Global Leader

200,000,000 People... 

yes that’s 200 million people.

That’s how many people have joined the global workforce for the first time over the past decade. Technological advances have made it possible for workers living in regions that never before had access to global opportunities to join organisations across the world. These workers offer incredible promise including new outlooks and perceptions. But this talent can also be transient, bringing cultural diversity and high expectations which organisations either squander or harness.

2012 and beyond represent an exciting opportunity. But it comes with the challenge of understanding how to build global managers that can skilfully lead teams with very different cultural values and perspectives and to produce the results that organisations require.

The challenge of the next 10 years for leadership will be the ironing out of Eastern verses Western cultures. This has become even more pronounced with the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). 

Employees of western firms are often encouraged as part of the organisational values, to bring different perspectives to work by asking questions, pointing out issues and offering solutions. Successful Western companies operate an overt culture of continuous improvement through employee engagement. Consensus is highly valued and seen as a leadership skill. Employees are recognised and often rewarded for their insights in helping the organisation to move forward. Good managers encourage their teams with strap lines like ‘change for the better’ and ‘if you see something, say something’. In many strong organisations employees are empowered to try and solve problems first and then report how they fixed what they found.

In the BRIC, these values are not inherent in successful organisations. While the pursuit to make improvement and identify problems and make exist, the business culture preference is for employees, as subordinates, to hint at problems in the hope that management notices. There will be times when management miss the hint, leaving the problem unaccounted for.

In essence, the cultural difference lies in the western management assuming problems will be reported, discussed and solved, whereas the BRIC teams wait for leadership to notice problems and manage them.

As you can see, there are two completely different approaches required from leaders. As the global workforce shifts and integrates these two lines will become increasingly blurred and the job of the leader will become increasingly complex. This divergence highlights the necessity for business leaders to develop skills and capability to be globally and culturally savvy. 

The past few recessionary years which have taken place predominantly in the West have verified that western business methods are not the only ones that can bring success. Financial instability has silenced the rhetoric that capitalism is king, that western business schools have all the answers and that expatriate leadership is the solution to every emerging market organisations challenges.

As Europe and the US falls into great dismay financially, the BRIC, powered by what is an almost opposite business culture, are zooming ahead.

This new paradigm, combined with the reality that these global interactions are relatively new and growing more intense every day, has left a vacuum of leadership, because most firms assume employees will just ‘figure it out’.

A decade ago, being assigned to a foreign team would require extensive training, but now, time and speed demand that people  ‘hit the ground running’ and too many organisations are seeking a quick fix by sending someone in from the West to the East or visa-versa. The cost in terms of lost productivity and the consequent movement of human capital is unseen, but significant.

The good news today is that we are experiencing and intense worldwide effort to engage across business cultures, and the combination of technology and leadership coaching allows everyone to engage any-time and any-where in the world, with a degree of understanding of each others issues.

10 years ago the amount of connectivity and accessibility to individuals around the world was mere theory. Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, high capability smart phones and cloud services have all dramatically changed our world. 

We had no idea this pace of change was going to happen. And we lost sight of the power of the individual. As people such as the late Steve Jobs charged through life to make ‘impossible dreams’ a reality for us all, our lack of predicative abilities have left our workforce ill prepared for the magnitude of global interactions required for real business and team transformation.

The way to harness this opportunity – to really live the vision and promise of integrated globalisation is to build a team of global managers that can deliver for your organisation, with a dynamic capability for inspiration, innovation and vision. Without these leaders, business transformation is only a dream. 

Author: Simon Teague, Leadership-expert

With extracts from:

Moore, B. (2011). Global managers for a Globalised World. Business Transformation: The transforming world of business , 62-65.