Grasping global leadership practice

”Sheer luck beats bad leadership any day – but you may be running out of luck …”

(Global leadership development professional quoted in Nielsen & Nielsen, 2016)

There is nothing to beat good luck – and good fortune certainly helps in most aspects of life. There are those who believe that global leadership is a matter of luck, but the vast majority adhere to the view that you have to make your own luck by devoting your attention, time and other resources to being better, getting to know more – and quite simply practising. Both to stay at the head of the field and to deal with setbacks when your luck runs out.

The idea that it helps to know more, to seek new ways forward and not least to learn from other people – not just for individual global leaders but also for companies operating at the global level or for Danish competitiveness in the global marketplace – was the trigger for establishing the Global Leadership Academy (GLA). The Global Leadership Academy started up in the spring of 2012 as a knowledge partnership supported by the Danish Industry Foundation through the Confederation of Danish Industry, Copenhagen Business School and nine Danish multinationals. In a 2010 survey of members of the Confederation, the respondents indicated that handling global collaboration and increasing complexity was one of the biggest management challenges that they faced (DI, 2010). The mission for the GLA was therefore to work together to explore, identify and develop critical global leadership skills; the vision for the project was to use these findings to develop organizations and leaders who can operate successfully and effectively in the global supply chain.

This handbook takes stock of the Global Leadership Academy’s work so far from a Danish standpoint, and summarises the new and practical knowledge which has emerged from this in the form of 12 tools for global leadership. However, the book is not the end of the story but rather an interlude, as this toolbox is now being offered to anyone with an interest in global leadership, and we hope that the learning produced in the Academy will live on and bear fruit in many Danish companies.

We will now share some of the key considerations and general challenges arising from efforts to optimize global leadership, as they have emerged through the work of the Academy. This is followed by an introduction to the collection of tools and a user guide to explain how global leadership can be understood and grasped using the tools in the book.

A fundamental assumption when we work on global leadership is that it is different from e.g. Danish leadership, local leadership or leadership in general. However, opinions on this have differed widely, and there are good arguments both for and against. If we take the broad-brush approach, we might say that neither the inexperienced nor the most experienced global managers typically find it helpful to talk about global leadership as something special. The very seasoned among them have gathered so much experience that distinctions that stood out clearly at the beginning of their careers can now be viewed more from above, where the similarities may be more obvious. The less experienced have not yet got to grips with the substance, do not have a clear idea of the level of detail and complexity, and do not see the differences. For those managers who find themselves between these two extremes, our experience suggests that it makes good sense to talk about global leadership as something special, possibly because many management careers start off in Denmark and only later take on international or global dimensions.

If we look across the activities of the Global Leadership Academy, the distinctive and particularly challenging nature of global leadership can be summed up in a number of dualities which have been recurring themes across research projects, networking meetings and conferences:

1. Leader vs organization: Global leadership as an individual or a collective/organizational competence – and how do they fit together?
2. ”Both-and” or ”either-or” ... or both of these? Reconciling the irreconcilable: global vs local, standardization vs differentiation, integration vs local adaptation, HQ vs subsidiary etc.
3. Corporate structure and/or national culture: Can values-based on a strong corporate culture be a guiding principle for the global organization and build bridges over cultural and other divides?
4.  Global leadership – ”one size fits all” or situational: What does the context mean for global leadership? Are there any general principles?
5.  Personal vs task focus: Are global leaders special people who can be best understood by looking at personality traits, or does it make more sense to look at their tasks and roles?
6. Global leaders and/or global HR professionals: Those practising global leadership and the people aiming to facilitate its development take a different view of the matter
7. ”Corporate Danglish” vs mother tongue: English and other foreign language skills are something we do not discuss enough – they are assumed to be in place, but we are often mistaken
8. The Danish background – ballast and/or benefit: Is a Danish background an advantage or a disadvantage to a global leader?
9. Intercultural skills vs general boundary-spanning competence: Cultural differences are important – but perhaps not the most important differences in a global role characterized by all kinds of diversity
10. Closeness and distance: Virtualization and matrix organization as a breeding ground for virtual collaboration and communication methods/channels in the global working environment – how can we create a sense of closeness at a distance?

Based on these ten issues, we assume in this handbook that it does make sense to talk about global leadership as something special; both because that was the assignment given to the Academy and because it throws light on the aspects of global leadership that are felt to be challenging. Global leadership does not alter the fact that managers have to assess performance and develop their staff, but the process may be changed – particularly if you have been used to performing your management role in a more local and familiar setting. The fact that managers and staff are physically separated from each other does not change the fact that teams have to find common ground and communicate effectively with each other, but the ways of communicating effectively and finding common ground may vary – and differ from what you are used to.

”The worst thing was starting to work in English the whole time. I actually thought I was pretty good in English, but it is really difficult to have to write consistently fantastic English.”

(Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children Denmark, Børsen, June 28, 2017).

A similar point arises in relation to language. Things are supposed to be so global, but if we are honest, many of the managers in Denmark who have the greatest development potential within global leadership are happiest speaking Danish ... And that is also true of many of the more experienced global leaders. Language is the crucial factor that we do not talk about enough. ”Corporate Danglish” and ”management by Google Translate” do not always offer the best basis for constructive discussions on global leadership. The globalization of management work in Denmark is at a relatively early stage of development in many companies, if we disregard the visible minority of globalization pioneers who have the size and history to have reached a level of globalization where it is not just marketing speak and wishful thinking to claim that the ”company language is English”.

We may note in this connection that there is a gap between the often red-hot interest in global matters among management development professionals (external/internal consultants and HR) and the language they use, and the way in which the people practising global leadership refer to it and perceive themselves. It is hardly surprising that those whose speciality or core competence is global leadership development see different opportunities and potential than those for whom ”globality” is just one aspect of a wide range of challenges to be addressed. However, this division underlines the need to build bridges over this chasm. For example, a recurring observation in the Academy’s work has been that global leaders are tired of what they see as an ”HR problem mindset” when it comes to handling national cultural differences. These leaders recognize the importance of cultural differences, but seek a more positive approach to handling them which also covers the potential merits of their own and other people’s cultural background and the possibility that ”diversity makes us strong”.

When the Global Leadership Academy started up, many of the participants still expected that one of the main outcomes of the project would be to identify and produce a ”checklist” with the five to ten key skills required to succeed as a global leader. We were disabused of this idea quite quickly… Instead, it became clear that global leadership is much more complex than that. Critical voices from practice will perhaps object at this point that complexity, chaos and a conspicuous lack of firm recommendations are an inevitable side-effect when researchers get mixed up in otherwise quite practical matters. However, nobody has all the answers on this matter – the term ”global leadership” is something of an umbrella concept in both a practical and a theoretical perspective. So the work of the Academy has taken us further than we originally expected – in fact, so far that towards the end of the project we realized that the original mission could not be achieved in quite the way that many of us had more or less explicitly imagined at the beginning, for the simple reason that no-one any longer believed that it would be possible or meaningful to identify the five or ten critical success factors for global leadership. So ”the big checklist for global leadership” ended up as a collection of 12 tools, each addressing a different, complementary aspect of global leadership, which we will elaborate on below.