Seven Characteristics of Global Leaders

According to one survey of senior executives from a prestigious consulting firm, 76 percent believe their organizations need to develop global-leadership capabilities, but only 7 percent think they are currently doing so very effectively. When looking for potential C-suite leaders, they are more likely to choose people who can lead successfully in an international business environment  and who can effectively convey the values and culture of the organization. As firms reach across borders, global-leadership capacity is surfacing more and more often as a binding constraint.

The business world we live is in big shift and transformation: The global balance of economic power is shifting in a multi-polar world; the change from a “multinational” organization that adapts the operations of each country or regional unit for local needs to a “global” firm with standardized, but agile,  and horizontally integrated technologies and processes; there are leaders from the twentieth century whose profiles are very, very different than what is required for a leader now-- global, more uncertain, interdependent and digital world with more distributed, multicultural, and different business models and an incredible pace of information and innovation.

So the leadership debate is not only about the seven shifts needed from managers to become leaders, but expand into broader spectrum: the seven shifts from regional managers to become global leaders.

1. From tactician to strategist with global mindset 

There are many multi-nationals, but few global companies, even fewer authentic global leaders. We need global leaders at CEO, CIO and all senior leadership positions to deal with the level of complexity to leverage its fundamental forces and have a positive impact in hyper-connected, interdependent global economy.

Global Mindset is worldview that looks at problems or issues in such a way that a solution emerges through a collaborative multicultural approach involving global psychological capital, intellectual capital, and global social capital. Being “Global” involves a personal intention to focus on being global. Companies don’t exist in silos but within systems, especially global ones. Being global is about crossing not just borders but also cultural divides between business, government and social sectors.

How to cultivate global mindset, global experience does contribute to shape it, however, it is required, but is not sufficient for the development of an accurate global mindset. From leadership scholars & practitioners, there are:

• Three core competencies: Self-awareness, engagement in personal transformation, and inquisitiveness;
• Seven mental characteristics: Optimism, self-regulation, social-judgment skills, empathy, motivation to work in an international environment, cognitive skills, and acceptance of complexity and its contradictions;
• Three behavioral competencies: social skills, networking skills, and knowledge.

2. From specialist to generalist with “globility” 

The global executives are business generalist demand more comprehensive skills in leadership, strategic thinking, relationship building and management, crisis management and public relations in addition to finance, sales & marketing, HR; and the common characteristics of successful global leaders fall into the soft-skills bucket, like "emotional intelligence," "listening," and "authenticity". Thus, global leaders shall have “globility” (global capabilities). 

Global Capability: The qualities and competencies of global leaders include such as tolerance of ambiguity, cultural flexibility, learning agility, handling complexity, communicating virtually, and working across cultures. Besides being brilliant and master the functional skills, he or she must be a strong communicator and a strategic thinker, and know how to collaborate with stakeholders of all stripes. However, when it comes to leadership substance & style, it turns out that many leaders of global corporations aren't so global leaders after all. Organizations must develop the capability to deal with global talent issues more thoroughly.

3. From analyst to integrator (synthesist) with Global Culture Empathy 

For C-Level leaders in global organizations, one single characteristic — "sensitivity to culture" (so-called "cultural empathy") — ranks at the very top of the requirement list. This rare quality can't be "taught," or injected simply by working in an overseas office.

 Surely, learning another language sharpens cognitive abilities, and speak a foreign language fluently notices how each language shifts one's consciousness and improve one’s transcultural capabilities.

However, culture is much deeper than custom, or a language. Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from another. Cultural behavior is the end product of collected wisdom, filtered and passed down through hundreds of generations as shared core beliefs, values, assumptions, notions, and persistent action patterns;

Global Culture Empathy: Requires a degree of egolessness, because you have to surrender the notion that your country, or language, or point of view is best. Cultural empathy means that you have to not just see through the eyes of someone who is different, but you have to think through that person's brain.It's a mindset shift. True cultural empathy springs from personality, early nurturing, curiosity, and appreciation of diversity.

4. From bricklayer to architect with Global-dimensional Design & Innovation 

The global organization blueprint is too important to be assigned only to specialist functions and regulated by specialist processes, however well designed those functions and processes via holistic approach is needed, one in which every part of an organization and every individual within it is connected and animated by the need to foster global orchestration.

Global-dimensional enterprise design: From a non-technology, enterprise architectural perspective, multinationals should consider diversity issues that range from factors related to their industry, operating geographies, culture, pace of growth and growth strategy, other elements of their business strategy (including all talent management aspects), sophistication of talent management practices, how people work and manage other people, workforce demographics and composition.

