What GICs Can Learn From Startups To Compete For Tech Talent

GICs (Global Innovation Centers) often face tough competition from startups regarding attracting and retaining top talent in the tech space. Startups are often perceived as more agile, innovative and exciting, while GICs may be seen as more bureaucratic and risk-averse. However, GICs can leverage several advantages to compete with startups and attract top talent.

First, GICs need to highlight the benefits and perks they offer employees, such as stability, strong company culture and opportunities for career advancement. By emphasizing the unique value they offer employees, GICs can differentiate themselves from startups and attract top talent.

But can they do more? Could they maybe emulate certain aspects of startup culture that most attract the top talent and thus offer a "best-of-both-worlds" workplace? Read on to find out.

Advantages Of GICs Over Startups

One advantage that GICs have is their association with large organizations, which offers stability and security. While startups may be more exciting and offer the potential for rapid growth and big rewards, they also come with higher risk and uncertainty. GICs, on the other hand, can be attractive to employees looking for long-term career growth. Another advantage GICs have is the resources and expertise they have to offer a range of professional development and training opportunities, which can help employees build new skills and advance their careers.

GICs also tend to have more structure and more defined processes and job descriptions, which leads to more consistency in operations, better-managed change and more structured rewards and recognition programs. On a more personal level, I find that GICs often offer better recreational facilities as well as access to counseling and mentoring, meaning that work-life balance may be easier to maintain. Finally, GICs are often a part of very reputable global organizations, which adds prestige to any employee’s résumé.

Now that we’ve listed some of the advantages GICs should emphasize when competing for talent, let’s see how GICs can emulate startups to offer some of the same excitement and agility in the workplace that often attracts top talent to startups.

What Can GICs Learn From Startups?

1. Remove some of the bureaucracy

One central point of criticism toward more prominent legacy companies is the amount of red tape, which slows processes down and can effectively halt innovation and creativity. If you want to compete for top talent as a GIC, try to give more ownership to your department heads, cut down on bureaucratic processes and consider introducing something like Google’s 20% rule, which gives employees time to work on whatever they are passionate about. Much innovation arises from this kind of freedom.

2. Become more fun

What makes startups so much fun is the informal work environment, the pace at which work is done, the spontaneity and the culture that encourages team members to be friends and have fun outside of their work responsibilities. It can be easy to import some of that into your GIC environment: Encourage people to create non-work-related Slack channels to discuss their hobbies and interests, trust people more and control them less, and host fun events like hackathons and fascinating talks by top authors and celebrities.

3. Allow for more exciting roles

Multinational corporations often have very narrowly defined roles that can make more creative spirits feel trapped in a job description that gives them little opportunity for creativity. Consider being more flexible with job descriptions and encouraging employees to weigh in on what they would like their role to be. That way, you will have more engaged employees and better results as they work on things they genuinely care about.

4. Offer more opportunities for growth

A GIC definitely has an advantage over a startup regarding long-term career prospects and succession planning. However, in the short term, the opportunities at a startup are more exciting. In a startup, someone who comes in as a software engineer could rise to CTO within three or four years.

What opportunities for growth could you offer to those who are ready to take on more responsibility? How could you make their mid-term prospects more exciting? This is an important consideration, as the average tenure at any one organization is getting shorter, and the younger talent often advances their career by changing organizations every three to five years. If you only offer long-term opportunities, you might lose out on some of the top talent.

5. Create a startup-like environment in capsules

Could you have an innovation center—a kind of Skunk Works, where the atmosphere is more startup-like, as it often is in R&D departments? Could you create a part of your GIC that allows more flexibility, creativity and playfulness to enter the workplace?

Offer The Best Of Both Worlds

As there is increasing competition for top talent in the tech space, companies looking to recruit the best and brightest must set themselves apart to become attractive. GICs would do well to redefine their employee value proposition (EVP) by focusing on providing a flexible or hybrid working model and offering a range of other benefits to attract top talent.

The best way to do that is to offer candidates the best of both worlds: the excitement, pace, innovation and creative challenge of a startup environment combined with the stability, reputation and long-term opportunities of a GIC.

First published on Forbes.com in June 2023

How Global Companies Can Attract And Retain Talent

The talent competition is tough, especially in the tech space. Talented engineers and designers have many options open to them. What can global giants do to attract the most sought-after talent to their teams? How can they create a hybrid work environment that is hard to resist?

Some of the issues leaders face in hybrid work environments are that employees feel less connected and managers feel that control is slipping. Maintaining a positive culture and keeping morale up is more challenging when things get tricky.

In recent years, global innovation centers (GICs) have become an increasingly important part of multinational corporations (MNCs)—such as IBM, Cisco, Deloitte and Glaxo Smith Kline, to name a few—as companies seek to remain competitive in a fast-paced and digital world. Since these large business units are often located in a different country from the HQ and have a particular set of tasks, they need to offer a different employee value proposition (EVP) to attract the specialized talent they need.

Before the pandemic, many companies relied on providing attractive work environments and accessible services to lure in top talent. Today, in a world where many people want to work from home, these perks are less effective. Many GICs are responding to this shift by offering more flexible, hybrid and remote work options, which can be a crucial part of their EVP.

Let's explore how you can learn from GICs' practices and leverage your hybrid work environment.

Get The Basics In Place

First, get your hybrid work environment right. How much face-to-face interaction do you need and want? What type of interactions does your culture require? Looking at your employee profile, how much flexibility is needed and desired? What kind of infrastructure do you have in place? What do you need to create the best hybrid work environment for your employees?

The second step is fully leveraging technology. Make sure you have clear guidelines on which software is used for what. Big companies use up to 50 different social and collaborative software platforms, which can get confusing. Try to reduce the number of platforms you use and clearly define what they are used for, e.g., email for more in-depth content, Slack for quick questions and coordinating meetings, etc.

Give your teams access to exciting technology to get their creative juices flowing and enable them to work most efficiently.

Thirdly, communication is now more critical than ever. Put some effort into achieving maximum clarity in your communication. Text updates are usually not enough; most people won’t read them, so think of efficient ways to do live updates at regular intervals. Make sure everyone has access to all the information they need.

Also, when speaking on Zoom, ask people to keep their cameras on whenever possible so that there is more of a connection. Leaders should set an example that others will follow.

Leverage Your Hybrid Work Model

When you’re offline:

When you’re at the office, make the most of personal interaction time, especially as a leader. Use this time to interact with your people face-to-face and build rapport. Nothing can replace meetings in real life for relationship-building. It’s also a great way to gauge morale, hear people’s ideas and create open and transparent communication opportunities.

