Background. China is one of the most attractive investment destinations for the biggestglobal automotive players, and Lean Manufacturing (LM) is their most established businessimprovement methodology enhancing the automotive industry’s performance. Despite intensiveinvestments in LM, the automotive industry is still not able to employ Lean philosophyeffectively at Chinese locations.Research aims. Theoretical and empirical questions arise on how to improve the situationin terms of Lean Manufacturing performance at Chinese locations. Thus, in the paper, wepose that if we assume leadership is the crucial enabler in LM implementation, there is anurgent need to address the conditions of Chinese leadership.Method. Basing on the content analysis of existing job offers we estimated the alignments ofdemands of the job posed by the unique context of Chinese culture with the profiles of candidatesthat are mostly wanted.Key findings. The content analysis revealed that in job offers there is an underestimation ofcultural intelligence skills. The aforementioned analysis led us to the proposition of how toimprove leadership in China by introducing a model of Chinese leadership center developmentdenoted as a !China Lean Center". The Center can be used by practitioners to developin-house skillful and culturally aware leaders in order to enable successful implementation ofLM at Chinese locations
