Global Diversity

Global Diversity: Is There Such a Thing As Global Leadership?

An Editorial Study on Global Diversity by Global Integration Resources

Leadership theories through the ages have tended to focus on the behaviors and attributes of the leader. Most large companies have lists of competences and skills that they expect their leaders to display and training and appraisal programs that focus on how to behave to be an effective leader.

In global organizations, this can be a challenge. In a “practical global leadership” program we asked different cultures to choose their ideal leaders. They could choose from figures in politics, business and other fields from a range of cultures and over the last 3,000 years. The vast majority chose figures from their own or very similar cultures. One group in Eastern Europe were attracted to Stalin, as a model of the strong leadership they thought was effective in their region. Leaders tended to reflect the ideal attributes of the culture that chose them.

So how can we be an effective leader for a global organization or team – do we need to be flexible in style – a different face to each individual, or is it better to have a consistent style and run the risk that you will not inspire some cultures and personalities. It is hard to see the same style inspiring a Japanese R&D team and a US sales organization.

In other organizations leadership criteria are developed by looking at the behaviors of existing top managers – running the risk that we create a new generation of leaders based on what was successful in the last 20 years, rather than what is needed in the next 20.

We believe that there is too much emphasis on what the leader does and too little on what we want the FOLLOWERS to achieve. In one exercise in our training we ask participants to start by defining how they would like their followers to behave. A typical list would include words like – self motivated, challenging and self-starting.

Next we looked at how they as leaders need to behave in order to get these behaviors from their followers.

If you want your people to be self-motivated you need to give them the space to do this. If you want them to be challenging, you need to give them the opportunity to overturn your decisions and change your mind from time to time. If you want them to be self starting you cannot direct how they spend their time every day.

The list of leadership behaviors that this exercise generates is almost the opposite of a traditional set – do any of your leadership competences include leaving people alone and changing your mind regularly?

Try taking the list of your current leadership competences and identifying what followship behaviors they are likely to create – typically they tend to put far too little emphasis on the follower doing things for themselves.

If you want to be a true global leader, try focusing on what you want your followers to do, rather than focusing too much on the style you personally need to adapt.

Author: Kevan Hall, "By Global Integration. Please visit http://www.global-integration.com/ for additional information on the skills of working internationally.