So organize some nice "away days" or retreats to take your people on, and make sure they spend time together in person regularly. You need that real human interaction to keep morale up and your culture alive and thriving.

Offer some engaging personal and professional development opportunities. Let key people travel to conferences and events where they can engage with other industry leaders, offer in-person workshops on days when people are at the office and have some fun with team- and culture-building activities.

When you’re online:

Since most people are working remotely now—at least part of the time—you can create new cross-border collaborations. Get people from different teams together, and let them exchange their experiences, challenges and successes. Encourage cross-functional collaboration to accelerate innovation.

You no longer need to have separating lines between countries and departments; working online opens up a whole host of opportunities, and most MNCs should exploit these more fully. Allow yourself to be daring and creative to come up with new ways of working together.

Another thing that becomes easier online is mentoring across levels. Embrace both classical mentoring, where more experienced professionals mentor the younger generation, as well as reverse mentoring, where the more youthful generation mentors the more experienced colleagues on some of the latest trends in tech, etc.

Finally, give your team members access to coaches and counselors, provide mediators to help resolve conflicts and offer your leaders memberships to critical networking and mastermind groups for your industry. Opportunities for advancement and development are a big part of the EVP for most employees.

In Brief

In addition to offering flexible working models, GICs also provide a range of other benefits and perks to attract top talent, like opportunities for professional development, access to cutting-edge technologies and tools, and the chance to work on innovative and high-impact projects. Consider what other elements your global company can borrow from these centers to appeal to employees.

First published on Forbes.com in June 2023

Four Steps To Evolve From A Regional To A Global Center Leader

From support centers to centers of excellence and innovation, global centers (a subsidiary of a multinational corporation based in the United States or Europe in a lower-cost country such as India, the Philippines or Romania) have evolved and proven their resilience during the pandemic. How about their leaders, though? Have they evolved as far and as successfully? Let’s have a look at the expectations that MNCs have of their global center leaders and how well these expectations are met.

Global centers started out as development and support centers for MNCs. Straightforward jobs were outsourced to lower-cost regions while creativity and innovation remained at headquarters. As global centers grew, more and more of them evolved into centers of excellence with a focus on research and development, product development and design. Banking, financial services and insurance companies and professional services firms started expanding the scope to cover research, underwriting and consulting.

Recently, since Covid-19 forced a lot of businesses to start or accelerate their digital transformation, some global centers have started playing a role in facilitating these changes globally. These pioneering centers have acquired talent in emerging technologies such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, the cloud, blockchain and cybersecurity. This rings in a new age of value addition in global centers and makes global centers more attractive to so-called unicorns and other rapid-growth businesses. Gojek, Uber and Grab are examples of unicorns that have Global Centers in India.

In my coaching practice, I have identified four steps to help regional leaders transform into a global center leader:

1. Think locally but, more importantly, globally

Global centers are part of MNCs and as such must have a global perspective combined with local knowledge, not just of their own country but also the other countries where the respective MNC has a strong presence. A global center leader needs to think strategically when making decisions on which offices to allocate projects to, which locations to grow, etc. The issue at the moment is that global center leaders often feel they are competing with other locations.

It is time to think on a more global scale about what is best for the organization as a whole. Leaders need to prove they are thinking strategically and holistically. They need to show their understanding of the overall organizational health of the company and where/how they can contribute to improving that. They need to leave behind the mindset of pushing their own people and their location forward to instead look objectively at where the best opportunities lie for the organization as a whole. This requires them to network with their colleagues in other locations and to initiate collaboration wherever it might be beneficial.

2. Contribute at a strategic level

What does this look like on a practical level? It means going beyond delivering projects on time, at lower cost, faster and with higher quality—that is the baseline for global centers these days. Global center leaders are expected to go beyond the old "tell me what to do and I’ll do it better than any other center/team/person."

Nowadays the expectation is that global centers contribute to the future direction of the company, that they earn their seat at the table by going beyond problem-solving, that they take a more proactive role. Even MNCs want to create more agile work environments these days. Digital transformation is a fast-paced field where constant innovation is happening and there are countless opportunities for pioneering Global Centers to forge new paths. Guided by questions like “Where will the next five-year growth come from?” leaders can take the opportunity to anticipate, think ahead and contribute to shaping the future of the company.

3. Move from cost arbitrage to business growth

In order to execute that move successfully and develop a more entrepreneurial mindset, leaders need to strive to deeply understand their customers’ needs and pain points. Who is your ideal customer? What are they struggling with? What obstacles are they encountering when they want to engage with your product or service?

Leaders can start their exploration in their local market, participate more, join the relevant conversations, meet their customers and competitors. Then, expand into the international market.

Another opportunity is to keep abreast with the business, i.e., stay connected across sales, services, product management and engineering—locally and globally. Global center leaders need to move not only with the times but ahead of the times to stay relevant. What is the next emerging trend? How can you be one of the pioneers of it?

4. Expand your sphere of influence

Traditionally, global centers have promoted generalists. They have shied away from too much specialization so that employees could easily be deployed on a variety of projects. Once leaders get to a certain level, this is no longer sufficient. They need to supplement their generalist skills with some deep expertise, especially in strategic areas.

Being an industry insider and having a good overview of global trends and developments in your niche are vital for the role. What regional and global trends are there in your industry? Where is the innovation happening?

Combined with essential soft skills like networking and executive presence, this ensures they have the ear of the right people, allowing them to consult internally on various strategic matters and to get involved at the executive level. This, in turn, helps them build their reputation and thus their global influence, creating impact beyond their immediate function—a vital step toward professional growth opportunities.

Global center leaders are sitting on a potential gold mine, especially as the pandemic has not only changed the global workplace landscape but has also proven the resilience of global centers. If leaders understand how to leverage their advantage and onboard the right talent to evolve to the next level, they can grow their global centers exponentially.

This article was first published on Forbes.

Managing a Global Matrix Organization Structure

The world is your oyster and with every passing day, this statement is becoming more applicable. A direct outcome of this change is the incredible transformation that the business world has witnessed. Today, irrespective of where you start out, there is no dearth of opportunities or limit to what you can achieve.

For us leaders, this modification in the business landscape has translated into immense growth. A company can now be truly global. It can function as one unit with the same objectives, goals, and outcomes. To enable this, all of us have had to adapt. Businesses are continuously reevaluating and restructuring themselves to achieve efficiency and productivity. Traditional management hierarchies are making way for more sophisticated and complex systems that empower fast growing multinationals to stay on a par with their global counterparts.

