Is your company rising to the development challenge?

Talent gaps are growing, especially in the face of accelerating globalization. To fight back, companies are working to develop 21st century leaders – workers who can skillfully adapt and navigate the years ahead on behalf on their organizations. Unfortunately, these next generation global leaders aren’t emerging as fast as they’re needed.

A key issue is defining what it means to be a global leader over the next century. From there, facing the challenges and overcoming developmental hurdles gets easier, though it will never be easy. Equipping tomorrow’s leaders with a global lens is a matter of strategic choice, and a commitment that has to be made in a sea of competing priorities.

Defining Global Leadership

Pinpointing the meaning of global leadership calls for generalizations, which often are a poor fit for many companies. Companies worldwide are looking at survey results and benchmark reports to allow them to pull out the core competencies a global leader must have, but very often, this just leads to a one-size fits all model that doesn’t help individual companies.

True leaders can’t be boiled down to a universal set of competencies, especially when working in multiple markets and cultural contexts. According to the Harvard Business Review, successful global leadership relies on intangibles that need to be coached and nurtured on the job. This includes the ability to build social and professional connections, the skill to see advantages in cultural differences, and the ability to adapt to shifting circumstances while balancing organizational priorities. While they are not innate qualities, they are skills that require more than a one-shot class to cultivate, making tomorrow’s global leaders a population that “grows” rather than “arrives.”

Overcoming Development Challenges

The need to grow global leaders over time should eliminate any belief that there is an “easy fix” for the worldwide talent shortage. This does not mean that the challenges of global leadership development are insurmountable. Instead, it means that companies need to take a new view of the overall process.

First, corporations need to look at talent as a company-wide asset. Two of the leading complaints from executive leaders looking for talent are managers who don’t share or silos that hoard top performers. Building workers with a cross-functional mindset requires ending a narrow mindset at the leadership level in the first place. Top talent needs to be free to move across locations and divisions to be grown into global talent.

Next, firms need to eliminate an “up-or-out” mindset. Rounding out high potential workers often requires lateral moves. If this is viewed as a demotion or a negative, it raises the potential that the talent will leave and the investment will be lost. Instead, your company needs to ensure moving to stretch positions or development roles, even if they at the same or lower band, as an opportunity to be embraced without question.

Finally, companies need to encourage ‘glocal’ thought patterns. This term from the Center for Creative Leadership represents a blending of the need for localized differentiation and local maintenance of the global organizational strategy. Universal standards and universal sameness don’t exist in the modern globalized business world, so tomorrow’s top talents need to be able to balance niche market concerns with system-wide priorities. This helps unite disparate groups and functions by ensuring that one worldview or one operational perspective isn’t drowning out the unique factors that create market advantages.

Development in a World of Speed and Complexity

Of course, all that growing and development is great in a bubble, but what about in a world that is moving at an ever-increasing speed? How can you manage talent in a business environment where ideas can be shared in real-time around the globe?

The emerging generation of talent will help with this more than many HR managers and executive planners think. This “arriving” talent pool is used to new technologies and comfortable with virtualized worlds in ways that the retiring generation is not. In that sense, the rapid pace of innovation is simply normal for 21st century leaders. Hiring and cultivating a mindset of curiosity and discovery will cover many of these challenges as a matter of course.

Complexity is another matter. Interlocking priorities and cross-cultural challenges are real issue. Increasing the capability and competency to lead in complex situations requires taking real risks with talent. A certain amount of competency can be built in workshops and sheltered training sessions, but for firms to really have leaders comfortable with complex decisions, those leaders need to be allowed to make and contribute to complex decisions at all levels. Only through hard experience can top talent have the “game” element stripped out of complex decision making processes and get more adept at balancing outcomes for optimal results.

Task forces can be a means to bridge the need for speed, innovation acceptance, and complex management. Aligning top talents from multiple functions against key priorities for the business cuts the distance between disparate talent pools and creates a real world opportunity for providing a solution to a complex issue. Firms can foster competition for top solutions between regions, or use one pool as the basis for a development-in-place opportunity that grows the global lens for high potentials.

Leaping Athead

Making more polished leaders from raw talent is a task with no easy fix or shortcuts. However, by defining global leadership in terms of its intangible qualities, overcoming barriers to development, and providing talent with the opportunity to gain real experience dealing with high-speed and complex issues, it is possible for your company to develop a competitive edge.

The leaders of tomorrow are being grown right now, around the world. They go fast in the global market, but your firm has the opportunity to build your own 21st century leadership in-house. It’s not a short-term project or a smooth road, but the rewards are there for firms truly ready to make the commitment.