It is easy to fall into the idea that you simply can’t have enough global mindset, and that everyone should have it. And it is undeniably difficult to find anyone against global mindset: it sounds up-to-date, fine and right – and who would want to be accused of a local, domestic or ethnocentric mindset? There is a social pressure to be ”on trend”, and so it sounds sensible to say that, if only all of the staff were more globally minded, everything would be much easier. And there is no doubt that both world peace and international companies suffer from a lack of global vision. But global mindset as a kind of unisex one-size-fits-all solution may simply be out of step with the company’s strategic reality. In any case, it will often be unrealistic to develop global mindset in everyone in the short or the medium term – do we have the cognitive bandwidth to develop it in everyone? And even if we do, would it be such effective use of resources if many people’s jobs have only a limited global element in them?

Pankaj Ghemawat, Professor of Global Strategy and author of the book ”World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It” (2011) believes that many of us are exponents of ”globaloney”, resulting in greatly exaggerated ideas of the extent and consequences of globalization. Part of Ghemawat’s explanation for this failure to recognize the more moderate scope of globalization (according to him) is that decision-makers in global organizations typically live more globalized (working) lives than the rest of the population, including their own employees. They overstate the extent of globalization and its implications for their staff and the company as a whole. As we know, above the clouds it’s always sunny, and with a bird’s-eye (or top management) view, the world may look more flat, as a bestselling book on globalization put it. For the vast majority of employees and managers in the global world, working life is quite earthbound and visibility more limited, and the Earth is still round.

A practical and easy shortcut to identifying global competences is to look at whether an employee has global experience. That certainly sounds very good, but it is not necessarily so. The connection between previous experience from e.g. postings abroad and existence of global competence is more complicated than that, as much depends on whether earlier expat experience or global working was positive. Global experience can also inhibit the development of global competence, as illustrated by the model below:

In the top half of the diagram we have two groups of people who have international experience. In the top right corner we have people with expat backgrounds, whose experiences have given them a very positive view of ”abroad” – we call them the ”Time-of-my-life-expats” expatriate managers/globetrotters, and they are typically the ones we look to recruit/promote when we regard experience abroad as a positive factor on the CV. In the top left corner of the figure is a group of people who have had experience abroad, but it has been negative. It is this group of globalization cynics, who perhaps ”came, saw, and hurried home again” that we need to be extra careful of, because there is a risk that they will not actually be able to turn the global experiences they have had into something that can be used constructively in the future. Perhaps the opposite.

In the bottom half of the diagram we have two groups of people without any international experience, one with a positive view and one with a negative perception of ”abroad”. For these two groups, the same principle of not taking anything at face value applies. The group of ”ethnocentric homebodies” perhaps covers people who do not feel properly suited to new tasks, but the group of otherwise positive globalization romantics may simply be ill-equipped to tackle the complications and challenges to their identity that follow in the wake of international collaboration.

A lot of resources are spent developing leadership competence, and the market for the development of global skills is bursting with intercultural skills development, global sensitivity training and global leadership programmes. And the leaders are undeniably a key group. Two major authorities on global mindset, Gupta and Govindarajan, note however that: Although we contend that returns to investment in cultivating a global mindset would always be positive, we do not expect them to be uniform. The value added by global mindset, and the value subtracted by its absence, is likely to be strongest in the case of those individuals who are directly responsible for managing cross-border activities, followed by those who must interact frequently with colleagues from other countries” (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2001, p. 124). It is striking here that the word ”leader” is conspicuous by its absence. This turns the focus on an aspect which has often come up in discussions at the Global Leadership Academy – the fact that an ever-growing number of employees come into contact with, and therefore need, global collaboration skills. But where are they in the companies’ efforts to develop global competence? In the Academy we have met with great interest, but found no concrete initiatives specifically directed at ”global mindset for employees”. We may then ask, if leadership is something that managers and their staff work together to bring about, what type of ”global mindset followership” competence should then match the manager’s ”global mindset leadership” competence?

Managers dominate the competence development landscape – not just compared to ordinary employees but also compared to types of leadership that do not involve direct staff responsibility. To begin with, there was a more or less unspoken assumption in GLA circles about the work on global leadership that it was most relevant to concern ourselves with global leaders with staff responsibility. However, this assumption was strongly challenged as our work progressed. Complex organization structures, matrix models and other forms of horizontal collaboration are becoming more and more widespread and raise the question whether global leadership and mindset should necessarily be reserved to the part of leadership work that is hierarchically structured. At the same time, a study of global leaders’ views of the challenges they faced in global working showed that it was precisely the parts of the job that had to do with collaboration with people over whom the leader had no staff responsibility which were felt to be more challenging (Nielsen and Nielsen, 2016). In matrices and multi-stranded collaboration structures, the traditional management skillset was even more stretched than in a globalized version of classical, home-based leadership.