Adapting to growth

One such solution is the Global Matrix Structure. While binding the company under a single shared vision, Matrix structures aid in enhancing productivity and delivering quicker solutions. Broad objectives and a concrete agenda with clearly defined operational metrics are the cornerstones of implementing this structure successfully. With the aid of technology, transparent and real-time communication ensures seamless application and consistent results.

Critical Considerations – While implementing a Matrix Structure, a substantial effort should be devoted towards the continuous reinforcement of the company’s vision, objectives, project plans, and agendas. Effective communication on these essential elements is necessary to stay on track to be on the same page with diversified teams. Resources should be invested in building relationships throughout the company. Crafting a work culture around the company’s vision and values, and driving unity matter more than ever as numbers grow.

Challenges are many

For employees, coordinating across reporting lines to accomplish their goals and meeting their targets can get complicated. In a Global Matrix Structure, the organization’s growth directly translates to higher complexity for the employees. Reporting to multiple managers while ensuring productivity can become a challenge. To successfully implement and sustain this structure, certain precautions are necessary. Miscommunication in such a setting can have immense ramifications. As mentioned earlier, communication is key to not only ensure alignment of vision and goals but to also develop trust across the whole matrix.

Our workforce can be described by a single term – global, but that does not mean standardized. In a global setting, it is even more important to be mindful of unique cultures. The interaction of cultures, work styles, and mindsets, ideally leads to an exchange of ideas and learning. Adapting to local culture is the only way to be successful on a global scale. However, standardization is not your enemy either.

Critical Considerations – Standardize internal SOPs, processes, and policies as a certain amount of standardization helps everyone work better together without ambiguity. A fatal blow to any Matrix Structure is inconsistency amongst employees and managers about organizational goals. In organizations of enormous length and breadth, no effort to reinforce collective goals will go to waste. Connect and bind collective goals to individual growth as it is easy to lose sight of collective goals when individuals try to adapt to new teams and projects.

Methods to succeed / How does one succeed?

To ensure the continued success of a Global Matrix Structure, it is crucial to focus on employee needs. Considering that your workforce functions across the globe while reporting to more than one manager, invest in creating assurance amongst them by providing them with clarity. Matters that hold high importance in an employee’s life are performance evaluation, professional development, coaching, accountability and conflict management. At every step, ensure clarity on every single aspect that directly affects an employee’s professional life.

Critical Considerations – Use the strengths of a Matrix structure to ensure that knowledge exchange, training modules, and skills get transferred on a global level. Employees value organizations that make an effort to contribute to their growth. Provide clarity regarding professional growth by making it easier for employees to discuss these matters with a senior in close proximity. Reduce the hoops and hurdles, to ensure that your employees at no point in time feel confused about their points of contact and managers.

Put a mechanism in place to broker discussions in case of conflicting priorities. Appoint and communicate a decision maker and leader for every project to avoid power struggles in the team. Finally, drive interdependencies for progress amongst team members. Some genuine collective/collaborative effort can bridge all gaps ensuring success for everyone.

Creating self-awareness for Development

As individuals, the process of personal development is a never-ending one. Climbing up the corporate ladder requires constant efforts. While the learning and training on the professional front remain a focus, there have to be conscious efforts to evolve as a person and leader. Professional progress is an endeavor that demands growth from every aspect of your personality. Advancing in your professional life demands that you constantly evaluate your approach towards the world and your team. The ability to be able to mold yourself as per the demands of a job is priceless in today’s ever-changing world. One such skill that will enable you to make these changes is the ability to be self-aware.

A leader wears multiple hats, adapting oneself to play a different role in each situation. A leader should be able to motivate people, take a calculated risk, make difficult decisions, have business acumen and updated skills etc. How does one perform each task and be in each role when there is so much to do? Answers lie in getting to know yourself well. Self-awareness is becoming aware of your strengths, weaknesses, emotions, motivations, and areas for improvement.

Being self-aware translates to knowing and identifying your thought process, the logic behind each decision, and understanding the need to seek assistance. Self-awareness also means understanding the motivation and emotion behind your behavior and the factors that influence. As it is crucial to take well-balanced, practical and impartial decisions as a leader, becoming self-aware helps you be in-tune with yourself much more effectively. 

Becoming self-aware is possible through continuous effort. The following pointers will help you develop this ability over a period of time.

• Personality Testing

  Understanding your personality, impulses and core traits through personality tests is a good way to get started. Tests such as Myers-Briggs, Predictive Index, DISC and Strengthsfinder will help you evaluate yourself. They will illustrate your areas of improvement and weaknesses. These tests will reveal your natural strengths, emotional drivers, behavior, conflict resolution skills, and communication abilities. An ideal way to start the process of self-reflection, personality testing will help you define your journey of personal growth.  

• 360 Evaluation

  360 multi-rater assessments will allow you to gather information and feedback from all the stakeholders of your company. This anonymous method lets you attain candid feedback from your peers, superiors, and employees. Accepting this feedback will let you make the necessary adjustments to your behavior and methods to be able to lead your company more efficiently and effectively.

• Feedback

  In addition to the formal channel of 360 Evaluation, ask your peers, senior and mentors for periodic feedback to get a new and different perspective. While doing so, ensure that you approach them with an open mind and a willingness to listen without justifying yourself. A receptive approach to these conversations will let you discover true insights while developing a bond of trust. Avoid defending yourself or explaining your thought process while having these conversations to build credibility. Do ask good questions to understand their feedback better.

• Experiment

  A great way to discover your own likes and dislikes is by trying out new things. Each new experience comes with an opportunity to learn something about yourself. While the experience itself may be positive or negative, it will surely provide you with an insight into your attitude and approach towards challenges.

Using Self Awareness to Your Advantage

Understanding yourself is a strong foundation for future success. This knowledge will empower you to make changes which will influence your career significantly. Being self-aware becomes a strength especially while making strategic career moves and planning your future.

As a leader, self-awareness is an ability of utmost importance as it will enable you to make informed decisions like hiring individuals for the leadership team. Accepting your weaknesses lets you find teammates who complement your abilities; knowing yourself lets you guide your teammates on the best way to make each team endeavor successful. Being self-aware while understanding others will allow you to surround yourself with people who can help you achieve collective goals more effectively, resulting in success for yourself and your team.

Boosting Operational Efficiency

Reaching optimal operational efficiency is a challenge even for organizations with the simplest structures. Multiple functions and departments have to sync and work together seamlessly to ensure productivity. Along with internal functioning, there are many external factors that influence an organization, like constant competition, technological changes, customer preferences, stakeholder expectations and so on. As the organization grows, maintaining productivity and efficiency can become a challenge. The best way to deal with this is to have a navigation system in place as you scale up to avoid loss of efficiency and resources.

