The Six Principles for Developing Global Leaders (page 4 of 4)

In this demanding global economy, companies must be sure their employees earn the skills that will help them respond to and satisfy customers on a new geographic scale. In addition, leadership development must adopt a dramatically new global perspective in order to make this happen. As leadership is one of the few remaining ways to retain competitive advantage, HR professionals need to ensure they are supporting and building leaders who can face this challenge head-on.

Resolving Conflict
Working with multiple nationalities in a pharmaceutical company, we used two models that demonstrated the idea of building globally and adapting locally. The topic was conflict resolution and is a great example of the challenge developers of leadership programmes face in multicultural situations. People in one country tend to avoid direct confrontation or accommodate the other person. In another, compromise is the norm. In still another, win-lose may be the dominant style. Leadership developers first need to understand the local style for dealing with conflict and then extract global principles. To describe the variety of approaches people have in dealing with conflict we found the Thomas-Kilman Conflict models very useful with multicultural audiences. This model describes the diversity of approaches that people demonstrate when faced with conflict. It is a very useful tool with multicultural audiences because it describes modes that often predominate in different cultures: national, company and even family. The second model was intended to describe how conflict can be resolved once recognised. Forum's AGREE model worked well in this context. The principles in this model are Acknowledge; Ground Rules; Reframe; Explore; Evaluate. In most cultures, effective conflict resolution seems to follow a pattern in which there is a recognition that disharmony exists, rules for dealing with that disharmony, a means to neutralise emotion and better understand the differing perspectives, an exploration of options and finally some process for evaluating a resolution. In the pharmaceutical company example, AGREE was introduced as a set of principles, and local facilitators had participants discuss their challenging situations and the styles that people demonstrated using the Thomas-Kilman framework. They then practiced resolving the conflict by applying AGREE in these realistic situations, needs and encouraging the customer to do the same.

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