Can effective leaders in one region / country duplicate their success on a worldwide level?
As business becomes more and more global, many organizations are asking themselves if an effective leader in one country or region can duplicate her or his success on a worldwide level.
For example, Lucia Mannone may have a proven track record in the southern European region, but is she still able to develop new client relationships, manage projects, and run teams in the very different markets of Latin America and East Asia? And if she can’t, what is the best way to prepare her and other budding global leaders like her to be fully productive and effective in the future?
This article will explore and explode some common myths around global leadership development and then come up with some alternative approaches that coaches can use to help all leaders be successful across international boundaries.
Lucia: A Small Case Study
In order to do this, let’s go back to Lucia. She is a 38-year-old Italian senior marketing officer for a German medical instrument company. The company headquarters are in Stuttgart and she is based in Milan. She has worked on Italian national accounts and then the southern European region for the last 12 years and her performance and that of her teams have been consistently high.
As her company is expanding in the key markets of Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea, she is now being asked to take on a more global role. Her technical knowledge is beyond compare and her ability to motivate her colleagues has been demonstrated again and again, even during economic downturns and company restructurings. But she has not traveled much beyond the Mediterranean, except for a professional conference in Baltimore and family holidays in Phuket and Cancun.
The myths around global leadership development
For someone like Lucia, the first step is usually to help her become more „culturally competent,“ but this can be interpreted and realized in many different ways.
Myth 1: The Behavioral Approach:
A typical way to launch „cultural competence“ coaching is for Lucia to do her “homework” and diligently learn the top 50 or 100 or even 500 etiquette tips for working and communicating with Brazilians or Koreans. But, what would she do in situation 501? The behavioral approach on its own only gives the „whats“ and the „hows“ but not the „whys.“
Myth 2: The National Values Approach:
In order to get at the „whys,“ Lucia might then be directed to the well-grounded and innovative works of Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars. But this approach can only help so far, because it is based on a rather dangerous assumption: that everyone—or even most people—within a national culture will conform to the norms of that culture.
How might our unique characteristics affect us?
What about Lucia herself? At first glance, it would seem that she is typically Italian, having lived and worked there her whole life apart from her frequent business trips around Europe and a few work and pleasure jaunts beyond the continent. But what if you knew that she was an orphan from North Africa, who was brought up by her nonna (adoptive grandmother) in a clean, safe, but very modest home in a small town outside Naples. She excelled in school and was the youngest MBA ever to graduate from the prestigious Bocconi University in Milan. She is now married to a struggling artist and has three young children, one of whom has cerebral palsy. How might these unique characteristics affect her personal value system and how she behaves and communicates with other people?
Additional Factors
So what are the other factors that may be influencing individual or group behavior?
Additional Factor 1: Organizational Culture
Beyond national culture, organizational culture is at play. So, for example, if Lucia Mannone is now trying to develop a new strategic partnership with a large Korean chaebol, she should probably spend a lot more time learning about that company’s values, history, traditions and culture than that of Korea as a whole.
Additional Factor 2: Professional Culture
By recognizing the value and power of “professional culture”, global leaders can actually help their colleagues find a new way of connecting across the world.
For example, a US-based hi-tech company was noticing that many of its software engineers, including all of the East Asian ones, were grossly under-reporting errors in responding to monthly questionnaires. It would have been easy to zero in on the East Asian engineers and try to deal with issues of national “face”, honor and pride. But then managers noticed that they were getting similar omissions in other parts of Asia, Europe, Latin America and even North America. From careful analysis and many interviews, it seemed that the under-reporting was more to do with the “professional” culture of the software engineers, for whom an “error” is like an admission of incompetence and failure. So the managers decided to eliminate all mention of “errors” from the monthly questionnaires and instead they asked the software engineers for their lessons learned, best practices and suggestions for improvement. Suddenly, the managers starting getting a flurry of invaluable insights and ideas from the previously reticent engineers and, not coincidentally, errors were drastically reduced.
This may be a good way for Lucia to build trust and rapport with her marketing counterparts in Tokyo or Buenos Aires as they may well have studied exactly the same textbooks as she did in university but they were just in Japanese or Spanish.
Additional Factor 3: Everybody is Unique
As any budding global leader can now see, it is a lot more than national customs and values that explain why someone behaves the way they do half way around the world. Just as Lucia Mannone may not be typical of her country, her company or her profession, anyone she meets with around the world may well be similarly unique.
Building Global Skills
Given this complexity and uncertainty, how can a global leader possibly be effective with counterparts he or she may have never met or may never meet? So far, we identified different ways she could become “globally competent”:
- By understanding and comparing the different countries’ values and behaviors;
- By taking into account the organizational culture of her own company– in both its headquarters and its offices around the world– and that of its key clients;
- By drawing the best from each person’s professional culture, whether they are marketers, doctors, or operations people.
The Importance of “Individual” Culture
But there is still one “culture” that stands out above all others if Lucia or anyone else wants to be successful globally. And that is “individual” culture. Even though anthropologists maintain that culture is a group phenomenon, we all carry around our own individual culture with us, molded by both Nature and Nurture.
This columnist suggest that the reader ask themselves some very searching questions about their own “individual” culture. These questions might include:
- What does it mean, in a general sense, to be a truly global leader?
- How will becoming global leader enhance— or impinge upon— my career, my work, and my personal life?
- What natural strengths, learned talents, overarching passions, and core values do I already possess to be a global leader?
- What gaps do I have and what hot buttons and blind spots do I need to be aware of?
- What else do I need to be successful on a global level?
Collaborating Successful Globally
Once these questions have been addressed and future global leaders are much clearer about the who’s, what’s and why’s of branching out across the world, then they can start to learn more about the individual cultures of the key counterparts with whom they will be interacting.
Enjoy the journey!
Authored by Jeremy Solomons; Edited by Malii Brown
References
- Adler, N. (2007). International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior. Florence, KY; Cengage Learning.
- Hampden-Turner, C. and F. Trompenaars. Riding The Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations across Nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
- Hofstede, G. (2005). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind (Revised and expanded 2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
The above article was included in the Feb. 2014 intercultures e-newsletter.
Photo credit title photo: Getty Images.