“To me, global leadership is extreme leadership... just like extreme sports.”

Dr. Joyce Osland, global leadership expert

Becoming a successful global leader requires a fiercely inten­tional process that few are adequately prepared for. Dr. Osland’s words ring as true as a bell; global lead­er­ship is not an easy road to walk. It’s not enough to bull­doze your way through busi­ness strategy and hope that the people you lead will simply fall into line.

With so many different factors at play, if global leaders and the compa­nies they work for fail to prepare, they prepare to fail. The results speak for them­selves; poor staff engage­ment, high staff turnover, general confu­sion across the company, and a bottom line that’s affected nega­tively. Programs of change get aban­doned, good ideas get lost in the ether and resources are wasted.

If this sounds familiar, then realize this…

You aren’t alone.

Let’s have a look at a case study by the Harvard Busi­ness Review and pull out some obvious issues and how it is that global leaders might avoid them.

First… a quick summary.

Case Study Summary

This case study is the tale of three high-level exec­u­tives from the United States titan Argos vs a group of inco­he­sive Euro­pean managers from their various acqui­si­tions. Frank Water­house, CEO of Argos Diesel, has been working furi­ously for the last four years in Europe. Argos now had several compa­nies under its umbrella and Frank had been busying himself with getting new contracts from various different govern­ments; in short, he’s Argos Group’s shining star.

Acquiring new compa­nies to join the ever-growing Argos port­folio is easy. Inte­grating the teams and aligning so many different visions together is another animal entirely. Inter­na­tional Argos CEO Bill Loun said he had the perfect guy for the job. As a professor for Amer­ican Studies in Cairo for 5 years, he had inter­na­tional expe­ri­ence. He then joined Argos in the States and pulled together a fantastic training program that brought all the cross-divi­sional teams together in record time. Costs came down, produc­tivity went up. He was one of Argos Group’s rising stars and would be an excel­lent aide to Frank. 

Enter Bert Donaldson. He arrives in Zurich with his family in tow excited to get his hands dirty and start the ball rolling. He’s got plans for these managers, and he’s deter­mined to get every­body aligned to ‘The Argos Way’.

How Things Progressed

As time went by, Bert started to run into prob­lems. The managers didn’t seem to be responding to him at all. He felt like he tried it all; 1 – 1 meet­ings, training sessions, office lunch invi­ta­tions. He’s asked for feed­back and sent out ques­tion­naires. All the responses didn’t give him any detail or move him any closer to bringing all these teams across Europe together. That’s assuming he got responses at all; a lot of the managers didn’t respond.

He held a huge progress meeting to discuss how things were moving forward and Bert had…nothing. No stats, no vision, no plan. They were halfway through an aggres­sively quick 2‑year program to bring the Euro­pean managers together and they weren’t even close to getting started. In a defeated, frus­trated panic, Bert phoned Frank to let him know that this presen­ta­tion was going to be terrible.

Frank was annoyed at this point. The success of his own career was tied to Bert’s ability to deliver this program. If Bert failed, so did he. Once it became clear that Bert was strug­gling to get the Euro­pean managers onside, Frank started asking questions. 

The answers were damning.

• A close colleague said that the training sessions seemed to go okay but some managers felt patron­ized, and others felt that there wasn’t enough infor­ma­tion. The trainers that Bert had brought in, turned up in casual dress to a formal busi­ness envi­ron­ment and got angry when one of the Norwe­gian managers asked ‘too many ques­tions’. Bert’s right-hand lady, Frau Schweri, who helped him pull together the training programs advised against asking them to come back.

• Bert didn’t listen; the fact that the trainers turned up to a formal busi­ness training program in a Mickey Mouse sweater was none of his concern. People needed to get over it. On top of that, he insulted Frau Schweri by refer­ring to her as his secre­tary. This woman was a training and devel­op­ment power­house, spoke 5 different languages and was both emotion­ally and cultur­ally intel­li­gent. She had years of expe­ri­ence in this field and was suit­ably outraged.

• The training always ran over, details like naming etiquette was over­looked. No oppor­tu­ni­ties for networking, no coffee breaks… it was a disaster. People were talking in the office. Bert never went home at a normal time, he always looked stressed and he seemed unable to get into the cultural swing of things. There were also whis­pers that his family was suffering too. They were in a new city, his daughter was in a new school but they were also strug­gling to adjust to such a vastly different lifestyle.