 Care About Competition & Numbers

All leaders and entrepreneurs start their journey with certain numbers and goals as destinations. These goals define strategy, milestones and execution methods to reach the eventual target. While working towards this, measure your progress. Do this not just internally but compare it with your competitors to focus on the larger picture. Benchmark the practices that are helping them increase their efficiency and learn lessons from their processes. Go a step beyond, look at other industries that face similar problems as you do and benchmark their process as well. Incorporate these learning while creating processes for your own company.

 Standardize at Each Step

Creating standardized processes at every step creates structure and predictability in the company. It provides employees clarity regarding their roles and responsibilities. Standardizing is key to keep the quality of your services consistent. Install checks and balances to stop errors that could be foreseen. Standardized processes create efficiency while safeguarding productivity through repetition and accountability. Periodically, evaluate the efficacy of these procedures to identify room for improvement.

 Proactive Evaluation

The standard procedures and protocols that each company puts in place have to be appraised from time to time. As the company grows or external factors come into play, there is a need to make certain changes. Foreseeing bottlenecks and continuous improvement guarantees that your company fulfills commitments in a consistent manner as per expectations. Proactively doing this evaluation can increase and enhance the capabilities of your teams. While a crisis situation forces us to make changes, prevention is better than cure. Make proactive evaluation a part of your process to ensure operational efficiency.

 Invest in Infrastructure

While there is a lot of effort involved in hiring the right people, investing in infrastructure ensures that the employees have the right tools and support to achieve the goals set for them. Along with the technology, choose the right vendors and partnerships. Find the right connections at the appropriate costs to meet the customer need. Ensuring the quality of your offerings and establishing a set up that empowers your employees to do their best will not only guarantee growth for your organization but it will also increase job satisfaction amongst your employees. This will directly impact the organization’s overall operational efficiency.

 Make Learning Priority

The next step to ensure efficiency and productivity from your employees is to plan their growth within the company. Creating career options, learning opportunities, skill enhancement avenues, and training programs will increase their operational effectiveness while positively impacting attrition levels. Employee productivity and skill enhancement also keep them up the curve with respect to competition. As technological advancements also have a direct impact on the efficiencies, training only ensures that your team is prepared for the future.

Keeping a check on operational efficiency is a must for organizations that are aspiring to grow at a fast pace. Without a strong focus on this element of the organization, even the strongest products and services can fail to meet customer requirements. A customer’s experience of dealing with your representatives and using your product defines their future with you. The customer experience takes precedence over everything else and delivering a consistent, satisfying and efficient experience has never been as vital to success as it is now.

Transforming and Turning Around an Ailing Company

“If the plan doesn’t work change the plan, not the goal” -Anonymous

Profit unmet? Revenues collapsing? Losing customer retention? Employees abandoning the bandwagon?

Low-points are a part of every business journey. Losing heart and feeling demotivated does not resolve existing issues. No entrepreneur wants to be a part of any falling statistic. However, time spent wallowing over mistakes made is precious time lost. In such situations, the key is to take immediate actions, lest you run the risk of the company going down in flames. Irrespective of the scale of business, if your company is teetering between success and failure, it is helpful to first understand why your business is failing and then strategize how to overcome them.

The Fire-Fighter Approach

Whenever a fire breaks out, the flames are usually bigger than disclosed. You try to break through the door, oblivious to what may happen inside; either the house could collapse or you can put out the fire. Regardless, you charge, because such actions are taken when it’s almost too late.

Similarly, in the world of business, problems are tackled seriously only when the fire is about to collapse the house. In such situations, you play the fire-fighter and risk breaking-in. The catch here is to reach the cause of the breakout. The team needs to realize the flaws and be consciously aware as to where the functioning has gone wrong. Having a clear and open discussion about this negates the confusion and brings in clarity on how to tackle the problem going forward.

Train Insane or Remain the Same

You have often heard the quote “Train insane or remain the same” connoted to fitness enthusiasts. Did you know that this saying also applies to the employees of an organization? To turn your company around, you’ll need to push all the boundaries and make strategic moves to improve its health. Often when a company changes its strategies and plans, they rarely execute the same as the team lacks the potential to do so. So what are you going to do? Get rid of existing staff and fish for new talent at a juncture where the company’s future looks uncertain? This is a flawed plan. Instead, you can train and correct the existing staff and turn them into your dream team. Initially, they might resist change, but with time and willingness to initiate, employees will blend in.

One Victory at a Time

As the saying goes “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Similarly, one cook cannot focus on different dishes at once. Akin to this, the organization should focus on one problem and resolve it in totality before moving on to the next issue. Even one small victory helps increase your employees overall morale. This can be better executed if there is openness amongst team members about sharing both good and bad news. This also helps in instilling a sense of ownership into your employees.

It is imperative to involve employees in decision making and undertake more roles as a leader. This will energize them towards transformation and commitments. It also makes them more accepting towards changes. Develop a singular vision between every individual and lay out clear key performance indicators (KPIs), which will ensure that employees work together as a team towards an objective.

People Matter

More often than not, major fallouts that take place in a company is because of clashes between people; employees, management or owners. These issues are often not addressed because of ego clashes. The challenge is to sort through all the agendas, defensiveness and embarrassment caused at all levels of the organization. Hence, people of the organization should actively address the issue. They should be open and talk more often to show that they care. Immediately taking stringent actions like firing someone can backfire manifold. It is extremely important to maintain the talent that originally created the concept or brand as they are the company.

Turnarounds are exciting and fulfilling when you begin to see changes work for the company’s betterment. It is rewarding to see a business that was left for dead to start fresh and keep going. At the end of the day, the goal is to transform, enhance and motivate your employees to reach their highest potential. Through a constant and rigorous review of work processes and employees, you will ensure that unforeseen circumstances do not throw the company for a loop. Thus, the ability to effectively transform a company is determined by the relationship shared between the company, employees, and customers. Change is the only constant, and embracing it with open arms will fuel the growth of the company.

Lack of Collaboration Causes Workplace Failures

The primary challenge in globally dispersed organizations is to ensure that the workforce operates productively to accomplish corporate goals and meet market demands.  It is important for these organizations that goals permeate through to the local teams and business units to ensure maximized worker productivity and meeting of market demands. Leaders of the organization are called upon to set standards around internal communication and productivity of the workforce.

Business Unit Goals Focus vs Company Goals

Leaders are the foundational members of a company and their style has a direct impact on how employees engage with each other.  Leaders must know the people on their team well and understand their strengths and skills in order to determine the best way to facilitate achievement of goals and objectives for their unit and the company as a whole. 

