Creating a Global Mindset

Companies that ignore the global mindset do so at their own peril. The ones that most effectively develop this quality in their employees – particularly senior leaders – will have a distinct advantage over their competitors.

Historians among us have watched during the past decades as the term “expatriate manager” turned into “international manager” and then “global leader.” Yet today, about 20 years after the phrase “global leadership” first entered the learning and development vocabulary, a surprising number of companies have barely begun to adapt their language, skills models and leadership architectures to include strong global components.

Beware: If your leadership pipeline isn’t actively creating global citizens able to deal with mind-bending levels of ambiguity and complexity, and if your up-and-comers are not already innovating across political, social and cultural boundaries in a way that suggests they’re able to spot opportunities no one else sees, then your competitors will be studying you in a case on “those who became extinct on the road to globalization.”

In Duke Corporate Education’s review of research across three fields and its diagnostic/design work with the Global 1000, it has seen global mindset emerge as an important differentiator, driving success in new markets and transforming presence into global competitive advantage. While normative research involving small groups of executives continues on this topic, it misses out on interdisciplinary insights gained from integrating decades of scholarship. This article attempts to address that oversight.

The French energy company Total is a good example of an organization intent on building its capabilities around global mindset in its “company manager” ranks — what other companies would call “country managers” — in which they cover not only such basics as law, local context, crisis management, safety and security but explicitly address “leading in ambiguity” and the issues and opportunities around leading people different from oneself. Medtronic, a leader in medical technology headquartered in Minneapolis and doing business in 120 countries, found itself “talking global but acting like an international firm,” and did something about it.