question is not 'has this person worked internationally?' It is 'how does this person behave when they do not have the answers?'

The Relationship Fallacy

There is a related mistake that deserves naming separately: hiring for relationships rather than for leadership.

Clients often want a leader who 'knows the clients.' This is understandable. Client relationships are the lifeblood of any agency. But there is a meaningful difference between someone who has relationships in the market and someone who can build the leadership architecture that sustains client relationships at scale.

I have seen this go wrong in both directions. An organisation hires someone with deep client connections, only to find that those connections are personal to the individual and do not transfer to the agency. The clients liked the person. They are not interested in the organisation.

Conversely, an organisation hires a strong operational leader who cannot open doors, and the business stagnates because new client relationships take years to build.

The right brief is honest about which problem the organisation is actually trying to solve. Leadership capability and relationship capital are both real, but they are not the same thing, and conflating them leads to disappointment on both sides.

What Selecting Well Actually Looks Like

A good selection process for a Southeast Asian agency leader starts earlier than the search.

Before any names are put forward, the organisation needs clarity on three things: what the market genuinely requires right now, what the business can realistically offer a leader in return, and what the first 90 days need to accomplish.

That last point matters more than people realise. The first 90 days in a Southeast Asian leadership role are not a listening tour. They are an audition, for the team, for clients, and for the market. A leader who arrives without a clear understanding of what early success looks like will default to the behaviours that worked in their previous context. That is almost always the wrong starting point.

The search itself should be genuinely market-mapped. Not limited to who is actively available or who surfaces through the usual channels. The best candidates for these roles are often not looking. They are succeeding somewhere else. The question is whether the opportunity is compelling enough, and whether the approach to them is credible enough, to earn a real conversation.

Assessment should go beyond competency frameworks and career review. Leadership style, motivational patterns, and how a person functions under pressure and in ambiguous environments all matter enormously in this context. I use the Enneagram as part of how I think about leadership fit, not because it is a neat sorting mechanism, but because it surfaces the kind of self-awareness and relational intelligence that Southeast Asia demands.

And the process should not end at offer acceptance. The transition period is where the most value is lost. A new leader who is not properly supported through their first six months in the market is a significant risk, regardless of how well they were selected.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

A failed senior hire in Southeast Asia costs more than the fee you paid to find the person.

It costs the 12 to 18 months of commercial momentum you did not build. It costs the relationships that frayed while the wrong person was in the role. It costs the internal credibility of the HR or regional leadership team that made the call. And it costs the people in the market who had to work under someone who did not understand them, or worse, did not try to.

In a region where senior talent is genuinely scarce, the reputational cost matters too. The market is smaller than it looks. Word travels. An organisation that is known for placing and then losing leaders quickly will find it harder to attract the right candidates next time.

The economics are clear. The quality of the process is not overhead. It is risk management.

A Closing Thought

Southeast Asia will continue to be one of the most complex and most rewarding leadership environments in the global creative economy. The organisations that navigate it well are not the ones with the deepest pockets or the strongest global brand. They are the ones that approach the market with genuine curiosity, honest assessment of what they need, and the patience to find someone who is actually right for it.

The brief is never just about the role. It is about the context the role lives inside.

Get that right first, and the rest of the process becomes considerably easier.

---

JM is the founder of Tripitakka, a Singapore-based boutique executive search and leadership advisory consultancy operating exclusively within the global creative economy. He has spent over 25 years recruiting and advising senior leaders across Asia Pacific.