In organizations with a more command-and-control-style leadership approach, bureaucracy is more prevalent and communication between employees and departments or business units may be strained. Leaders in these organizations may be driven by achievement of departmental or business unit goals versus the larger collective goals of the organization.  However, this style of leadership often results in employees practicing behaviors that might negatively impact the larger collective. Employees may feel encouraged to keep information to themselves, reject new ideas for fear of failure, and possibly work against others, despite everyone working for the same company. The organizational impact of this style of leadership is poor employee morale and job satisfaction. 

Encouraging Collaboration

In a decentralized leadership approach, on the other hand, collaboration is encouraged and a more democratic style of leadership may be adopted. This style of leadership is built on consensus building and allows leaders to leverage the skills and knowledge of their workforce.  The ultimate goal should, however, not be lost on a leader.  They should work to manage employees so that they have limited barriers to effectiveness, feel empowered to look for new opportunities to grow their career, and equipped with the knowledge and abilities to successfully deal with the challenges of their job. This requires a leader who – as suggested in a Wall Street Journal article on leadership styles [1] – can adapt their style to meet the needs of their particular group of employees and the situation of their organization.    

Leadership Style Impacts the Bottom Line

Leaders of an organization must be cognizant of the impact their style has on the bottom line results of the organization. In a study conducted by Daniel Goleman at the turn of the twenty-first century, the results revealed, “that a manager’s leadership style was responsible for 30% of the company’s bottom line profitability.”  Therefore, leaders must be aware of how their style could cause ineffective communication throughout the organization, less productive employees, and eventually, less competitiveness of the organization.  Leaders must also be aware that other underlying issues may be prevalent throughout the organization which could cause a less productive workforce such as general fear of sharing knowledge and resistance to change and new ideas.  In these cases, other styles of leadership may be more appropriate.  For instance, the affiliative style, which emphasizes team work and harmony to accomplish goals, may be best when groups are prone to working in silos and resisting communication. Such a style can highlight the importance of working together for the collective good of the group versus adversarial relationships that reduce the productivity.  Such an acknowledgement can demonstrate how a leader can be mindful of changing or improving their style to produce better results for the company.    

Culture of Trust

In order for organizations to overcome operational ineffectiveness, a culture of trust must be established, whereby employees feel comfortable sharing with others in the company.  In fact, a study conducted by the IBM Institute of Knowledge-Based Organizations (IKO) noted that the most important factor to establish strong employee relationships and knowledge sharing is trust.  This study further revealed that there are two kinds of trust, benevolence based trust - individuals do not intentionally harm each other, and competence based trust - individuals believe the other person is knowledgable, which improves communication and knowledge sharing.  Both kinds of trust can exist independently of each other and individuals do not always need to share both types of trust with others. However, both types of trust support different goals for the organization, and therefore, organizations should find ways to promote both types of trust within the organization and between employees. 

Infrastructure & Systems for Collaboration

Another important factor for organizations is the existence of robust systems to support the teamwork of employees in order to achieve organizational goals.  These systems include technological infrastructure that supports communication and collaboration, formal and informal networks for employees to learn more about others (e.g. mentoring programs, communities of practice, lunch-and-learns, etc.), timely, well-designed training that is easy to access by the employee, and an appraisal and reward system that promotes the desired behavior.  These systems can support a more open environment where communication flows easily between individuals, trust is developed, and knowledge is shared to complete work, generate new ideas, and solve problems of the organization. 

Building Trust IN Organizations

In both cases, establishing trust and supporting robust systems, leadership is required for success. The study conducted by the IBM IKO noted three actions that managers can take to build more trusting organizations:

• Create common understanding of the operational activities of the organization. To create a common context of the work to be accomplished and the goals of the group will help to build shared language and a shared view for how work is accomplished.

• Model behavior expected of employees. It is important that employees see their leaders demonstrating the behaviors being asked of them. This starts with actively listening to others and encouraging employees to communicate and share their concerns. It is important that employees believe their leaders are trustworthy before they will feel comfortable sharing with others.

• Bring teammates together. While physical distance may prevent all employees from coming together face-to-face, leaders should work on ways in which team members, regardless of physical location, can interact with each other. These opportunities will go a long way in building trust and supporting the systems in place that can facilitate effective working relationships for the common good of the group and the organization overall.

These actions taken by managers can undercut silos of communication, strained relationships, and fear and begin to create a culture of sharing and trust. 

 To keep this really only makes sense if you can link to the Wall Street article in question and say “as suggested in this Wall Street Journal article”

Are You Speaking Your Customer's Language?

Make Customer Meetings Effective

After calls and emails, meeting a customer in person is an opportunity for progress. A structured meeting with an outline and agenda can be productive and measurable. Often customer meetings can go awry if you enter without preparation and goals. Depending upon the stage in the customer’s journey with your company, a meeting can change the course of your partnership with any client.

Prepare

While placing the meeting request, take some time to outline the agenda of the meeting including the expected outcome. As you fine tune the presentation and add relevant information to it, get to know your client, the company, and their business well. Communicating goals is an important step internally as well as externally. It assigns responsibility and effort to each member. It is also essential to have information about the client’s industry to understand the external problems that the company might be facing at the moment.

Focus on Them

During the meeting, while you might be pitching your offerings, keep the focus on your client and their needs. Emphasis on what your company can offer to them precisely as opposed to what you offer to the world in general. Discuss their business needs and problems. Focus on selling a solution instead of a product. Pitch your product as an essential to their business instead of just pitching your product.

Think Big Picture

While you might be meeting this new client with a set goal in mind, look beyond the set objectives. Take some time to ask questions and get to know the client’s thinking process and point of view. Spending time in understanding the client’s vision for the company and business objectives at this juncture can lead to better ideas and more business opportunities. Though the client might expect a certain kind of solution from you, this will help in creating better and more relevant solutions.

Get Clarity

Meetings are the perfect opportunity to have dialogue which is both necessary and insightful. These are opportunities to go a step further and dig deeper. When suggesting a solution or a service, first understand the problem. Ask the right questions to understand the cause of the problem instead of offering a solution at face value. Getting to the reasons and causes is a great way of getting insights. Addressing a deeper issue will also bring more value to your partnership.

Share What You Know

Apart from your services, share what you know about the client’s industry and your specialization. Sharing the right information at the right time, picking points from the conversation to share analytics, and illustrating innovative solutions that your company has created for other clients, is a guaranteed way to showcase your credibility and expertise. As meetings are a two-way conversation and are fluid, such conversations only benefit both parties. After the meeting, follow-up with the client with your case studies and published insights to support the same. The familiar adage, ‘Knowledge is Power’ continues to rule to this day.

