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Global Strategy: The Challenges of Leading an Organization into the Global Arena

Summary: Every organization must undertake an audit to understand how they can leverage the global market to add value. Once they understand their customers' needs, what all major competitors are doing, and the tangible and intangible assets they already have within the organization, a strategy for developing a Global Organization can be developed. Alongside the development and the execution of the strategy there is always the greatest challenge of all, developing a number of Global Leaders.

What Global Leaders truly have to do just to survive

Global leaders have to develop two sets of skills, strategic hard skills and leadership behavior. This combination of hard and soft skills is often very difficult to find in one person. That is why teams should be formed around every major strategic initiative, and a balance should be struck between right-brained inspirational leaders and left-brained analytic leaders. This in itself can cause problems and will be discussed further in other TLCN articles, but the key is to always have respect, and always value differences, how ever opposed opinions could be, remembering there is never one right solution.

Strategic Hard Skills will always include:

  • Understanding the needs of customers that want to benefit from the Global Market, and those that would benefit, but don't know or understand.
  • Understanding how competitors, whether traditional rivals, newly formed companies, or emerging substitutes, can challenge your organization
  • Understand how to review current strategic activities, looking for opportunities and threats and comparing these with inside the organization's strengths and weaknesses
  • Understanding how to review new potential markets that can be developed profitably, how to engage with them, and go to market in them
  • Understand alternative sources of tangible and intangible supply and how to adapt the organization's supply chain to capitalize on value added identified
  • Understand how to build a global organization and the global communications structures and strategic pathways of knowledge flow that goes with that

Leadership Behavioral Skills must include:

  • Intellectual capital:
    • A knowledge of a range of appropriate and relevant global industries, normally gained by research and reading.
    • To have global value networks, to understand different social, political, economic, and technological environments and the working of people from diverse cultures.
    • Understanding how to build a Global Organization, remembering the rule of 'unswerving flexibility' as there is never one right answer, and the answer will change as more is known and understood.
    • Being able to cope with cognitive complexity, as a one size fits all model can never work.
    • Being open to cultural intelligence, and understanding the nuances of cultural and custom differences that exist even within parts of a country or region.
  • Psychological capital:
    • A strong psychological profile that will value difference, welcome change, accept team think, be curious, be open, give and accept leadership, and build an empowered learning organization
    • Display a positive attitude to cultural diversity, and without prejudice, value all differences
    • Be transparent in all strategic endeavors with all of the team that comprise the global workforce and network.
    • Is passionate about the execution of the strategy and capable of generating excitement around the journey to the completion of the vision.
    • Will be cosmopolitan and be comfortable in a range of societies.
  • Social capital:
    • Have the ability to connect to and work with people from other parts of the world.
    • Have the skill to generate positive energy in people from other parts of the world, lead them and excite them.
    • Have the ability to build mutually trusting relationships with people from other parts of the world

What does this mean?

In today's world, Global Leadership with a Global Mindset is not only needed to win, it is essential in order to play. Jack Welch stated in 2002, "The Jack Welch of the future cannot be me. I spent my entire career in the United States. The next head of General Electric will be someone who spent time in Bombay, in Hong Kong, in Buenos Aires. We have to send our best and brightest overseas and make sure they have the training that will allow them to be the global leaders who will make GE flourish in the future."

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Written By:
Keith Bezant-Niblett
Associate Vice President