• Frank had noticed that Bert was strug­gling. He wrote to Bill Loun in the States and detailed that Bert was strug­gling to adjust to life in Zurich and strug­gling to mobi­lize the managers. Bill got straight on the phone and explained in no uncer­tain terms that Frank had to sort this out. Bert was the best that Argos had; this had to work. Frank’s career was on the line. 

Would Frank give up on Bert and return him to the States? If he did, his career path would also take a hit and all the work he’d done for the past 4 years would be wasted. Bert’s career and repu­ta­tion would poten­tially be destroyed beyond repair.

Frank broached the subject with Bert; Bert’s response made it clear that he had completely over­looked how the Euro­peans did busi­ness. The culture here was different from what he was used to in America. The values were different, the way they reached goals and came to an agree­ment was different. Bert seemed to have no aware­ness about how his behavior was impacting those around him and no desire to learn about how to get the best out of the Euro­pean managers.

The Final Situation

At this point, every­body was frus­trated. Frank could see that a lot of the prob­lems would have been alle­vi­ated if Bert were more cultur­ally adapt­able. He was unpre­pared for the different social norms and customs and so all of his training programs and plans were frus­trating and resisted at every turn. 

Frank was unsure whether to fire Bert and move on. Could cultural under­standing really be taught? From Bert’s perspec­tive, he didn’t under­stand why people aren’t responding. Their compa­nies had been acquired into the Argos Group and ‘The Argos Way’. Culture shouldn’t be impor­tant. It is what it is; they work for an Amer­ican company now.

Morale is down and without a strong vision, people are begin­ning to call for Bert’s resig­na­tion. Is he really the right man for the job? Is there any more time left for him to make the proper adjustments? 

Problem 1: Misun­der­standing The Cultural Landscape

This is where Frank Water­house fell short. In an effort to ringfence the success of his career, Water­house did not give his CEO enough of a briefing about the ongoing chal­lenges of trying to pull together all the different depart­ments under one banner. Whilst he can be commended for being natu­rally obser­vant and respectful of the intri­ca­cies of the cultures around him, he could have painted a more detailed picture for his CEO. 

Conversely, let’s assume that Water­house did actu­ally pull together all this infor­ma­tion and Bill Loun didn’t listen. Water­house could have at least touched base with Bert Donaldson and showed him the ropes. The two men are colleagues and could have been a support network for each other in this regard. Instead, Donaldson was left to sink in his lack of knowl­edge and under­standing, wrecking his profes­sional rela­tion­ships and ruining his repu­ta­tion in the process. This then directly impacted the success of the project — after a year of trying to imple­ment an aggres­sive change program, they were no further along than when they started. 

A lot of that was due to an inability to commu­ni­cate cross-cultur­ally; there was no clear commit­ment to ensuring that the vision and its meaning were inter­nal­ized by all divi­sions correctly. Such a commit­ment would have led Donaldson to work with Water­house to estab­lish a clear workup of what social and cultural norms were at play in these teams. This intel would have guided the strategy creation for initia­tives like work­shops, confer­ences, and 1 – 1 feed­back sessions. 

Problem 2: ‘The Argos Way’

The second problem is the belief that ‘The Argos Way’ is enough. The Argos Way was built on one kind of over­ar­ching culture. The assump­tion that what works in Detroit would trans­late well into other cultural contexts was the company’s first big mistake.

This view­point was perpet­u­ated from the top of the orga­ni­za­tion; the chairman and Inter­na­tional CEO Bill Loun did not seem to under­stand that you can’t ignore the culture of employees and replace it with ‘The Argos Way’. The like­li­hood here is that although he held the title of Inter­na­tional CEO, Bill Loun had little to no expe­ri­ence dealing with Euro­pean acqui­si­tions and no advi­sors to brief him on the chal­lenges that would await his hand-picked candidate. 

As a result of this, Donaldson was believed to have all the required skills needed as a global leader to unify all the Euro­pean teams. Addi­tional resources to help him accli­ma­tize were not allo­cated and no struc­tured program to guide him through all the cultural norms was put in place.

