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Succession Planning: Managing Risk and Ensuring Business Continuity
Sep 09, 2010

Breakfast Club
San Francisco: The Next Frontier for Learning and Development
Sep 23, 2010 07:30 am
The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco
San Francisco, California

CLO Symposiums
Unleashing Learning: From Strategy to Execution
Sep 27, 2010 - Sep 29, 2010
The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel
Dana Point, California

Features

Published June 2010

The Global Leadership Mindset

  

  Eileen M. Rogers and Daren Blonski

The integration of multiple geographies, cultures, nationalities, ages and styles in enterprises around the world is having an enormous impact on business relationships. Leaders today need a new, specialized set of skills if they are to be successful.

Fueled by social networks and technology, universal collaboration is becoming a daily business reality. Global data and knowledge are now accessed on devices that people can hold in the palms of their hands. Jim Kouzes, renowned leadership expert, recently described this shift by stating that “while the content of leadership has remained the same over the past 20 years, the context has not.”

Leaders striving for success today must be able to master three new levels of competence:

• Global business acumen: The new financial, industry, functional and technical skills needed to navigate a market characterized by rapid evolution of business models, markets, products, and mergers and acquisitions.
• Global mindset: The capacity to engage in a boundaryless and synthesizing cognitive process that identifies opportunity and innovation in complexity.
• Global citizenship: A potent combination of geographic, political, economic, governmental, legal, cultural, technological and environmental savvy that informs business strategy formulation and execution.

Global Mindset vs. Global Citizenship

A global mindset includes the ability to see beyond the boundaries of the organization, national culture, functional responsibilities and corporate gain to envision and communicate the ultimate contribution and value of the work to society and sustainability.

In his book Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner delineates five sets of cognitive capabilities leaders must master: the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind, the creating mind, the respectful mind and the ethical mind. The global mindset demonstrates the application of the ethical mind, which conceptualizes how work can serve purposes beyond self-interest and can contribute to the greater good.

This global mindset enables people to embrace complexity and paradox. It means they are capable of holding the tension and ambiguity of opposing points of view, perspectives, data and values in their minds and then harmonizing these differences for greater leadership effectiveness.

Global citizenship is acquired by pursuing an open-minded interest in the world, global business, cultures and people. Again drawing from Gardner’s five minds model, this capability to gather, retain and master vast reservoirs of knowledge, data and information about the world reflects the respectful mind. The respectful mind recognizes and embraces differences between human individuals and groups, tries to understand them and seeks to work effectively with them. The crux of a global citizen is honoring one’s origins while suspending judgment and remaining open to others. This is emotional and social intelligence applied to cultural competence. These leaders adopt a flexible, adaptable and curious way of looking at things and see difference in others not only as acceptable, but as preferable.