200 million people.
That’s the number of people that joined the global workforce for the first time in the past decade. Information technology has invited workers, living in regions that never before had access to global opportunities, into organizations across the world. These workers offer a great promise never before seen by organizations: highly trained talent at low cost prices.
This is an exciting development. But it comes with the challenge of understanding how to build global managers that can deftly lead teams with very different business culture values to produce the results organizations’ desire.
This is not easy, but it could be. The first step is noticing this change – the integration of new workers from remote lands with divergent, and at times conflicting, values to the Western worker. The next step is to plan for it by training leaders to skillfully understand and lead initiatives to success. At IndiaThink℠ we call these employees Global Managers.
For all of these global interconnections to work, leaders that build commitment, manage uncertainty and communicate business needs across cultures are a necessity. These skills go beyond being interculturally sensitive, or knowing that business cultures are different and understanding a few parameters about differences such as the “Indian Yes.” Global Managers focus on the dynamic of business interactions. They emulate local leadership from afar and can detect problems early, make necessary plans to tackle them, and move to resolution.
At IndiaThink we develop global leaders through our training and coaching programs. After working with us, our clients understand how business culture impacts everything in an international relationship. This may seem hard to imagine, but it is absolutely true. Every challenge in a relationship can be mapped back to a culture difference.
How do I, as the Founder of IndiaThink℠, think about business culture in today’s environment? This article offers, some of the insights I share with my clients about how business culture interactions create challenges. It’s likely that what you read here will be a first, but it will change the way you see what is happening in your global relationships. I look forward to hearing from you personally –send me an email with your comments.
The Organizational Culture: Expectations and Experience.
Every organization has an internal culture and set of values outlining what is expected. Employees don’t talk a lot about these values because they are understood. To be successful, employees adhere to the culture that surrounds them and typically it takes just a few weeks for a new employee to understand “how things work around here.”
These rules thread through interactions in the lunchroom, where you may engage in friendly banter with those that report to you, to discourse during meetings, to how you treat your boss when you see him outside the office. Everything done at work is guided by these actions, which quickly become subconscious. Without this map, every choice would be overwhelming at best – it would take hours to decide how to engage as each new email, conversation and meeting presented itself throughout the day.
These values form a strong subconscious inside organizations and instruct us what to assume will happen. This works great when interacting with local colleagues, who drink the same cool-aid if you will, but it leads to failure when reaching outside the organization for additional resources because outsiders don’t share these values. Further, and perhaps more damaging, they know nothing about them.
These same values become expectations inside global partnerships. The challenge is what is expected in the West is very different from what is expected in other nations. It would be fair, and actually safer from a business perspective, to assume what is expected in the West is different from the rest of the world.
When I talk about the differences between the BRIC cultures – Brazil, Russia, India and China – and the West, I tell Western leaders to assume the BRIC does business 100% differently than they will expect.
These expectations inside an organization, combined with little insight into what foreign teams may find completely acceptable, create dramatic problems and cost a tremendous amount of money and time if employees don’t possess the right leadership skills.
For example, in Western firms, employees are often expected to bring their perspective to work by asking questions, pointing out challenges, and offering solutions. Consensus is highly valued and seen as a leadership skill. Employees are graded on contributing these insights – did they help to move the organization forward? In technology organizations, these skills are in hyper drive because time is of the essence.
This type of culture creates a safe place to report problems. The mantra is “if you see something, say something.” Almost every Western manager will claim that there is never harm in reporting a problem. It’s very rare that employees do not report problems they identify. Further, employees will almost always try to solve problems first and then report how they fixed what they found.
In the BRIC, these values are not inherent in a typical organization. While the pursuit for identifying problems may exist, the business culture preference is for employees to hint at problems in the hopes that management notices. There will be times when management will miss the hint leaving the problem unaccounted for.
And here is where the problems begin: The Western team assumes problems will be reported, discussed and solved. The BRIC teams wait for leadership to notice problems and manage them.
While this may seem subtle, there is a gold mine of problems behind this difference: surprisingly late projects, products delivered in the wrong code, incorrect budget estimates, promises that the new features will be completed, or new staff incorrectly trained on the initiative.
The truth is that both sides of the partnership are acting with the best of aims, but no one is taking the role of global leadership to decode the situation.
Why not?
The Case for Training Employees Leadership Skills for Globalized World
It is a myth that individuals are born with the capability to be globally savvy. This myth is passed around at cocktail parties today because it’s easy to believe the globalization has erased business culture differences.
Actually, the exact opposite has happened and this is critical to understand.
The recession of 2008 verified that Western business methods are not the only ones that bring success. It silenced rhetoric that capitalism is THE alternative, that Western business schools have all the answers, and that expatriate leadership is the solution to every emerging market company’s challenge.
The recession experienced in the West was barely felt in other parts of the world giving new power to the business preferences held for centuries in places like China and India.
As Europe and the US fell into financial chaos, the BRIC, powered by what is an almost opposite business culture, zoomed ahead. This called to question: Is the Western way really the best?
This new paradigm, combined with the reality that all of these global interactions are relatively new and growing more intense every day, has left a vacuum of leadership because most firms assume employees will just “figure it out.”
This is a prescription for failure.
Firms that take this path spend too much money finding new providers, re-doing projects, missing market windows and hiring advisors to solve problems.
Just 10-15 years ago being assigned to work with a foreign team required extensive training. Individuals were singled out to travel to these lands and act as corporate diplomats. Today, there is a different – and damaging mantra. Western firms often presume that all employees are perfectly poised to effectively manage teams in China even though they have never traveled there and have little understanding of even the basic concepts of the Chinese business culture.
This leaves them trying to decode what is happening without really understanding what to look for because he or she can’t Identify the problem until it’s the product is 2 months late and a market window is missed.
But here is the good news…..Here is the truth: Every organization has a solution right in front of them: their own employees. Once these employees understand why someone is acting in particular ways – once they learn how to detect the dynamics of business cultures – they guide global transformation for organizations.
Recognize…… and Act
We are experiencing, for the first time, an intense worldwide effort to engage across business cultures. The old multi-national firm, while it still exists, is no longer the only player in global markets. Technology allows everyone to engage from anywhere in the world.
Ten years ago the amount of connection and access allowed today was theory. Facebook, Twitter, extremely savvy smartphones and cloud services have all dramatically changed our world. We had no idea this change was going to happen. Our lack of predictive abilities has left our workforce ill prepared for the magnitude of global interactions required for real business transformation.
The way to harness this opportunity – to really live the full vision and promise of globalization and is opportunities –is to build a team of leaders with the right skills that can deliver for your organization. Without these leaders, global transformation is only a dream.
Copyright IndiaThink Corporation
—–BIO —–
Brandi Moore is the Founder of IndiaThink℠ and the author of The Little BRIC Book: Cracking the code to global management of projects in Brazil, Russia, India and China. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, Christian Science Monitor, PBS Rising Voices, and Outsource Magazine. For more information about IndiaThink visit indiathink.com. To learn more about The Global Manager Program visit theglobalmanager.com. Brandi can be reached at brandi@indiathink.com
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