There has been a lot of talk lately about the linkage between global mobility and global talent management in multinational organizations, and with good reason. According to Stewart Black, Allen Morrison, and Hal Gregersen in “Global Explorers London,” when asked how many global leaders their firms have, 29 percent of Fortune 500 companies said “nowhere near enough” and 56 percent said “fewer than we need.” In addition, 67 percent of Fortune 500 companies responded that their current executives do not have the global leadership capabilities they need.
At the intersection of talent management and global assignments is an organization development (OD) discussion. To adapt to internal and external changes, such as expansion into emerging markets, OD initiatives are launched to rethink and retool the values, beliefs, and sometimes even the structure of an organization. Organizations constantly are adapting to keep pace with global markets, and these adaptations ultimately affect the skills people need to be successful in a constant swirl of change that is the workplace today, often referred to as “permanent whitewater,” according to Marvin R. Weisbord in “Productive Workplaces Revisited.”
This is why global talent management, whose work it is to attract, grow, reward, and retain the organization’s human capital, is now, more than ever, such a critical function.
Many organizations seek to make global mobility more strategic, but perhaps the real issue is how to make global talent management more strategic. To do this, employers need only to leverage and synthesize the opportunities that already exist in the organization today. Making effective use of these rich opportunities is a matter of getting just a few things right, a few things that require systems thinking with a global mindset.
One such opportunity exists in the many, typically disparate, functions in the organization responsible for some facet of global leadership development. HR (with mobility as a subset), diversity, global talent management, and learning (L) and OD each have an important piece of the global leadership development puzzle and yet, in most organizations, labor independently and unaware of one another’s great works. This silo effect in organizations is the result of these various disciplines’ degree of sophistication, which in most large organizations requires a level of technical proficiency and productivity not easily or quickly mastered. However, that does not preclude the possibility of bridging these silos for the purpose of building a concerted global talent management strategy. Indeed, any effective OD initiative looks to revisit, recalibrate, and reconfigure the relationship of internal functions to one another in order to adapt to external pressures such as those brought about by globalization.
The second opportunity that employers can leverage to make global talent management more impactful involves the way in which global leaders learn and grow. This is a topic that touches on many concepts and theoretical disciplines. It also must be considered in the context of culture, because what is considered leadership competency and the ways in which people learn are both heavily influenced by cultural values, beliefs, and assumptions. These are important caveats to the fact that most of what global leaders need to learn, they learn on the job; a phenomenon that many employers presently do not recognize, support, or properly leverage. This is especially true as it concerns the learning that occurs on expatriate assignments. Because of the transformational nature of the culture shock experience, the duration of the global business and cultural immersion, and the sheer amount of resourcefulness that an expatriate must exhibit to be successful while working in another country, the expatriate assignment is considered the consummate developmental opportunity. It is no wonder that research indicates global assignments are two of the five most effective methods for global talent development. These top five methods are short- and long-term assignments, frequent business travel, global teams, and global projects, according to Mark Mendenhall, in the article, “The Elusive, Yet Critical Challenge of Developing Global Leaders,” published in the European Management Journal.
As mentioned, global mobility as a vehicle for developing talent can lead to some fairly interesting, complex, and sometimes contested topics, including adult learning theory, transformational learning, intercultural intelligence, double loop learning theory, and the learning organization, to name but a few. Though these all are important considerations, for the sake of simplicity we will stick to some of the basics which, when properly executed, will go a long way toward leveraging global mobility as a means to developing global talent.
Aligning Global Vision and Goals
Every year, organizations go through enormous efforts to build strategic plans and budgets. Support functions then go off and make structural and resource decisions that will serve these goals in the best ways possible. On paper, everyone looks aligned to the overarching goals of the organization. But, the reality of the situation is that organizations move quickly, in many different directions, into diverse regions, needing to serve ever-more sophisticated customers, legal, regulatory, immigration, and other masters. Various supporting functions, mired in their own red tape, fixed curricula, rigid structures, policies, hierarchies, and linear thinking cannot keep pace. No wonder why, when global talent development timelines clash with the timeline of the quarterly financial review cycle, the best-laid talent development plans fall in ribbons on the budget cutting room floor. Methods for developing talent, therefore, must be opportunistic, flexible, and able to meet the organization’s mercurial strategic changes. This flexibility and morphability requires a new way of thinking about designing and developing the leadership curriculum to better match up with the experience of the global leader. The curriculum of the training room needs to provide frameworks and models for leaders to make sense of their experiences and then continue learning outside the classroom, where global leaders are sinking or swimming in the “whitewaters” of globalization.
What’s Different About Global?
What makes global leadership different? Recent research with exemplar expatriates tells us that to develop innovative strategies, bring value to customers, and spur growth for their organizations, global leaders must be able to build collaborative and innovative solutions that can be brought about only by recognizing and leveraging differences, according to the 2008 “Global Leadership Study” conducted by Ernest Gundling.
