Global business is increasing dramatically and along with it, the cross-border friction that emerges when there are misunderstood or ignored cultural differences. Though every destination provides new hazards for mistakes, Ernest Gundling, an expert in strategic global approaches to leadership development, organizational change and innovation, explains that the challenges you will encounter are relatively predictable and easily anticipated.
The single greatest cause of difficulties in global business transactions is lack of appropriate people skills for relating to counterparts from other countries and cultures. In Working GlobeSmart , Gundling outlines the 12 fundamental skills managers need if they intend to move across borders and succeed. Not simply a list of culturally specific customs and behaviors, Working GlobeSmart presents a general set of behaviors spanning interpersonal, group and organizational skills. According to Gundling, managers, especially American managers, who can understand why these skills are important and incorporate them into their business dealings - whether in South America, Europe or Asia - will find that partners across the globe are more likely to respond and work together to achieve mutually beneficial results.
Global People Skills Working GlobeSmart includes 12 competencies that include interpersonal, group, and organizational skills. Gundling writes that they must be well integrated throughout your organizational culture, because the value of your products, either at home or abroad, will decrease without the people skills to back them up.
Failures in global business are more insidious than acute. They seem small, but as they build up, they become lethal. Gundling writes that expecting others to speak one's own language; assuming everyone is eager to adopt your ways; and not taking the time to establish effective relationships abroad can all undercut plans that have been carefully strategized at home.
Generalizations about a national culture can be helpful in anticipating how people will act in unfamiliar settings, Gundling explains, but it is improper to apply stereotypes to an entire nationality that is most likely as varied culturally and ethnically as your own. By inquiring about another culture, identifying its contribution, learning its core values and attendant behavior, and understanding the gaps between you and the average profile of the other culture, he writes that you can predict areas of potential conflict both with business partners and your own personal limits.
Interpersonal Skills
Gundling points out that often those with good people skills at home make the wrong choices abroad. The most common trap is to evaluate people positively on the basis of language skills when they are deficient in managing subordinates or working with customers. He says you must learn local standards so that you can discern when conduct that signals competence in your own environment has a different significance.
Group Skills
Organizational Skills
As international managers head out to become global citizens they must consider how they will be changing the world, Gundling explains. Does the foreign country want the changes you bring? Should it have them? As values around the world change, he writes that the best place to initiate change is where local customers and employees desire it or are open to it. Rather than national international managers, he adds, the world needs global citizens who can easily move from one culture to another. He writes that they encompass the core items of trust, respect and listening, but also participating in meaningful work, profit, integrity, social justice, environmental sustainability, mutual learning, and personal and professional growth. Global citizens transcend the dichotomies of parent and subsidiary and home and host country. As the ratio of overseas to domestic revenue shifts dramatically, he explains that companies will need employees who can recognize local customer needs, weight them against the organization's strategic priorities, and invest valuable resources in the best interest of the company. Copyright © 2003 Soundview Executive Book Summaries
Soundview Executive Book Summaries