Problem 3: Donaldson’s Unwill­ing­ness To Learn

Donaldson, having had his feathers fluffed by ‘The Argos Way’, approached this very complex situ­a­tion with a “my way or the highway’ atti­tude. He then proceeded to try to force his way of working onto the acqui­si­tion teams, which was a disaster.

He alien­ated people, border­line insulted people, and failed to see how certain things like the ‘Mickey Mouse sweat­shirt’ fiasco was not accept­able in a new cultural context. His response was to blame the team leaders. The reality was that he needed to under­stand how some of these smaller details affect the way people respond to a change in orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture and leadership. 

For example, in Amer­ican culture, it’s routine in some sectors for people to work long hours and spend less time with their fami­lies in order to do this. In some profes­sions, this is seen as an example of an employee ‘going the extra mile’. In places like Germany, staying in the office after hours on a regular basis means some­thing completely different. You aren’t respected for doing it; you just look like you can’t manage your time or some­thing is wrong in your family life. People are less likely to value their work over their family and if they see their leader doing that, they’re unlikely to respect you. If, as a global leader, you aren’t respected, you’re already fighting a losing battle.

Simi­larly, Donaldson ran into prob­lems because he couldn’t seem to connect with the team leaders. That’s because he was unwilling to under­stand how to connect with them. Eating a sand­wich in your office at your desk is not always how people want to interact with you. Excel­lent ideas and great rapport are often built in the canteen, during coffee breaks, or after work over dinner. Donaldson was unwilling to be flex­ible in this regard and see how things are done in the cultural context he was in. He was there­fore unable to influ­ence those around him into working towards a common goal, which undoubt­edly would have knocked his confi­dence as a leader.

Problem 4: A Belief That Cultural Intel­li­gence Can’t Be Taught

Water­house saw that a partic­ular approach was needed in order to navi­gate through all the different cultures. Maybe he was really obser­vant or perhaps someone told him. Admit­tedly Donaldson wasn’t exactly in a great mindset to learn, but Water­house wasn’t in a mindset to teach either. 

This belief that ‘leaders are born and not created’ is prob­ably one of the most limiting beliefs that global leaders can have. Global lead­er­ship can be taught to anybody who is focused on learning and refining what they do. Every­body is born with a measure of lead­er­ship ability; the choice to culti­vate further is down to the individual.

Cultural intel­li­gence, emotional intel­li­gence, inter­per­sonal skills, commu­ni­ca­tion skills. All of these things and more can be taught if mentors are willing to share and mentees are willing to learn. Had Water­house had a more open view and made fewer assump­tions about what Donaldson should know, he could have inter­vened much earlier and saved a lot of people a lot of aggra­va­tion and many setbacks.

Find out in our free Emotional Intel­li­gence (EI) quiz for global leaders in which EI-areas you are doing well and in which you have room for your devel­op­ment:

Problem 5: Lack of Struc­tured Global Lead­er­ship Development

Managing one area in Cairo and managing one area in Detroit is not always adequate training or expe­ri­ence to run divi­sions in multiple nations. A struc­tured lead­er­ship devel­op­ment program would have given Donaldson a chance to correctly assess the chal­lenges ahead of him. Throwing leaders into ‘sink or swim’ situ­a­tions is a very risky staff devel­op­ment method and not one we recommend.

Whether or not they rise to the occa­sion is irrel­e­vant — some will and others won’t. But why put people under unnec­es­sary pres­sure and poten­tially lose 75% of your leaders. There are huge bene­fits to investing in a global lead­er­ship program that prepares leaders for the unique chal­lenges of extreme lead­er­ship. Had this holistic approach been afforded to Donaldson, it is highly likely that the outcome of this case study would have been different. 

Learn­ings from Donaldson

Overall, Donaldson walked into a very complex busi­ness context with his eyes wide shut. It’s actu­ally quite a common scenario. His atti­tude compounded any issues that a lack of proper training might have caused; if he had been open to learning in general, he would have approached the whole situ­a­tion with curiosity, sensi­tivity, and adapt­ability. Clearly, he is a very capable leader in the right context; but as soon as the extra layer of complexity was added by the global nature of the assign­ment, he was unable to adapt quickly.

Let’s look at what really held Donaldson back and different methods he could have used to course-correct as the assign­ment continued.

