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Features

Published June 2008

Creating a Global Mindset

  

  Schon Beechler and Dennis Baltzley

Companies that ignore the global mindset do so at their own peril. The ones that most effectively develop this quality in their employees – particularly senior leaders – will have a distinct advantage over their competitors.

Historians among us have watched during the past decades as the term “expatriate manager” turned into “international manager” and then “global leader.” Yet today, about 20 years after the phrase “global leadership” first entered the learning and development vocabulary, a surprising number of companies have barely begun to adapt their language, skills models and leadership architectures to include strong global components.

Beware: If your leadership pipeline isn’t actively creating global citizens able to deal with mind-bending levels of ambiguity and complexity, and if your up-and-comers are not already innovating across political, social and cultural boundaries in a way that suggests they’re able to spot opportunities no one else sees, then your competitors will be studying you in a case on “those who became extinct on the road to globalization.”

In Duke Corporate Education’s review of research across three fields and its diagnostic/design work with the Global 1000, it has seen global mindset emerge as an important differentiator, driving success in new markets and transforming presence into global competitive advantage. While normative research involving small groups of executives continues on this topic, it misses out on interdisciplinary insights gained from integrating decades of scholarship. This article attempts to address that oversight.

The French energy company Total is a good example of an organization intent on building its capabilities around global mindset in its “company manager” ranks — what other companies would call “country managers” — in which they cover not only such basics as law, local context, crisis management, safety and security but explicitly address “leading in ambiguity” and the issues and opportunities around leading people different from oneself. Medtronic, a leader in medical technology headquartered in Minneapolis and doing business in 120 countries, found itself “talking global but acting like an international firm,” and did something about it.

But what is global mindset and how can senior learning professionals establish it in their leadership pipelines, given the certainty that the demand for global leaders will continue to outstrip the supply?

How Great Global Leaders Think
Global leadership starts with understanding and insight across any given country’s society: its social structures, institutions and demographics. This understanding must extend to business-relevant issues such as legal, regulatory and economic structures. “Global leadership,” by definition, involves influence of the leader over those who are very different: people who, from their cultural background to their view of the world, will not have the same common experiences, legal frameworks, social structures or even the same views on the corporation’s role in society. At the same time, global leadership involves more than leading in just two or three countries.