Glob­al­iza­tion changed our work envi­ron­ments and corpo­ra­tions face the chal­lenge that their leaders lack the skills to adequately meet the demands of a more and more connected world.

The tradi­tion­ally educated leaders struggle to deal with complex­i­ties, ethical and cultural chal­lenges, tensions and para­doxes, the creation of learning envi­ron­ments and the guiding of large-scale change efforts across conti­nents. Disrup­tive change in infor­ma­tion tech­nology led to inse­cu­rity and non-confi­dent management.

The impact on multi-national corpo­ra­tions is signif­i­cant. When leaders lack the skills to manage processes of collab­o­ra­tion, discovery, archi­tecting and system thinking, then compa­nies lose the orien­ta­tion to navi­gate chal­lenges, lose cred­i­bility and market share and fail to achieve a sustain­able finan­cial, ecolog­ical and economic impact.

Reality shows that inter­na­tional advan­tages are secured by leaders with a global mindset and mindset who are able to adapt rapidly to an ever evolving, highly compet­i­tive market. They master cross-cultural rela­tion­ships and create winning strate­gies by inte­grating global and local perspectives.

However, of the 52% of multi-national corpo­ra­tions which plan to expand their oper­a­tions, only 16% of them reported that they have enough global leaders to fill these crit­ical roles. This lack of adequately prepared global leaders leads to chal­lenges like these:

• Your leaders are strug­gling with increasing complexity, ambi­guity, and uncer­tainty in their day-to-day tasks, thus leading to shrinking market shares.
• Your managers lack core compe­tences to effi­ciently and effec­tively lead your team across cultures, causing internal conflicts.
• Your colleagues are unsure of how and when to adapt their lead­er­ship style to fit local circum­stances, failing to achieve corpo­rate objectives.
• You are strug­gling to align your corpo­rate strategy with multi-cultural dynamics — and so your organ­i­sa­tion is being out-competed in global markets.
• Your exec­u­tives lack tools for better under­standing them­selves and expec­ta­tions they face when working across borders, causing losses of employee loyalty and motivation.
• Your team works (partly) remotely and virtu­ally but lacks the means to sharing knowl­edge and context, is overly depen­dant on tech­nology, and frequently loses useful details.

Do you recog­nize your­self or chal­lenges in your orga­ni­za­tion here? These chal­lenges are not god-given. Read on to learn how to over­come them.

Among the leaders ques­tioned only one-third reported being effec­tive across coun­tries and cultures. That is the lowest single skill effec­tive­ness rating in a survey of 13.124 global leaders and 1.528 HR exec­u­tives within 2.031 multi-national corpo­ra­tions in 48 coun­tries. (Deloitte 2015)

The data collected regarding the use and urgent need for global lead­er­ship is oppressive:

1. Global lead­er­ship is more than any other option a key factor for global success. (Ghemawat, P. 2012. Devel­oping global leaders. McKinsey Quarterly)
2. The global lead­er­ship vacuum “remains the biggest chal­lenge of all for 2013 and beyond.” (World Economic Forum, 2013 Global Agenda Outlook)
3. Compa­nies still struggle to adequately prepare enough global leaders. (Gitsham, M. 2008. Devel­oping the global leader of tomorrow. Report of 1st Global Forum for Respon­sible Manage­ment Educa­tion, United Nations, New York)
4. Firms have had to curtail global strate­gies due to the lack of global leaders. (Mallon, D. 2015. Deloitte’s ‘What Works’ awards 2015: Lessons from the best report)

Multi-national corpo­ra­tions began to confront and try to solve the chal­lenge of finding and devel­oping leaders who could operate sucess­fully in the global context by using different approaches, usually built on top of a do-fail-learn-mindset. These early adopters quickly faced internal barriers within the companies.

Urgency, limited time, limited budgets, conflicting agendas, inertia and bias towards tradi­tional lead­er­ship training as well as high yet unclear expec­ta­tions made the process of finding and devel­oping global leaders unnec­es­sarily nerve-wrecking, painful and costly.

