Читать книгу Growing Global Executives - Sylvia Ann Hewlett - Страница 9

Introduction

In the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, the American Red Cross collected $488 billion in aid worldwide—the largest outpouring of donations in its history. Its chief executive, Gail McGovern, unveiled plans to develop brand new communities as well as rebuild old ones; in the neighborhood of Campeche, the Red Cross pledged to build some seven hundred homes that would provide residents with basic sanitation, running water, and electricity.1

To date, as revealed by ProPublica and NPR in a joint investigation of the charity, none of the communities have taken shape. Campeche remains a garbage-strewn slum of rusted sheet-metal shacks. And of the one hundred thirty thousand homes the Red Cross claims to have built island-wide, only six can be documented.2 Managed from the US, with staff on the ground consisting largely of Americans, the Red Cross’ housing campaign foundered for lack of expertise, language skills, and experience in cutting through the red tape around land access. The $24 million Campeche strategy will be scuttled when the organization withdraws from Haiti in 2016.3

The squandering of $170 million in infrastructure capital, not to mention nearly half a billion in relief funding, underscores the single largest growth constraint on international organizations in the private as well as public sector: an anemic pipeline of locally sourced leaders. Emerging markets in the South and East stand poised to take center stage in the global economy within the next ten years, a shift that is expected to increase not just market potential, but also market competition.4 To be effective in these growth hubs, multinational corporatons (MNCs) need local leaders to help them navigate the red tape of local government and the labyrinth of local business channels.5 To wield a competitive edge for years to come, MNCs need talent with local market intelligence, men and women who can identify unmet needs because they’ve experienced them firsthand, and who can innovate solutions appropriate to meet them because they’re intimately acquainted with local customs, preferences, and living conditions.6

Indeed, to foresee challenges or nimbly respond to crises, MNCs need lieutenants on the front lines who are empowered to act on their local intelligence. The Red Cross had very few. Leadership roles went to expats, whose compensation cost the organization three times what hiring a local would have cost. Given the security situation, separation from family, and the demanding nature of the work, turnover among the expats was high, creating chronic vacancies that added to the organization’s paralysis on the ground. As one staffer observed, “Everything would take four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”7

MNCs are well aware that the expatriate management model is ill-suited to growing their footprint and market share—not to mention stupendously expensive. Even before the global financial crisis of 2008, they were scaling back on the recruitment and deployment of this talent brigade, replacing them with local nationals, third-country nationals (executives who are neither nationals of the host country nor the country in which their MNC is headquartered), and returning nationals. According to a survey conducted by the Association of Executive Search Consultants of hiring activities in China, India, Brazil, the Middle East, and Russia, only 12 percent of senior executives in those markets were expats in 2008, compared with 56 percent in 1998.8 The decline of the expat has steepened in recent years—because companies now have to make social insurance contributions on behalf of their foreign workers, making hiring them prohibitively expensive.9 Little wonder that 76 percent of senior executives polled by the UN said their organizations should invest in developing global leadership capabilities in emerging markets.10

Multinational organizations that managed to get out in front of this talent trend—that developed local talent into leaders with strategic decision-making capability—have realized dramatic results in terms of local market penetration. General Electric (GE) was one of them. Up until 2001, GE abided by conventional wisdom: R&D was centralized at headquarters in the US, and innovation for the developing world consisted largely of simplifying a product that had been successful in the West in order to sell it at a lower price point. The resulting “innovation” was often entirely inappropriate for the markets the company hoped to capture. For example, GE’s cheaper, emerging-market version of the surgical C-arm—a heavy, high-cost imaging machine designed for use in hospital settings—fell flat in India, where the majority of healthcare is dispensed in rural clinics.11 But Omar Ishrak, a Bangladeshi who became CEO of GE Healthcare’s clinical systems unit in 2005, took a different approach: he empowered teams at the local level to innovate products attuned to the needs of clinicians operating on foot in remote areas where electricity couldn’t be relied upon, serving patients who could not afford to travel to city centers.12 The result: GE’s wildly successful low-cost Electrocardiogram (ECG) MAC 400, a handheld, battery-operated heart monitoring device that sent readings by cellphone. Developed specifically for the Indian market by a team of India-based engineers and designers, it demonstrated the competitive edge bestowed on MNCs that decentralized operations to make their subsidiaries in growth hubs more autonomous.13