They tell us that keeping pace with the global business environment, capitalizing on opportunities, and even knowing who the ever emergent competition is, are complex challenges for the best among them. The research also proves that for sustainable talent management strategies, global leaders must be change agents who are able to expand their own and others’ bandwidth at every level and location in the organization.
And yet, global leaders are learning their craft in far flung corners of the globe, often without organizational support to help “operationalize” this tacit knowledge and unconscious competence. The issue of lack of support is compounded by the fact that knowledge transfer back into the organization is lost, as well. Understanding what is different about global leadership and recognizing that it requires a different kind of organizational support is where the dialogue between global mobility and global talent management begins.
Supported Learning
Because research tells us that the greatest opportunities to develop leaders are happening outside of a fixed set of policies or classroom curriculum, employers need to find ways to support this kind of development. These learning opportunities, as outlined before as short- and long-term assignments, global teams, and projects, are the raw materials of the global mindset curricula. These learning experiences, when supported by the organization, are the most effective ways not only to develop global leaders, but for knowledge transfer and subsequent organization development to occur, as well.
However, it is important to note that the expatriate experience is transformational, meaning that learners have a fundamental paradigm shift in perspective that changes their way of thinking and subsequently their behaviors, according to Edward Taylor in the article, “An Update of Transformative Learning Theory: a Critical Review of the Empirical Research,” published in the International Journal of Lifelong Education.
This is the best action learning lab available, but it is highly emotionally charged and, therefore, has uncertain outcomes.
It is important to note that there is a difference between experiential learning and supported action learning. The former often happens by default and is unpredictable, while the latter is intentional and, because it is supported by design, has a positive effect on people and the organizations they serve.
An unfortunate proof source for this argument is when expatriate learning goes bad. Every HR and mobility practitioner knows where these bones are buried, and every local office has a legendary expatriate maniac story to tell that has set them and the organization back years. These stories exist because leaders were sent on assignment without careful selection, training, on-the-job learning support, and without other organizational reinforcements to bolster them when the going got rough.
Policy and Practices
Let us return to alignment for a moment. For employers to reap what is being sown in the everyday work-a-day world of expatriates and global leaders at large, it is not enough for the respective functional silos to have strategic plans that line up nicely with organizational goals. These functions also must have a shared, single strategy, with specific, departmental objectives that align with these goals. These objectives distill into tactics for recruitment, retention, learning and development, compensation, mobility, and succession planning. Therefore, global talent management, HR, learning and development, OD, and mobility need to understand what is different about being global and what is different, therefore, about global leadership. This shared understanding then allows these functions to coalesce around a unified vision and strategy to develop their global leaders.
Supported learning, therefore, goes beyond learning and development interventions and gets into performance goals, metrics, coaching, and other means of guiding and reinforcing the expatriate’s learning. This is why a strategic view of expatriation is so important. When global mobility and global talent management are aligned, the expatriates are chosen for their growth potential in the organization, given a chance to build intercultural skills in a formal instructional setting, coached during the assignment, and their knowledge and newly-built skills are valued enough to be transferred to the organization. In other words, the assignment cycle itself is viewed holistically as the expatriate’s learning experience, and supported as such.
The Assignment Cycle
The assignment cycle from selection, to cultural training, to on-the-job support, to repatriation and reintegration takes on elevated importance when viewed as an integral part of global talent management. Practitioners of all sorts have been banging this drum for years, but it never really has been more than an echo in the hallowed halls of corporate policymaking. Many more assignment cycle elements could be added to those mentioned above, however, for the purpose of bringing the global talent management and global mobility into focus, we will take a look at just the following four.
Selection
Because global leaders learn through special assignments such as the expatriate experience, deciding who gets this opportunity is akin to deciding who gets nominated for executive education programs. Meaning, in the old world, getting “nominated” to an executive education course was a pretty good indication that the organization was investing in you as a high potential and had great hopes for your future in their leadership ranks. In a more strategic view of the expatriate experience as a means to grow future talent, who we select for these “stretch assignments” becomes critically important.
As a result, the measuring stick that we use to determine the candidate pool really needs to become a global ruler. This means two things. First, we cannot continue to use the same old methods for selecting who goes on assignment (i.e., urgent business needs and technical skills). Likewise, we cannot use the same assessment instruments and criteria that historically we used for talent management opportunities. These only will ensure that we are excluding valuable candidates who do not fit our parochial viewpoint of exemplar leadership, and it means that we are not getting candidates with the right skill set for the expatriate assignments for which they are being selected. The short story on assessment and selection, therefore, is to choose people who qualify using global leadership competencies as a guide and to be sure that the assignment fulfills an important step in their career paths and for the globalization needs of the organization. These global leadership competencies, along with the traditional selection instruments that determine cultural adaptability, round out the selection criteria to include not only technical but behavioral skills and knowledge, as well, according to Vladimir Pucik, in “Selecting and Developing the Global Versus the Expatriate Manager: a Review of the State-of-the-Art,” published in Human Resource Planning.