Chal­lenge 1: Distinct Lack Of Self Awareness

Donaldson was out of his depth and completely unaware as to the reasons why. He then resorted to blaming every­body else for why the program he was trying to imple­ment was not moving ahead as planned. 

Solu­tion 1: Reflec­tion Exercises

The ability to reflect is a powerful tool that leaders use to iden­tify skills they struggle with. Taking a step back to assess the part you play as a leader will allow you to take a birds-eye view; why did your colleague not respond as you would’ve liked? What could you have been done better? Is there a more appro­priate way to achieve your goal? 

Had he done this, he might have seen that the task he’d been set is prob­ably impos­sible to achieve in two years and that a longer-term view was needed. He would have also seen that he’d missed out on learning what really moti­vated the people he was now inter­acting with and acted accordingly.

Chal­lenge 2: Distinct Lack Of Cultural Intelligence

One of the multi­cul­tural compe­ten­cies required of global leaders is to become cultur­ally intel­li­gent. It’s as impor­tant as emotional intel­li­gence because it equips leaders with the knowl­edge they need to assess what cultural norms are at play when they are having inter­ac­tions with different cultural groups.

Where Donaldson should have been hyper-aware of these, he wasn’t. He found himself in a situ­a­tion where he was disre­specting his colleagues and was totally unaware of what they needed in order to estab­lish that common ground. 

Solu­tion 2: Under­standing The Impact Of Culture

Ignoring the impact of wider soci­etal culture on working envi­ron­ments a rookie error that will quickly make a fool out of even the most well-meaning leaders. Culture cannot be ignored. It must be accounted for when predicting the success of any change program.

Global leaders must study the domi­nant soci­etal cultures that are an intrinsic part of their work­force and take steps to under­stand it as much as possible. If Donaldson had mapped the general habits of his French, German and Spanish colleagues, he would have acquired for himself a whole blue­print detailing the best methods to convey the mission. It also would have avoided the next problem.

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Chal­lenge 3: Poor Commu­ni­ca­tion Of The Vision

Donaldson tried a one-size-fits-all approach with the confer­ences, work­shops and trainers. It worked for some and not for others. This meant that whole teams were confused about the vision and the part they were expected to play in it.

Commu­ni­ca­tion is key, and how people inter­nalise the meaning of a company vision is directly impacted by their culture. Donaldson found it almost impos­sible to get people behind his vision and that was partly because he couldn’t adapt his delivery style to align more closely with the culture of the different teams he was leading.

Solu­tion 3: Scrap the One-Size-Fits-All Delivery

The solu­tion here is to think about how you can deliver the message of the vision in a format that resonates with people. If every­body is all in the same room at one time, then a global leader has to think about how they would do this. 

Here’s an example of this to help you; imagine you’re giving a presen­ta­tion. Some cultures inter­nalize meaning through story­telling. Other cultures are driven by data. Some cultures respond better to inter­ac­tive feedback. 

A global leader would present the vision first, maybe with a story that talks about how the company arrived at this point, and why a change was neces­sary. The folks in the room that need a story to under­stand why they need to take action are satis­fied. The leader then gets into the nitty-gritty about how imple­menting the vision will affect various sets of data. The story­telling group listens politely. It’s not a moti­vator for them. 

The data-driven group, however, light up like a Christmas tree. The formulas make sense — their contri­bu­tion is going to affect this percentage and that percentage and increase revenue by 25%. They’re on board. The leader goes on to include a ques­tion-answer session; “How can we all come together to make this a reality?” The more demo­c­ratic group give their answers. A posi­tive response from the front makes them feel valued. They’re on board to help. 

Same vision, tailored delivery. 

To conclude, it’s clear that the success of a global leader cannot be left to chance. Global leaders must recog­nize the very real chal­lenges that inter­na­tional manage­ment presents. These chal­lenges are not just the musings of busi­ness acad­e­mics trying to make fast cash. They affect people’s lives and their fami­lies, and they must be handled with care in a supportive and inclu­sive fashion.

To avoid the sad case of Donaldson, Water­house, and co., find out more about the global busi­ness lead­er­ship courses we offer at eurac to get your­self prepared for the chal­lenges to come. Alter­na­tively, sign up for our weekly newsletter with all of our tips and tricks for successful global leadership.