| Abstract | As the position of the first operator an offshore gas platform in Vietnam, Gas Operation Division of Vietsovpetro (VSP Gas) has achieved many successes after 20 years (from 1995 to now). With this result, VSP Gas has extent to technical service in gas industry in Vietnam and got the first results with millions of US dollars per year from this market. Besides the achievement, manage system of VSP Gas has started to reveal some problems. The brain-drain, lower productivity, dissatisfaction of customers have appeared for 20 years. One of the most important reasons is the leadership. However, it has the low priority, especially, the mid-level leaders.
The study applied the theories and the practices about leadership to evaluate the situation of leadership in VSP Gas. The survey was carried out by sending questionnaires to employees in 7 onshore departments and 3 offshore platforms of VSP Gas to get information in 4 sections about the mid-level leader in the departments: environment of work place, characters of superiors, management skills and soft skills of leaders. The survey was entirely designed on a 5-Likert scale in these sections. The overall number of answers was 2070, 552 by female and 1518 by male. The women’s responses were milder than men’s one with more than 46% versus 40% of positive and very positive responses. There were more than 35% of surveyees have positive and very positive responses in 4 sections. While more than 15% of surveyees were disappointed with management skills and soft skill of leaders, more than 10% of surveyees were disagreed with environment and characters of leaders. Moreover, there is the warning signal when the neutral responses are dominant and more than 46% of employees have intention to leave their department or VSP Gas.
Besides, the face-to-face interviews were performed with 2 mid-level leaders in VSP Gas and 7 higher leaders in Director Board of VSP Gas, in other divisions in Vietsovpetro or PVGAS, the biggest client of VSP Gas. The aim of interviews was to clarify the reasons of low priority for leadership in VSP Gas, what the major skills that VSP Gas leader must have or what the main knowledge or skill that VSP Gas leader should be trained in future. There are many skills which mid-level leaders should be had not only management skills (vision, strategy, build plan, solving-problem, making-decision), but also soft skills (team work, communication, speech, language).
The collected data from the survey and the interviews was summarized, analyzed, discussed, compared deeply to find the real problems with mid-level leaders in VSP Gas. With the root causes of problems, the study suggested some solutions to solve the problems and to improve the leadership in VSP Gas, as well as the first step for the performance. There were 3 main recommendation such as building a benchmark system to periodically evaluate capacity of mid-level, building a human resources strategy to improve leadership (training, recruitment, promotion), building the business culture in which the talents are respected and appropriately used. |