Supporting Global Integration through Leadership Development Initiatives

With integration becoming an increasing concern of global executives of multinationals, Terence Brake, President, TMA World - Americas, looks at why this is so important and how leadership development initiatives can contribute to global integration. A fuller version of this article was published in the July 2008 edition of The Grapevine Magazine.

For further information on TMA World's approach to supporting global integration through leadership development initiatives, please contact Terence Brake at tbrake@tmaworld.com.

Given the complexity of global business, it should be no surprise that integration is a priority issue. In a 2007 Accenture survey of 900 senior executives, participants were asked to identify their top challenges in building a global organization. Nearly half of all respondents identified 'maintaining a common corporate culture and identity' as their number one concern ⁽¹⁾.

What can you do to support integration through your leadership development initiatives?

Take a strategic approach to leader development initiatives. Rather than create relatively independent initiatives, design them to be closely aligned with company strategy and mutually supportive. Some companies - such as ArcelorMittal - have created corporate universities to help ensure leaders at different levels receive training that promotes consistent messages and models, shared vocabularies, and usage of common tools.

Ensure that all leadership development initiatives are coupled to a clear vision of how the company needs to operate in the world economy. The age of the multinational is ending. Instead, many are aiming to be what IBM CEO Sam Palmisano calls the global integrated enterprise ⁽²⁾. Leadership development at IBM is unthinkable without strong links to this integrative reference point.

Embed corporate values into all leadership initiatives. Shared values are the underpinning of a corporate-wide culture, and provide what Rosabeth Moss-Kantor calls a guidance system ⁽³⁾. They help unite employees across the globe, as well as enable fast, independent decision making consistent with the company's philosophy.

Communicate and reinforce a clear vision of an inclusive and collaborative leader. You can and should 'operationalise' this vision by establishing a common set of global leadership competencies and skills, and build them into a shared performance management system.

Balance cultural adaptation with cultural co-creation. While cultural adaptation is still very important, leaders also need to be skilled in cultural co-creation. Instead of a focus on your culture or my culture, we focus on 'our' culture.

Create learning and development initiatives that bring participants together (virtually and face-to-face) from across the enterprise to work on global level challenges and opportunities. Future global leaders need to be taken out of their restrictive local environments to discover the urgency and power of cross-border collaboration. Action learning projects are great vehicles for developing integrative leadership thinking and behaving.

Highly distributed business organizations are vulnerable to fragmentation and diffusion of effort, but a strategic approach to leader development can greatly increase the chances of operating as one company worldwide.

References

1. Corporate Culture Is Chief Concern for Global Execs, Accenture Digital Forum, April 30, 2007
2. The Globally Integrated Corporation, Sam Palmisano, Foreign Affairs, NY: Council on Foreign Relations, May/June, 2006
3. Transforming Giants, , Rosabeth Moss-Kanter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review , January, 2008

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