Some organizations have career planning practices that clearly make global assignments prerequisites to entering the senior leadership ranks. These employers use the organizational review as a checkpoint to ensure that the leader’s career path is closely managed and supported by the organization as a whole. These are the stellar organizations that also have a clear vision as to how global their C-suite should look like someday and fill the leadership pipeline accordingly.
Cultural Training
The latest trends in cross-cultural training are to include: training for the host office staff on how to work with the expatriate leader that they will be receiving; and ensuring that in addition to the cultural dimensions, the expatriate’s training includes specific attention to the global leadership competencies required for the job.
Cultural training for the office hosting the expatriate is most useful because organizations can use this type of group training opportunity to talk about corporate culture, skills for working globally, functional cultures, the long-term plans for the local office, and other useful expectation-setting and communication strategies. Training the expatriate on the competencies that are specific to global leadership is an excellent way to weave the “soft” interpersonal skills of cultural intelligence and adaptability with the “hard” skills of the global business environment. Hands-on classroom simulations that blend intercultural theories and models with other business skills that the expatriate needs to do the job has not been the traditional approach to this type of training. This is a huge missed opportunity to provide useful models and frameworks on which the expatriate builds global leadership skills outside of the classroom.
On-the-job Support
The preparatory steps of expatriate job descriptions, learning objectives, performance metrics and milestones all serve as the foundation for supported, action learning to occur. Action learning is effective when the organization actively aids the expatriate manager to effectively use the assignment to hone their global competencies and develop as leaders. This is done by carefully assessing the leader’s competency gaps and mapping these to the specific work they will be doing while on assignment so that the occasions to practice and improve these skills are identified and codified as learning opportunities. This mapping, when accompanied by learning objectives and performance metrics, becomes the actual action learning sequence.
Organizationally supported learning means that this process is monitored by a coach, formal mentor, and/or qualified line manager whose job it is to assess the leader, give feedback, and mark and reward their progress. This is a far different learning intervention than what occurs in the classroom curriculum and takes a good deal of planning and commitment on behalf of the organization. However, because these expatriate leaders are tagged as high performers and responsible for developing other leaders, this type of investment has exponential returns. This is another important facet of ongoing support. For the expatriate, developing local talent most certainly should be considered an important performance metric with attendant rewards. This concept is critical to developing the organization’s global mindset. The expatriate must be able to engender local ownership and develop local leaders while they are on assignment. This ensures that the leadership pipeline is stocked with individuals who come from all office locations, and this confluence of talent is essential to the organization’s development and growth as a global enterprise.
Knowledge Transfer
The last of our assignment cycle considerations is the organization’s value and use of the expatriate’s learning. Knowledge transfer is given short shrift in many organizations, especially by those for whom technology is next to godliness. Unfortunately, no one has yet discovered a way of getting global leader learning into the DNA of the organization via high tech alone. There are still a number of low-tech ways that come into play, all of which require, once again, a cohesive plan among the HR, diversity, and learning and OD functions.
The plan can have myriad tactics, and indeed it should, but leader-led action learning in particular is gaining a good deal of attention lately as a sustainable way to develop a global mindset. As mentioned earlier, successful expatriates need to develop succession plans while on assignment, as well as have an active role in developing others on their return or when they move on to their next assignment. Training sessions, workshops, and other interventions are excellent frameworks for building the foundation for global leadership competency; however, newly acquired knowledge and skills often are not sustainable in the long run if they are not reinforced on the job. Leader-led, individual or team, action-learning interventions are effective ways to galvanize the expatriate’s learning and transfer it to other would-be global leaders. With the design of these “learning networks,” the organization is seeding its ability to develop global leaders in a way that generates long-term payoff for the talent investment they have made in the expatriate. This is how the organizational global mindset gets developed.
A Welcome Change in Strategy
Many employers now are heeding the clarion call and formally including global assignments in their blueprints for global talent management, a change in strategy that is welcomed by most global mobility practitioners with a standing ovation. Though the basic building blocks toward this integrated approach seem quite simple, they are hampered by the Catch-22 of needing a global mindset to build a global mindset. Large-scale changes, such as those wrought by globalization, require breakthrough thinking to be dealt with effectively.
The same logic that necessitated organizations to silo their thinking to deal with the complexities of the early stages of globalization now calls for them to think across the silos in order to harness the opportunities that come from globalization. Thinking across these silos means viewing the assignment cycle for what it is: an expensive but highly effective way to develop global talent.
Terry Hogan is responsible for the global leadership practice at Aperian Global, Southbury, Connecticut. She can be reached at +1 203 296 2599 or e-mail thogan@aperianglobal.com.