World-Class innovation to connect global dots, on the navigation dimension—to have more antennae focused on the trends and what’s going on in the world. And what group will have more diversity—conceptual diversity with diversity of opinion, independent thinking, decentralization, and aggregation — It takes world-class leaders who can connect global dots to both inspire and nurture the evolution of businesses that walk the talk when it comes to innovation — businesses that use inventiveness as a basis for achieving the kind of transformative change that propels global growth.

5. From problem solver to global agenda setter with Global Leadership Effectiveness 

A global leader’s ‘tolerance of ambiguity’ and ‘cultural flexibility’ have a strong correlation with global leadership effectiveness.

Global Leadership Effectiveness: Can lead effectively in an global business environment; can articulate and embody the diverse values and culture of the organization; Can respect colleagues and reports with empathy; can engage effectively with multiple internal and external stakeholders, customers and partners worldwide; can make decision via leveraging variable factors; can create new capability to expand global business growth; can create working environment where global team and virtual team can thrive.

There’s leadership study considers this topic in a more sophisticated way by examining whether the combined effect of personality characteristics and cross-cultural experiences predict a leader’s effectiveness as a global leader. In this context, a global leader is defined as a leader who interacts with external clients from other countries, develops strategic business plans on a worldwide basis, and manages a global budget and foreign suppliers or vendors. Self-and organization-initiated cultural experiences contributed to global leadership effectiveness, but self-initiated experiences had a more meaningful benefit to leaders. “to be effective, global leaders need high levels of both cultural flexibility and tolerance of ambiguity, and low levels of ethnocentrism required in jobs with complex international and multicultural responsibilities”.

6. From warrior to diplomat with Global Cognizance & Insight 

There’s an interesting research on a thinking skill called cultural metacognition, which simply means thinking about thinking; in this context, thinking about your cultural assumptions. If you can gain awareness of your assumptions, you can build trust and take your team beyond cooperating on a task to true creative collaboration.

Global Cognizance, Global Insight & Foresight: Develop insight and foresight requires holistic thinking and forecasting capability, without such capabilities, companies can fail to increase value and competitive edge in a global economy.  The global leaders also need insight about the capabilities and expertise inherent in the talent they have now, more critically, they need foresight to seek out the potential and capabilities they’ll need for the future development, the well blended insight and foresight can drive competitive value and global growth. An authentic global leader is a diplomat with global cognizance:

• Navigation capacities:  is important in a more volatile, uncertain, and globally distributed world as you need a directional guide; Also you are scanning the external environment and making sure that you’re seeing signals, patterns, and trends that are going to have an impact on your company’s ability to continue to thrive and grow.
• Capacity-to-empathize has to do with reaching people who differ from you and connecting to them not through the role hierarchy so much as through influence, so that you can act on a common purpose together;
• Self-awareness & self-correctness: if  you have a combination of self-awareness, awareness of  the organizations, and then you have the courage to be able to step into something that’s unfamiliar and outside their comfort zone.
• A win-win proposition. There’s a transparency in digital era of twenty-first century, it’s a global ecosystem of stakeholders that is going to determine whether or not your company or your organization can thrive.

7. From talent manager to global talent master to lead Global Mobility 

High performance can be achieved and sustained by building the right set of competencies in the workforce and aligning and deploying these most effectively

Global Mobility: The ability of global leaders to manage their global talent efficiently will mark the difference between success and failure. The need to develop well-rounded leaders of the future, with a truly international perspective, the recognition that an organization can benefit from a two‑way transfer of knowledge, skills and experience – every market is a fertile ground for new ideas. But also balance of global and local Needs— is the extent to which they allow organizations to pursue the optimal mix of local operating preferences and nuances along with established global standards.

A 2012 survey by the Corporate Executive Board showed that 60% of organizations were experiencing a leadership shortage, an increase of 40 percentage points from the previous year, a “paradigm shift” — a fundamental change in thinking — is required to tackle the talent shortfall, and it’s strategic imperative to develop new capabilities for managing a global supply chain  --Grow leadership development, workforce planning, strategy alignment, and workforce diversity capabilities.  

In summary, global leaders are both nature and natured, cross-cultural competencies are also both created and shaped, and global leaders’ global influence are based on the value that you bring and the values that you have. Such seven characteristics: global mindset, globility, global cultural empathy, global leadership effectiveness, global design & innovation, global cognizance, global mobility can become key leadership differentiators in 21^st century.

Posted in: culture Master,Future of Leadership,Innovation