Show Openness and Adaptability

It will be very rare that you will find clients who agree with your every point and vice versa. Meetings are the ideal time to resolve any conflicts that you may be facing with your clients. Not only does it give you a chance to avoid miscommunication, but it also guarantees that client values your effort. Depending on the nature of the conflict, formulate a solution beforehand. In a meeting,  it is much easier to show openness and dedication to achieve a fair resolution.

If you are meeting the client for the first time, understand that there will be an uncomfortable moment or two. Be prepared to put your point across and be clear about your negotiating positions. Throughout the meeting, maintain focus on reaching a positive outcome and engineer a win-win situation for both parties through communication.

Plan the Next Step

While concluding the meeting, plan a final next step.  Always end with an actionable point to ensure that discussion continues and your meeting achieves results. Make the meeting memorable for the client by following up with something of value to them. It could be an article that will resonate with them or just a sincere mail saying thank you. Use this chance to cement your new association with the client on a positive note.

Building the Dream Team

One of the biggest responsibilities of a leader is to form a team that can turn the company’s vision from words into reality. This requires not just a single leader but a leadership team that brings together a whole array of expertise, skills, and capabilities. Building a team at this level requires the leader of this team to go beyond skills and qualifications. It is crucial to consider all aspects of an individual while building a team that will lead your company. 

Forming a Team

Most individuals at this level of seniority have worked with the company for a long time. They might know of each other but in their separate departments. An individual in a leadership team goes beyond just representing the silo/department that they lead. Being a part of this team means actually leaving that title behind and working with each other to achieve collective goals of the company. Just as necessary as it is to ensure the seamless and efficient functioning of the operational aspect of the business, the leadership team has to also focus on staying true to the vision and objectives of the company. This can be done only through collaboration and teamwork.

While you start the process of building a leadership team, begin by being completely honest about your own strengths and weaknesses. As a leader, it is essential to know your areas of weakness and find teammates who can offer you valuable counsel in those areas. Next step while shortlisting candidates is evaluating their skills and aptitudes not just individually but with context to each other. Finding people with complementary competencies to join a leadership team will create a balance and an opportunity to drive collaborations. The varied experience of each individual will foster mutual respect instead of competition creating cohesion in the team.

Building Diversity

Professionals with individualistic thinking, unique thought processes, and distinctive talents offer a myriad point of views and perspectives. In a team like this, each problem is solved through collective debate and the most credible solution is found. There is less chance of opinions overlapping due to individual expertise, guaranteeing an innovative and robust approach to business problems and a long-term strategy that is futuristic and ambitious.

Communicating Responsibilities

In order to achieve success together, it is important to discuss and understand the role of each person in the team. In a team of this level, there cannot be any competition or personal agendas. Discourage this by engaging in conversations with each member, focusing on their unique role and responsibilities. Often, there is emphasis on the achievements and outcomes expected from the team and individuals. It is necessary to place equal importance on behaviors and decorum expected from them as they will be leading their own teams to achieve success by providing them motivation and direction. 

Evaluate and Realign

Many teams get caught up in resolving the operational and short-term challenges. As a leader, bring back the focus of your team to the bigger picture. Reinforce your long-term goals and strategy to this group of people as they will drive the company towards achieving them. Emphasizing the collective vision is the only way to stay true to the path of collective and company progress. This can be done through periodic evaluations and strategic meetings that discuss only the long-term agenda. Assess where the company stands, make the appropriate changes for course correction.

As you periodically evaluate progress, also appreciate the achievements of your team. Display the qualities that you would want your team to exhibit to their team members. Build channels of communication that promote openness and collaboration. Knowledge exchange should be a priority for this group of people as they chart the company’s future progress.

A leadership team is at the core of your company. The attitude, energy and vision of these individuals dictate the future of your venture. Spending time in forming a formidable team is an investment towards success. Go beyond qualifications, reputation, achievements and appearances to form a team that believes in your dreams for the company.

Preserve Your Core

We dreamt of space travel, hover boards, flying cars, and many other revolutionary changes. Little did we know that our lives were going to change in phenomenal ways in the coming decades, but not as we had imagined. Technology has seamlessly integrated itself in our lives in such subtle ways that we do not notice its existence.

Analytics and the Changing HR Game

There are numerous definitive ways in which Big Data and analytics can change the HR game, enabling an efficient and agile shift in human resource development and management. What are some of the areas that analytics will play a huge part, and how will this shape the future of the corporate world?

There is a set of problem questions that ubiquitously plagues every HR or Business Head. Some of these are along the lines of:

• What will my turnover be next year?

• What factors drive employee turnover?

• What are my biggest workforce risks?

Predictive analytics to provide such answers would hugely simplify processes for the HR department. Decisions, predictions and expectations become more objective and realistic, and therefore the path forward is significantly more concrete than it would be with the traditional guesswork approach.

The good news? There is an abundance of data available, 90 per cent of which was collected in the last two years alone.

There are numerous definitive ways in which Big Data and analytics can change the HR game, enabling an efficient and agile shift in human resource development and management. What are some of the areas that analytics will play a huge part, and how will this shape the future of the corporate world?

Managing Talent Agility

• The HR departments of the future will largely focus on talent agility. There is increasingly a shift being seen from attempting to foster change and recruit new people, to actually ensure that the talent deployed is agile and can seamlessly move with the times.

• Predictive data will give the HR department hints on which direction the trends are moving in. This will help build a people pool with the latest business developments in mind.

• Aligning and realigning at regular periods of time will prove easier with data available on people and their skills. As agility becomes the new norm, talent will have to be matched to work and vice versa.

Talent Advisory

• With talent agility, the HR department will also become career advisors. In a world where agility leads everyone to change careers at regular intervals, the unit with the most data at their disposal, will be the most effective source of career advice.

• The HR department will also be in charge of workshops, training sessions and onboarding initiatives that will align employees with their new job roles in a rapid, yet efficacious manner.

• In assigning new job roles, or simply giving input for employees’ future options, the extensive performance data will prove very useful. Analytics can help search through years of data across the organisation, match competencies, look for keywords, and find talent potential where mere human observation cannot.

Freelance Talent Management

• With the dawn of HR analytics, the future workforce with be mobile, possibly remote, and will be employed in multiple jobs.

• Talent acquisition will also expand. Rapid talent mobility will lead to freelance marketplaces, rather than job boards. These will deploy employees on a project basis, incentivising, evaluating and finally redeploying, all at a swift rate.

Persona Hiring

• Lengthy job descriptions will no longer serve any purpose. Roles will be created according to need, served and then dissolve in a rapid fashion.

• The hiring process will evolve to consider actual past performance of existing employees, sourced from various databases. This will in turn create a persona for a potential employee which will play a crucial role in the interview process.

