IBS

Developing Leaders with a Global Mindset

Learning outcomes

Understand and practice the competency approach to HR development.

Seminar tasks

Exercise: Career anchors (Edgar Schein)

Reading/activity for the week

·      Evans, Paul and Pucik, Vladimir (2002): The Global Challenge: Frameworks for International Human Resource Management, McGraw Hill, Chapter 8

·      Case 3: Pucik, Vladimir and Duffy, Cristina (1999): Developing a Global Mindset at Johnson & Johnson. IMD

Questions to answer:

1.      What is J & J´s approach to managing the global organisation?

2.      What mix of training and development methods and policies does J & J adopt to develop managers with a global mindset?

3.      Evaluate J & J´s approach to developing the global mindset.

4.      Describe other approaches and methods to global leadership development

Recommended reading:

·      Noe, Raymond A., 2002, Hollenbeck, John R., Gerhart, Barry, Wright, Patrick M. Human Resource Management, 4^th edition, McGraw Hill, Chapter 9

Chapter 8. Developing Leaders with a Global Mindset

• A generic principle behind talent development is that people develop primarily through challenge. However, this implies careful risk management (coaching, training, and the like), otherwise development can be at the expense of operational effectiveness.
• While competencies frameworks are particularly necessary in international firms so as to provide a common language for steering talent development, there are significant trade-offs between underlying organizational logics.
• With rapid change and increasing discontinuities, careers in international firms are becoming more and more intransitive. This means that openness to challenges and ability to learn form experience become more important in talent development.
• Without a rigorous process of leadership development, short-term and local interest will inevitably drive out long-term and global concerns.
• There are very different heritages in leadership development, from one firm to another, with different trade-offs. Most have the disadvantage of handicapping transnational development.
• In multinational leadership development, local companies have the responsibility for recruiting top talent, and then leadership potential is identified from the local ranks of those with technical experience. In steering the decisions on potential development, people-based planning approaches are more effective than traditional position-based succession planning systems – and they also allow more room for people to manage their own careers.
• It is not just the leaders who have to cope with the contradictions of transnational enterprise – leadership is vital but insufficient. The key lies in the minds of people inside the transnational enterprise.
• The psychological concept of global mindset emphasizes the ability to accept and work with diversity, while the strategic concept stresses balanced attitudes toward competing business, country and functional perspectives.
• A fundamental condition for developing global mindset is equal opportunity for all – it does not matter where you enter the firm. The tools are:
  • international transfers,
  • cross-border project assignments,
  • and training / education (where action and project leaning are the critical elements).
• Global mindset complements the use of coordination technology, although it is unlikely to take hold unless there is a high degree of consistency across all transnational management processes.

Developing talent – summary

People develop through challenging assignments…

… this requires risk management (coaching) so as to avoid failures that the enterprise naturally wishes to avoid…

… but not so much that success is guaranteed and that people will never learn to deal with hardship.