Despite these hard­ships corpo­ra­tions succeeded in the devel­oping global leaders. For example IBM launched a company-wide initia­tive in 2008 to give its future leaders the kind of expe­ri­ence they needed to develop skills and perspec­tives to effec­tively address the chal­lenges it faces in the global market­place. Their leaders learned to be more collab­o­ra­tive, were more attuned to a multi­plicity of cultural differ­ences, and far more fluid and glob­ally networked. IBM achieved record finan­cial perfor­mance and trans­formed itself into a glob­ally inte­grated enterprise.

This and other processes — like Ulysses and Oasis for Price­wa­ter­house­C­oopers (PwC)‘s leaders — were successful, because they created contexts in which leaders had to engage in contrast, confronta­tion and trans­for­ma­tion in a mean­ingful and deep way.

The complex processes and actions through which an indi­vidual influ­ences internal and external players from multiple national cultures are what make global lead­er­ship neces­sary. Global Leaders are not to be confused with domestic leaders, expa­triate leaders, compar­a­tive leaders or global managers. Global Leaders are “Extreme Leaders” (Osland et al., 2012). Their most impor­tant compe­ten­cies and skills can be divided into two domains:

1. Tech­nical / profes­sional compe­ten­cies and skills
2. Compe­ten­cies asso­ci­ated with connecting and relating with people who differ cultur­ally from the leader

Compa­nies are expe­ri­enced in devel­oping the tech­nical and profes­sional compe­ten­cies, but lack effec­tive processes to develop the inter­cul­tural compe­ten­cies. We summa­rize four cate­gories of compe­ten­cies based on “A Frame­work of Nested Global Lead­er­ship Compe­ten­cies” by Allan Bird in his article “Mapping Global Lead­er­ship Compe­ten­cies”, and a review of compe­ten­cies espe­cially needed in times of crisis.

You will benefit from:

• 1. Effi­cient and authentic global lead­er­ship, empow­ering multi­na­tional compa­nies to grow and thrive
  2. Context-specific actions to orga­ni­za­tional excellence
  3. Devel­op­ment of suffi­ciently cultur­ally aware and intel­li­gent leaders and integrators
  4. Keeping global team connected and engaged to foster effec­tive cross-cultural work
  5. Lever­aging differ­ences and syner­gis­ti­cally inte­grating the disparate elements in an increas­ingly complex world
  6. Explore the skillsets of successful global leaders and discover what it takes to build a cohe­sive global team
  7. Improving your leaders ability to nego­tiate and moti­vate internationally
  8. Flex­i­bility and curiosity to lead success­fully across cultures

To provide an inte­gra­tive and inno­v­a­tive seminar concept, eurac assures:

• Cost savings in personnel devel­op­ment through targeted, yet robust, on-going exec­u­tive training
• Measur­able results.
• The elim­i­na­tion of “spot-solu­tions” in personal further educa­tion and move­ment forward to compre­hen­sively inte­grated training content for indi­vid­uals, teams and the entire company.

Indi­vidual Skill and Compe­tency Frame­work
Train­ings and exec­u­tive coaching will be indi­vid­u­ally tailored for you, based on your company’s goals and employees’ skills. This will elim­i­nate “spot solu­tions” by imple­menting the eurac Skill and Compe­tency Frame­work, not only on an indi­vidual basis, but also for the busi­ness as a whole.

Prac­tical imple­men­ta­tion in the routine workday
All train­ings connected with exec­u­tive coaching will effi­ciently increase the compe­ten­cies of partic­i­pants. The methods and tech­niques are prac­tice-oriented and easily applied. The train­ings and exec­u­tive coaching are construc­tively designed and will be imple­mented by prac­tice chap­ters, on-the-job training, and fixed assign­ments between indi­vidual units.

Exclu­sivity
eurac training groups are small and exclu­sive in order to provide indi­vid­u­ality, differ­en­ti­a­tion, and quality at the highest level.