Ultimately Big Data will lead to a culture of fishing where the fish are. Social media and big data analytics will play a huge role in matchmaking and finding the right talent. Hunting for new talent will go the route of digital marketing, where skills will be marketed in much the same way that products are now.

The HR department trajectory will go full circle. To keep up with a fast-paced, analytics-based culture, Human Resources as a field, will have to build strategic thinking as a core competency. In many cases, the inhouse HR will be downsized, and a large chunk of HR responsibilities will be handled by specialised agencies.

While the process is fascinating and will ensure that numerous loopholes in current HR methodologies are addressed, a regular culture of impact assessment is just as important. There is, after all, an ROI on everything, right from talent acquisition initiatives to employer branding and employee engagement – all of which come under the scope of HR responsibilities. The key to successful HR analytics is, thus, analytics of HR analytics.

The dawn of a new HR age means that humans will become more human, and machines will become more mechanical, efficient and predictable. The need for effective and competent leadership will grow and ultimately people will be more real with one other, because this is what will count – honesty and transparency, and claims that line up with results from extensive data analysis.

A Culture Beyond Paper & Jargon

Walk into any corporate office, and you are likely to see company values, vision and other mission statements plastered across window panels and on walls. While this is indeed a common sight but one does wonder ‘how does one actually live up to company values?’

While employer branding initiatives strengthen organizational culture, vision statements that explain the purpose of an organizations’ existence often get translated into smaller actionables that each individual eventually aligns themselves to. Propositioned with a business plan and backed by immense data, they become our pathways – meant to be a way of living for every individual employee. All we need to do is to follow the plan. But then, can we? 

Peter Drucker once said that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. If you look at it, most company level Initiatives fail because what starts as a noble intention, eventually gets lost in a deadly Bermuda triangle thanks to office politics and the dearth of consistent communication and ownership.

Break Away from Silo Thinking

Have you heard about the 'Functional Silo Syndrome'? In a team of five members, when one individual shoulders all the responsibility voluntarily and refuses to seek help or divulge project details. Or on the floor when everyone is engaged in a ‘team building activity’, but this one team member will be sitting in his/her cubicle furiously typing away an email and complaining about all the ‘noise’ occurring in the name of bonding. 

Myth

If you are independent, you are more susceptible to becoming a loner. 

Reality

 Alienation (by any means) will cause you stress and adversely affect your health. 

Business Dictionary defines ‘Silo thinking’ as a mindset present when certain departments or sectors do not wish to share information with others in the same company. Carelessly tossed around for the past three decades, this situation does not originate at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Rather, it is said to trickle down from the top. 

It is said that “leadership is not a position or a title. It is action and example”.  Organisations have been trying to implement various means to eliminate silos at the workplace. How can you as a manager help in changing the silo mentality? 

Work towards unifying the team

Address the issues that are central to the organisation. Encourage employees to align themselves with the same vision. As their leader, steer the wheel with conviction and lead by example. Support cross-departmental collaboration for various projects and activities. The goals of all employees must be aligned in the direction of general progress of the organisation and not just be limited to the fulfilment of their individual departmental objectives.

Why Do Employees Quit Organizations When They Are Doing Well?

It makes complete sense from an individual’s perspective to quit a job when one is ahead and doing well. However, no one works in isolation – there are always repercussions of an individual’s performance that go far beyond the self. There is a good chance that the next level is also doing well, is empowered and the general chain of hierarchy is undergoing the opposite of a domino effect – each domino is enabling the next one to stand up and stand strong.

When one person who is doing well, quits the organization, it negatively affects their team, their juniors, and the company as a whole. Not only do recruiting and on boarding costs come into play, it is also their absence that is felt, because they were an integral link in the chain.

Why is it, that despite being in a great place professionally, employees choose to leave their organizations in search of greener pastures?

Employing EQ to Emerge Through a Crisis

Any crisis brings with it an atmosphere of hostility and ambiguity. Whether it is an internal or external crisis, it threatens the stability of the organization. Although, crisis protocols and programs are usually in place, the uncertainty attached to a crisis can create unrest significant enough to shake the very foundation of corporations. During this critical period, it is necessary to have a high emotional quotient (EQ) to deal with the volatile situation in an appropriate manner and to bounce back from it without any damage.

As you work towards finding rational solutions, it is essential to understand the emotional aspect of the crisis as well. When an organization is facing a situation like this, the employees look closely at the leaders for reactions and guidance. Considering the fact that their reactions will largely be modelled after yours, leaders have to demonstrate a high emotional quotient and encourage employees to do so as well. 

Empower the HR department

As the department closest and most equipped in the organization to connect with the employees, HR personnel must step up and leverage their people skills by engaging in constant communication with the employees. To evoke the EQ of the employees, this team can organize town halls, seminars, or workshops to facilitate conversations and bring about unity in the organization. 

This is the time when a company’s  policies designed to create a work-life balance become extremely important. The crisis may lead to additional work, stress or general anxiousness amongst employees. Encourage them to use their time off, provide flexibility, and promote better physical and mental health during this time. 

Experience, Experiment, Explore: Three-Step Business Owner's Guide

Remember the time you decided to venture out on your own? The days of struggle, the relentless researching, never ending enquiries, possible networking opportunities, word-of-mouth promotions, and a one-man army that was ready to take on the world. A while later when you succeeded in your area of expertise, you considered diversifying. But this decision had to be made after a thorough risk analysis.

Taking risks is a part of business. But if you kept saying yes to every risk, without weighing the pros and cons, you could have also lost your business. When it comes to maintaining the margins in the balance sheets, it can be extremely tempting to oblige to any project that comes along. But if it’s not a cultural fit and does not agree with your business ethics, it can do more harm than good.

While there are no official rules as such for the business to flourish, I personally recommend these tried and tested golden guidelines.

Experience: A much-needed reality check to keep you rooted

While business school taught you a lot, it could never replace first-hand, on-ground, hands-on experience. That eventually came from having observed the industry and its evolving trends. But what if it could have been an easier journey?

Earlier, the industry was volatile and uncertain. Now, it is ruthlessly competitive. A mentor can not only help you plan for the short-term deliverables but also aid you in strategising long-term goals. A wider perspective towards your career will help you plan better. In times of confusion, a veteran can groom you to make quality decisions even when there’s a crisis to be handled. Giving you that much needed push when you are low, but also critically evaluating and providing feedback, when you end up getting used to looking through tinted glasses.

Breaking Down Silos at Work

All businesses have hierarchies to facilitate the division of work. A decentralized system is efficient as it comprises departments with the required expertise in respective fields. However, the same system that vouches for smooth functioning can also create issues in the giant machinery of an organization.

