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WHO “GLOBAL TALENT” IS, WHAT PEOPLE WANT, AND WHAT THEY NEED TO LEARN

Rethinking Talent

Many organizations have realized that if they still hope to be relevant in the near future, they need to radically adjust their thinking about where they are located, how they do business, what they produce, and who will lead them. While the need for change is glaringly apparent, the path to success in this new global playing field is often elusive. The transformation to a global talent management model is a high-stakes endeavor fraught with difficulties and well-intentioned strategies gone awry. As the world shifts, some approaches to talent will produce far greater success than others.

Allergic to Outsourcing

Sohail is a mid-level manager for a global pharmaceutical conglomerate that has invested millions in its sprawling Hyderabad campus and has aggressive hiring plans to fill the site with Indian talent. The break room where we meet resembles a Moroccan riad, an open courtyard in the center of the white building with light pouring in from a glass roof. Well-spoken, whip-smart, and sharply dressed, Sohail leans forward with his elbows on his knees and uses his hands to talk.

“I'm actually part of a new team in Hyderabad. We used to be in a BPO [business process outsourcing] relationship with the company, but now we are part of an integrated global business services [GBS] center. The organization takes major decisions based on our input.”

Sohail bristles when asked to further explain the company's former BPO setup. He seems allergic to the word “outsourcing.”

“Actually, we even had trouble with the word ‘services’ in the transition to the global business services model. This service mindset was still associated with low-level outsourcing work, so we needed to hear how it was going to be positioned differently at GBS than with an outsourcing model. People felt these words were demeaning and associated with low-end, disjointed processes and tasks. The company actually had to invest a lot of time in communicating that this was a significant change – that we would be doing the same GBS work as a colleague in Europe or the United States. We needed to see how our work fit into the bigger context of the organization. They told us we would now be driving the process, taking on leadership roles to drive excellence across the global organization.”

From the pharmaceutical industry to the software, finance, and manufacturing sectors, strikingly similar transitions are described. An executive at a major management consultancy comments,

We are in the process of moving the global end-to-end solutions architect team to India. It will eventually be entirely driven by our team here. Currently, our European solutions architects handle the client interface and solution development, and then hand over instructions for the India team to implement the designed solution. But this will all change within the next 18 months. The team in Bangalore has been responding to requests from Europe, but now they will need to lead projects themselves.

In many places in India, “outsourcing” and “BPO” are becoming terms used with ridicule and disdain. Infosys, once the shining beacon of India's globalization, has become the brunt of sarcastic slurs in the Indian papers: “Why is Murthy [former Infosys CEO] talking about Infosys and global leadership excellence in the same breath? It's just a BPO.”

In Mumbai, some bankers have a visceral response to the suggestion that their work is “back end.” An outspoken Mumbaikar (resident of Mumbai) quickly corrects the mistake: “Actually, you misunderstand our organizational structure. The term you use does not relate to our situation since we are not a BPO.”

India is in the middle of an identity shift, and the original stepping stone into the world of multinational corporations is now passé – even despised. India's growth has bred an elite generation of globally savvy bright-young-things with little tolerance for any whiff of second-class corporate citizenship as well as a reticence to identify with humble BPO beginnings.

For captive BPOs, the talent is actually integrated into the organization but retains a type of second-class citizenship, completing partial tasks in a process, often without full ownership, connections, relationships, or context. Captive BPO employees, however, are exposed to the organization's values, its talent expectations and opportunities. These often hit a nerve with intelligent, ambitious BPO workers who are trying to square the organizational rhetoric with the reality. The demand for development and full engagement from talent in India, the Philippines, and elsewhere either leads to change or disengagement.

The Business Case for a New Global Talent Model

The smartest organizations understand that the key to this globalization game is talent: having the right kind of people in the right place at the right time to realize their growth goals. The right place is where the growth is happening now – and the right time is yesterday.

For many organizations, talent is the rate-limit on global growth, and the biggest challenge they face in moving toward a successful global model. Global leadership capacity, in particular, is the key binding constraint. In a recent survey, executives reported that “just 2 percent of their top 200 employees were located in Asian emerging markets that would, in the years ahead, account for more than one-third of total sales.”13 More broadly, CEOs in Western multinational corporations (MNCs) identify the ability to hire, develop, and retain talent in fast-growth markets as the main competitive differentiation in today's market.14 Companies that get their global talent strategy right will set the course of their organization toward success and avoid becoming corporate dinosaurs.

More than any other factor, global talent has become the definitive gauge by which companies are measured and a key indicator of whether they will succeed or fail in the global market. Thirty percent of U.S. companies admitted in a survey that they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities “because of insufficient internationally competent personnel.”15 In another study, one in four global CEOs reported that they were “unable to pursue a market opportunity or have had to cancel or delay a strategic initiative because of talent constraints.”16

Most business leaders recognize how critical it is to have a good global talent strategy. But many, if not most, are struggling to both define what a good global talent strategy looks like and how to implement it. In an executive survey, “76 percent believe their organizations need to develop global leadership capabilities, but only 7 percent think they are currently doing so very effectively.”17 The challenges in attracting, developing, and retaining global leadership talent are myriad and include inexperienced local talent in key growth markets, radical variance in leadership models across key locations (some models are difficult to transition to global roles), scarcity of globally experienced and locally savvy leadership talent, poaching, job-hopping, and increased competition from local companies in the war for talent.

13

Martin Dewhurst, Jonathan Harris, and Suzanne Heywood, “The Global Company's Challenge,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2012.

14

“15th Annual Global CEO Survey 2012: Delivering Results, Growth and Value in a Volatile World,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012.

15

Shirley Daniel and Ben L. Kedia, “US Business Needs for Employees with International Expertise” (paper presented at the Conference on Global Challenges and US Higher Education at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, January 23–25, 2003), cited in Pankaj Ghemawat, “Developing Global Leaders: Companies Must Cultivate Leaders for Global Markets,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 2012.

16

“15th Annual Global CEO Survey 2012,” 8.

17

Developing the Global Leader of Tomorrow, a joint project of Ashridge Business School as part of the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS) and the United Nations Global Compact Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), based on a survey conducted in 2008, cited in Ghemawat, “Developing Global Leaders.”