You do not have to look far in the UAE to find a workplace filled with a plethora of nations and cultures. Indeed, you may well be sitting in such an office right now, surrounded by a range of accents and languages, dress styles and approaches to working. As an employee, this is undoubtedly a great opportunity to interact with people from other places and to benefit from exposure to ideas and cultures that are not your own.
For employers, however, the challenge of leadership in a globalised economy is one that has kept many organisations extraordinarily busy as they attempt (with variable success) to develop their leaders to be capable of leading these diverse teams. In the business world that now exists, a physical presence in different countries no longer dictates whether a company qualifies as a ‘global business’.
Multiple other factors, such as overseas partners, suppliers and employees now expose even small organisations to the world at large, and bring with it the need to effectively lead a global team.
At its core, successful global leadership requires leaders to be culturally aware, with the capacity to lead across geographical boundaries. They are required to undertake duties that might include managing worldwide budgets or negotiating with clients from around the globe.
The role may involve developing multi-regional company strategies or considering risk-management approaches for different territories. The challenge for these leaders is in balancing these business demands against the different cultural nuances, customs, and working habits of different employees, and to recognise how these distinctions impact on their ability to lead.
The extent of the challenge has led to a cascade of research and theories on the best ways to prepare an organisation’s executives for global leadership. These have attempted to properly identify what a global leader requires to be effective, and what an organisation should be focusing on in terms of their ongoing development.
From this has flowed a growing trend for organisations to prepare their leaders for global leadership through competency frameworks that tend to focus on factors enabling leaders to function in their role. These could be their leadership experience and knowledge, skills, attitude and other professional attributes.
One particularly important foundation of this is the development of a ‘global mindset’ – a frequently-referenced concept that, in essence, should allow a leader to successfully negotiate and combine difference cultural and strategic issues at both a local and international level. Identifying such a capacity in an individual is, of course, not easy, requiring an organisation to quantify attributes such as cultural awareness, cognitive complexity, and social capital.
Arguably a better gauge of leadership effectiveness is to look at leadership behaviours – the observable (and consequently measurable) actions or attitudes that are actually exhibited by leaders when they demonstrate proficiency in a professional skill.
This approach appears in a 2014 research report by the Institute of Corporate Productivity, which identified four critical factors that positively impact on global leadership development.
These are, firstly, that global leaders require cultural immersion in the relevant local markets. Second, to effectively lead virtual teams and teach employees with different learning styles, a global leader needs to be both collaborative and influential.
Third, leader selection should be based on leadership behaviours, as well as a performance track record and the use of behavioural assessments. Finally, the report suggested that an organisation must focus on their longer-term requirements, based on future skills and competency needs of the business.
In the region, there are many examples of organisations that have recognised the challenge and started investing in developing global leadership capacity. What is now needed is for these organisations to acknowledge that it is not enough to identify and focus on the functional aspects of leadership competency in a global context.
Instead, they need to realise the importance of demonstrating the ‘right’ leadership behaviours for a multicultural environment; a move that will have a positive and far-reaching impact on critical components such as their strategic alliances and their overall organisational success.
— The writer is Executive Development Director, Abu Dhabi University Knowledge Group.
