Leadership Challenge

Global Leadership Lesson #5: Exemplary Global Leaders Are Open-Minded

In my last four blogs I have written about qualities that are common to effective global leaders—they have high integrity and credibility, are forward-looking, team-oriented, and inspiring. Not only have Barry Posner and I found that these attributes are essential to success, so has Project GLOBE in its research studying 17,000 managers in 62 countries.

There is still one other overarching quality that explains why global leaders are effective in culturally diverse settings. It's something other researchers have called a global mindset, but it all boils down to being open-minded and flexible.

Researchers Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck in their book Developing Global Executives — a report on their research into this challenge—state that "At some point a fundamental transformation takes place for successful global executives—a transformation that can be described in shorthand as the acquisition of a global mindset." And how do they define global mindset? Here are a few descriptors that make their list: open-minded, flexible, adaptable, curious about others, interested in differences, empathetic, and gets along well with others. Maxine Dalton and her coauthors from the Center for Creative Leadership report very similar findings in their book on Success for the New Global Manager.

Take for example the case of Titus Lokananta. Titus, plant manager, Grupo Industrial Bimbo SA, remarked to a Wall Street Journal reporter a while back, "I'm an Indonesian Cantonese with a German passport who works for Mexicans in the Czech Republic." This guy represents five cultures all by himself. In preparation for a recent presentation, I did a Google search for Titus, and I found him at a factory in China.

In his life and in his career, Titus clearly has had to adapt to a variety of cultures in order to be successful. He's had to be open to and curious about the ideas of others.  More and more leaders will be facing the challenges that Titus does—the challenges of leading diverse groups of people who are culturally different from the leader and very often culturally different from each other. The development of a global leadership mindset is likely to be the most vexing challenge leaders will face in the next several years, even decades.

When I was chatting about this issue recently with my good friend and colleague, Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, a partner in the global executive search firm Egon Zehnder International and author of Great People Decisions, he remarked, "You have to be able to work with people as peers, and see their differences not only as acceptable but perhaps even preferable to one's own. This is thinking beyond your culture. As I see it, it's about working on a larger scope, and being open to many more ways to do things.  In brief, it's getting out of yourself!"

As the world flattens and our economies become more and more global getting out of yourself is great advice for anyone. Seeing the world through the mental and emotional viewing frames of people different from ourselves is a great prescription for learning to work and live in a borderless world.

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Global Leadership Lesson #4: Exemplary Global Leaders Are Inspiring

In my last three blogs I have written about three qualities that are common to effective global leaders—they have high credibility; they are forward-looking; and they are team-oriented. These attributes are found to be part of the profile of exemplary leaders in our research over the past twenty-five years involving over 300,000 leaders from 60 countries and in the research by Project GLOBE involving 170 researchers studying 17,000 managers in 62 countries. A fourth attribute that both our research and Project GLOBE find to be positive a facilitator of effective leadership is being inspiring.

People expect their leaders to be enthusiastic, energetic, and positive about the future. Enthusiasm and excitement are essential because they signal the leader’s personal commitment to pursuing the dream. If a leader displays no passion for a cause, why should anyone else? As people often say, "enthusiasm is contagious," and constituents are much more likely to be positively influenced by a leader who has zeal and fervor for a cause than one who is dispassionate.

Being upbeat, positive, and optimistic about the future also offers people hope. This is crucial at any time, but in times of great uncertainty, leading with positive emotions is absolutely essential to moving people upward and forward. When people are worried, discouraged, frightened, and uncertain about the future, the last thing needed is a leader who feeds those negative emotions. To get extraordinary things done in extraordinary times, leaders must fuel the effort with positive feelings. Leaders must breathe exuberance and life into our hopes and dreams and enable us to see the exciting possibilities that the future holds.

It’s really a simple proposition we all learned in high school physics. We learned that positives attract, and negatives repel. Whether it's physical matter or the human spirit, being a positive force in the world is the only way to attract the masses.

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Global Leadership Lesson #3: Exemplary Global Leaders Are Team Players

There was an article a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal reporting that successful CEOs were more tough-minded than some studies have found. "We found that 'hard' skills, which are all about getting things done, were paramount," says lead author Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. "Soft skills centering on teamwork weren't as pivotal. That was a bit of a surprise to us." That is a BIG surprise to us, and it is not at all consistent with our research, nor is it consistent with the findings of Project GLOBE involving 170 researchers studying 17,000 managers in 62 countries. We and they have found just the opposite. Exemplary global leaders are unequivocally team-oriented, collaborative, and participative in their practice of leadership.

After reviewing thousands of personal-best cases, we developed a simple test to detect whether someone is on the road to becoming a leader. That test is the frequency of the use of the word we. In our interviews, we found that people used we nearly three times more often than I in explaining their personal- best leadership experiences. Leaders foster collaboration and build trust. This sense of teamwork goes far beyond a few direct reports or close confidants. They engage all those who must make the project work—and in some way, all who must live with the results. In today’s virtual organizations, cooperation can’t be restricted to a small group of loyalists; it must include peers, managers, customers and clients, suppliers, citizens—all those who have a stake in the vision.

