The Six Principles for Developing Global Leaders (page 1 of 4)

As leadership is one of the few remaining ways to retain competitive advantage, HR professionals need to support and build leaders who can face this challenge head-on. Here, Ron Koprowski of Forum, discusses how to design a leadership development programme that addresses the dramatically new global framework.

Having worked in the international arena for over twenty-five years, I find that part of the joy of this international work comes from the thirst other business professionals have shown for American processes and ideas: our free-market success, our ideas on management and leadership, our HR policies focusing on the importance of people in a company. Today, however, there's a subtle shift toward America and its ideals. Much of this shift is due to the recent corporate scandals, the economic recession, the number of companies who are laying off or closing local factories, and rapidly shifting investments and capital. So how do American companies - and, in many cases, companies from developed countries - create a leadership development approach that fits into the turbulent business climate today and addresses and overcomes any cultural biases that
may limit the value of development? This article addresses some of the principles that I've found work to make leadership training and development succeed in a global corporation.

The cultural challenge
Implementing a leadership development programme on a global basis offers a unique set of challenges - something I witnessed firsthand in a recent client situation. Several Forum colleagues and I were meeting with a client team to help plan the global implementation of a newly tailored learning system.

A design meeting was held in Paris and attended by people from Germany, the UK, Hong Kong, Brazil, France, Italy, and the US. At the end of the first day, our facilitator started to summarise our decisions and agreements. As she paraphrased our agreements, a heated discussion ensued about what we understood and to what we had committed. We quickly discovered that our assumptions about language, meaning, and context had shaped our understanding of the commitments in very different ways; yet we had all thought we had a common understanding throughout the day. Had we not discovered that our respective "cultural lenses" distorted our understanding, the work done at this meeting could have gone to waste. How do companies get the results they want when they train across multiple cultures? How do they avoid the innumerable situations in which waste can occur? The work we've done at Forum reveals that while there may be no single best way to handle global implementation, several basic principles can increase the likelihood of success. These six principles for successful global leadership development that we have identified are:
1. Be clear about why you are developing leaders.
2. Use customer input to drive leadership development.
3. Involve the line.
4. Find a global way.
5. Build globally, adapt locally.
6. Get sponsors to live up to their commitments.

No.1: Be clear about why you're developing leaders
Any leadership development effort should be clear about its purpose. In a global context, however, such clarity is critical in order to conserve resources, effect rapid change and ensure laser-beam focus. There are three broad approaches to leadership development. They all touch business strategy, but the choice of which development approach to use depends on the kinds of leadership behaviours and actions needed.