This combines two axes: The perception of ”abroad”, and the perception of ”home” and the local background. In the top right corner we have the group of global nomads we met before, who have gone into ”global orbit” and have lost their ties to the ”local”, which is mainly associated with something negative, while globalism has become a sort of new nationality. In contrast to them, the top left corner of the figure shows the globalization enthusiasts, who have still retained positive links to their home country and ”local” matters. In the literature, this group are often referred to as ”grounded cosmopolitans” – they are globetrotters who have not lost touch with their roots and can still value and appreciate others who think in a more earthbound way and whose circles are smaller. These two groups are reflected in the bottom half of the figure, which contains people who lack global mindset – either because they can only see the positive in their own back yard, or because they are in a no man’s land where they do not feel part of either a national or a global community – perhaps because they are in a period of transition.

Some companies put their trust in younger generations almost automatically having a more global outlook: they have travelled more, they are more global consumers of culture, speak better English and have Facebook friends in many countries. A more pessimistic gloss on younger people’s global competences, also represented among the members of the Global Leadership Academy, is however that young people simply can’t be bothered with postings abroad and the life of a global nomad. They like to Skype and enjoy travelling but do not want to settle abroad. One suggestion is to look at the job design and workflows, so people do not have to travel so much. Another is to go for the ”grey gold” instead, and choose more mature leaders to be posted and recruited into global jobs. They have the time and the energy, no small children, and the self-knowledge, broad-mindedness and tolerance gained from a long life (some research suggests that older people do better than younger ones in the international environment). So one answer might be to ”leave the young at home and send silverbacks to start up a new subsidiary in Mexico instead of retiring to play golf in Spain”.

Another solution, or course, is to go for ”self-initiated expats”, the rapidly-growing element of the global workforce who travel around themselves looking for work. This saves companies a lot of bother, as employees themselves bear the costs and the risk of international working and do not turn their noses up at ”local salaries” at a time when more and more companies are moving away from ”special compensation packages” for global employees.

And it is also a myth that there will be less need for postings abroad in the future – the consultancy firm Mercer runs regular surveys of this phenomenon and the findings indicate that expat postings as a global working practice happily co-exist with an increase in the number of people working globally in other ways, including European commuters, business travellers or virtual matrix employees.

An often unspoken idea about global competence is that, once you have acquired it, it lasts for life. At the extreme, you could say that the members of the Academy have had a tendency to talk about global mindset in a way that suggests that, once you have developed a global mindset, you will think globally for the rest of your life. If this were the case, global mindset competence would be quite unique, as most other competences have to be maintained if they are not to fall away, and are also tied to the context and situation in which they are used, so they have to be adapted to changing conditions along the way.

Research in this area is sparse, but not surprisingly there are signs that global mindset, like any other skill, can diminish and break down over time. Research has shown through global mindset profiling with individual global mindset tests that people who have had a high global mindset score at an earlier period of their careers characterized by a very global role, may actually score relatively low after a later spell in a more locally oriented job (Pucik 2006). The point is then that global mindset has to be maintained.

One of the authors of this book lived and worked abroad for many years and speaks several languages, so must presumably be very globally competent. Maybe, or maybe not, because that was all many years ago, so how much of it is left? What difference does it make that this person has been researching this area for many years in the meantime? And had a lot of foreign friends? The research does not give us a clear answer on the ”half-life” of global mindset, but it is interesting to consider what activities and other life experiences break down and develop global mindset – and whether the company or the individual leader have weighed the implications for their skillset.

One of the studies carried out as part of the work of the Global Leadership Academy (Nielsen and Nielsen, 2016) clearly shows that many global leaders feel they have been left to themselves to pick up a global leadership role by ”learning on the job”. While there is certainly nothing wrong with either learning from colleagues or building up experience through practice (quite the opposite, in fact), these leaders also want help to develop globally. The same study also showed that many of the leadership development programmes that address global needs are global mainly in the sense that a) the programme is common to all the countries in which the company is represented; b) the programme is run in English; and c) the programme has a title containing the word ”global”. With regard to the actual content of so-called ”global” leadership development programmes, there was typically less that actually addressed involvement with global leadership. The network-building and accumulation of social capital which take place whatever the course content when leaders are brought together from different areas of the company should not be underrated, but the suggestion is that this is not enough.

The self-test below summarizes the main points from the nine myths and gives you the chance to make an overall assessment of your own and your colleagues’ perception of working with global mindset in practice. As always, this sort of test works best if you are honest – and if you use it as a basis for discussion, ideally with others who may see things quite differently from you.