Yet even in the burgeoning tech sector, international firms have not readily decommissioned the mother ship. GE’s headquarters continues to entrust execution, but not decision-making, to satellites in the developing world.14 MNCs based in the US and UK in particular struggle to develop and promote talent in the South and East beyond the director level.15 They also struggle to deploy and incentivize homegrown talent to win business and satisfy clients abroad.16

Committed to diversifying their leadership pipeline, they have invested billions ($14 billion in the US alone)17 in cultural competency training, multicultural leadership development, ex-pat executive coaching, and cultural navigation tools. Tools such as the ITAP International’s Culture in the Workplace Questionnaire™18 and Aperian Global’s GlobeSmart® Teaming Assessment and Global Teams Online® e-training tool19 (among numerous others20) have been developed on the basis of decades of research, including Geert Hofsted’s groundbreaking theory of “bilateral leadership,” the ten-year GLOBE study of sixty-two cultures, Richard Lewis’ When Cultures Collide, and Erin Meyer’s excellent The Culture Map, as well as more recent contributions to the field, such as Ernest Gundling’s Working Globesmart.21

But these leadership development strategies ultimately fall short of growing locals into global executives because they fail to move candidates beyond understanding cultural differences to acting on them.22 Local talent still lacks credibility with senior management at headquarters; expats still lack the culturally appropriate behaviors to create the partnerships and pathways necessary to driving value in the footprint; and senior managers continue to see and sponsor the people who surround them at headquarters, ensuring that the upper echelons of leadership resist diversification from abroad.23 Distance and difference remain chasms for companies whose competitive success depends on bridging them.

Virtual communication platforms have indisputably helped bridge these divides. Recognizing the imperative of integrating information flow across a wide range of digital platforms and devices, and of growing innovative, responsive, and flexible global networks,24 MNCs have been quick to prioritize investment in hardware, software, and training to facilitate virtual collaboration and knowledge sharing instead of other kinds of corporate development. A 2012 IBM study revealed that 71 percent of global CEOs see technology as the most critical factor in maintaining market competitiveness.25 Towers Watson found that upward of 61 percent of MNCs plan to integrate mobile technology into existing systems.26

Yet even as technology eases communication and maximizes efficiencies, it introduces misunderstandings and productivity constraints. Corporate leaders must not only demonstrate high-level expertise in an ever-expanding array of complex digital technologies, but also project authority and unlock value in this virtual environment,27 a challenge compounded by variances in quality and consistency due to inadequate infrastructure in the developing world.28 Technological savvy, skillfulness in cross-cultural virtual team management, adroit use of mobile technology and social media, and better allocation of precious in-person time are critical to the success of global virtual team leaders, but guidance is scant and, as a result, success is mixed.29

What will it take to move more local talent into global leadership roles? How can MNCs unlock the innovative potential of local teams? What should be the focus of leadership development?

With this study, we answer these crucial questions. Drawing on an eleven-market quantitative sample (Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the UK, and the US), interviews with forty-eight global executives, and focus groups with over fifty global team players, we find that emerging global leaders are in want of two core competencies: the ability to modify their leadership presence in order to project credibility to superiors at headquarters as well as to stakeholders worldwide, and the ability to unlock value from globally dispersed and culturally diverse teams through inclusive leadership. Overlooked by MNCs and business research organizations alike, these cutting-edge leadership competencies build on pioneering research of the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), which shows how developing executive presence and inclusive leadership are the keys to growing executive potential in multicultural talent in US corporations.30 On the global stage, we find these core competencies depend, respectively, on mastery of virtual communication, which enables emerging leaders to project credibility and leadership presence even when far from headquarters; and on sponsorship, which, as exclusive CTI research has demonstrated, generates high-level visibility for emerging leaders both as rising stars and as a developers of team talent.31

MNCs are grappling with a bewildering array of management issues today: the increasing economic clout of emerging markets, heightened competition for local talent, and an unprecedented dependence on virtual leadership have all contributed to sluggish revenues, uninspired business solutions, and stagnant talent pools. Yet these problems have a common solution: the innovative potential of emerging global leaders, gleaned from the ranks of the very MNCs facing these challenges. By tapping into this vastly underutilized resource, MNCs will not only jettison outmoded models of corporate leadership and gain a pipeline of diverse, innovative, and culturally savvy executives; they will also cement their competitive position in the world’s fastest-growing marketplaces.