In fairness to Kaplan and his colleagues at the ghSmart company— an executive assessment company that collected the data Kaplan analyzed—the executives they studied were mostly buy-out company CEOs who were restoring financial health to failing enterprises or preparing companies for sale. In those instances, it may be that more hard-nosed bosses are needed, but data on successful global leaders tells a very different story. What may apply to buy-out companies is not likely to work when we’re talking about people from diverse cultures who must learn to work collaboratively across national borders in order to get extraordinary things done. In these instances, and in most others, leaders who foster collaboration and strengthen others are the ones who will succeed.

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Global Leadership Lesson #2: Exemplary Global Leaders Are Forward-Looking

Last week I reported on the first of four dimensions that are common to successful global leaders. According to our research surveying 300,000 respondents from 60 countries and data from Project GLOBE involving 170 researchers studying 17,000 managers in 62 countries, the first universally positive facilitator of leadership effectiveness is honesty and integrity. They second is…being forward-looking and having foresight.

A little more than 70 percent of our most recent respondents selected the ability to look ahead as one of their most sought-after leadership traits. Among the most senior executives, the percentage is 88 percent. People expect leaders to have a sense of direction and a concern for the future of the organization. Exemplary leaders are able to envision the future, to gaze across the horizon of time and imagine the greater opportunities to come. They are able to develop a unique image of the future. But it’s not just the leader’s vision. It’s a shared vision—a vision for the common good.

A shared vision of the future is necessary, but insufficient, according to our research. To achieve extraordinary things done people need vast reserves of energy and excitement to sustain commitment to a distant dream. Enthusiasm is contagious, as the saying goes, and leaders must be a major source of that energy. They must inspire a shared vision of the future. Clarity of vision into the distant future, and enthusiastic communication of a shared vision, may be difficult to attain, but it’s essential that leaders seek the knowledge and master the skills necessary to envision what’s across the horizon and to convey the message with conviction and inspiration. Compared to all the other leadership abilities this is the one that most distinguishes leaders from other credible people.

Posted by Jim Kouzes

Exemplary Global Leaders: More Similar Than Different

I recently joined a client in Reykjavik, Iceland for a meeting of its top leadership team. The theme of the meeting was global leadership, a topic that is getting more and more attention now that the world is getting flatter and flatter, as Thomas Friedman has observed. In preparation for this meeting I reviewed the most recent data from our research, especially the Leadership Practices Inventory — we are now in the process of reviewing LPI data from over 300,000 respondents from about 60 countries— and our Characteristics of Admired Leaders survey. I also reviewed data from Project GLOBE. GLOBE stands for Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness, and it’s an undertaking involving 170 researchers studying over 17,000 managers in 62 different countries. If you are ambitious and want to read the data for yourself, you can sit down with a few cups of coffee and read the 800 plus pages of Culture, Leadership, and Organizations, the book that reports on the GLOBE findings to date.

What struck me in reviewing our data and the Project GLOBE data from around the world was not the differences, but the commonalties that are shared across the many cultures represented in the findings. There is a set of universally positive leadership attributes and practices that cross cultural boundaries. Effective leadership is not something that is idiosyncratic to one country or one region, but instead a mostly shared set of dimensions that are transferable. Sure, there are some culturally contingent approaches, but there are fewer of these than there are universally appropriate ones. This is good news, because if this weren’t the case then a leader from Indonesia could not effectively lead someone in Mexico, a Chinese leader could not lead someone in Germany, and a U.S. leader would only be working in the 50 states. We’d all be confined to our national borders and have to practice only stay-at-home leadership. We all recognize the absurdity of this notion, especially in a global economy.

And what are these universally positive attributes and practices? In my next four weekly blogs I will discuss each of them. Following that we’ll talk about the implications of these positive global leadership practices and what each of us can do to strengthen our abilities to better function in a global economy.

In this blog I present the first, and the most important, dimension. There is no surprise here. Exemplary global leaders are credible. They have high integrity, are honest, and trustworthy.

For the last twenty-five years Barry Posner and I have been asking working people around the world to answer the question, “What do you look for and admire in a leader, someone whose direction you would willingly follow?” Honesty has consistently come out on the top of this list of admired leader qualities no matter where we ask this question. Over the last three weeks I have asked this question in Reykjavik, Atlanta, Dallas, Dayton, and Napa, and "honest" has always been at the top of the list. On average 89 percent of people admire and look for leaders who are honest. While I 'm not surprised to find this in other academics’ research, it is comforting to know that what Barry and I have learned from the leaders we’ve studied is not biased by our sample.

It’s clear that if people anywhere are to willingly follow someone— whether it’s into battle or into the boardroom, the front office or the front lines—they first want to assure themselves that the leader is truthful and free from deception. No matter what the setting, everyone wants to be fully confident that their leaders are genuine, real, principled, and of unquestioned authenticity. Sure, we want our team to win, but we don’t want to be led—better to say, misled—by someone who cheats in the process of attaining victory.

Of all the qualities that people look for and admire in a leader, honesty is by far the most personal—to leaders and constituents. A leader’s honesty is a reflection of our own honesty. Perhaps that is why it consistently ranks number one. It’s the quality that can most enhance or most damage our own personal reputations. It’s the quality that makes everything else a leader says and does believable.

Posted by Jim Kouzes