Often, ‘silo mentality’ creeps in at several levels and establishes itself as an integral part of multi-departmental functionality. It is estimated that about 70 percent of executives see silo mentality a major obstacle in achieving goals. But what exactly is it and how does it impede progress?

We have seen tall structures used to store grains. These installations remain isolated with no windows or access to the materials kept inside. This serves as a perfect analogy to the way things operate between teams with a silo mentality.

The Know-How of Filtering the Right Talent

There are several criteria that go into hiring the right talent. Written tests, interviews, and psychometric analysis, all together promise to tell recruiters enough to make a long-term decision about a potential candidate. From a vast talent pool, all carrying with them the requisite qualifications, it becomes a tedious task to filter the right talent.

With multiple people who have decision-making powers in the process, different sensibilities compound the difficulty of making this subjective choice. There are, however, a few things to keep in mind about the hiring process and the modifications it needs. 

Conduct Effective Interviews

Professional interviews often become a series of questions and answers that are extremely generic in nature. The more generic the questions, the more cliché answers. The pattern this creates is that interviewers are not interested in the person as an individual, but rather ask a set of questions that they already have preconceived notions about and expect set answers for. The interviewee, on the other hand, prepares only to impress, providing canned answers to the questions, thereby giving absolutely no insight to the interviewer about their potential place in the organization. There must be increased focus on allowing the person to be at ease and challenging them to think before they give answers. What gets ignored often is that candidates are individuals and their personalities will either add value to or negatively affect the organization. Understand the candidate better, let them understand you, and visualize the kind of fit they would be for the company, both qualifications wise and culturally. 

Be Transparent about Challenges

At the outset, your potential candidate knows only what the organization allows to be perceived on the outside. This is normal. However, for someone you actually intend to hire, stay transparent about all the organizational challenges, the limitations of the role, and the areas for improvement in the company, especially for a role that might require change-making and innovation in existing processes. Be sure to discuss the culture of the workplace as well, and let the candidate determine whether they would be comfortable working in said environment. Show them around the office, right down to where they might sit and who they will have to deal with on an every-day basis. Take them through the amenities and facilities, and maybe even let them sit in on a meeting if possible. This will give them a good idea of the kind of discussions, briefs and interpersonal interactions that happen on a daily basis. There is currently too much emphasis on hiring the right talent, rather than allowing the talent to make the right decisions.

Stay Clear to Steer Clear of Ambiguity

Candidates need clarity on what is expected of them, and recruiters need clarity on whether the potential candidate is desirable and has the competence to fulfill these expectations. Outline the candidates KPIs with utmost lucidity, and ask them what they think of these indicators – whether they feel confident about living up to them, and whether they find them reasonable. In the case of new managers, they must always be allowed to meet and interact with their future team. This will enable them to better understand the challenges that lie ahead. Managers also need to know about the kind of support system that is being provided to them in the form of their team, while also being empowered to drive change and optimise the team after joining.

There is no dearth of talent and qualifications, but recruiting new employees needs to go a step beyond that to actually predict on the basis of insightful interviews, whether an employee is an appropriate fit or not.

This article first appeared on Entrepreneur India.

Understanding Why Multinational Firms Need Global Coaches

Making a case for why global organizations need to train their leaders under the guidance of multifunctional coaches and mentors.

As we are at the beginning of a new decade, there are speculations about if we have reached ‘peak globalization.’ If so, what does it mean for a leader, who heads a global company and is leading it into new markets? It may mean managing teams that are diverse in terms of nationality and geography or handling cross border and virtual teams. But it most certainly will mean that a challenging and daunting time is ahead. More importantly, it also means it’s time to adapt. Global organizations need to work across organizational boundaries and cross not only cultural barriers but also navigate the political and economic laws that rule the land. Add technological advancements in the mix, and you get how complicated the picture is. In such a scenario, how does a leader begin to manage and support the most critical asset an organization has: the people? Let’s find out. 

Cultural Challenges

With company branches spread across the globe, having offices in different corners of the world will inevitably bring in cultural differences. In a leadership position that requires leaders to travel overseas, experience different environments, and interact with people from other parts of the world, how do they bridge the communication and the cultural gap? Communication doesn’t just mean language, although that barrier remains. Employers and leaders must realize that culture drives how people perceive, think, and eventually act. Effective communication begins when there are awareness and acceptance that these differences exist and must be accepted. In such a case, leadership coaching can help build the conscious practice that is required to build a mindset that enables one to see different perspectives and helps in building a uniform corporate workplace culture.

Decision-Making

Business leaders make significant decisions every day. Yet, the most challenging part of leading a multinational organization is to be able to see the big picture when all the functions from various offices require equal attention. How do you ensure that leaders stay clear of analysis paralysis? Similarly, how do you ensure that the decisions which impact the company as a whole are effective and drive it forward while keeping everyone in tow? Decision-making doesn’t come naturally to people, and it’s a process that develops and strengthens over time. Executive coaching to help leaders merge the business dynamics with organizational principles and human understanding is critical here.

Building a Resilient Mindset

Resilience is nothing but the ability to recover from setbacks quickly. However, dealing with failures is not an easy task, especially with central responsibilities and if the failure impacts several stakeholders. Being in a leadership position comes with a fair share of pressure, and roadblocks are not uncommon. At times, issues in personal life start affecting the professional side as well. In such a scenario, leaders can benefit from leadership coaching to learn how to better deal with tough circumstances at work and to better manage themselves and their team in times of distress. The most valuable aspect of such a system is that over time, leaders absorb specific lessons from the coach, which they can, in turn, pass on to their team members in need.

Defining an Ideal Coach

While training for leadership is considered an essential part of developing the leaders of a global organization, basic coaching is not enough. Leadership coaches who have vast professional experience, with clients coming from diverse nationalities, demographics, and from across industries and functions, can help in tackling various challenges at work. A varied portfolio brings credibility not only in terms of what they have worked on so far, but what they can do to develop the leader. The right coach enables leaders to develop higher emotional intelligence and build compassion and empathy. After all, leaders impact people and their lives, not just improve the bottom line and share prices. An ideal coach would be someone whose experience aligns with the specific needs of the leader and can help them develop their potential. 

Multinational organizations carry higher levels of responsibility and accountability as they impact a wider variety of stakeholders. Naturally, the leaders of such businesses must be well-equipped to counter challenges thrown their way, whether the organizational changes or external disruptions, like slowing economies. They need experienced global coaches and mentors that have led by example to help them navigate the future.  

This article first appeared on People Matters India.