We talked about general leadership challenges and foundational principles for leaders to consider. We talked about the usefulness of adapting an organizational behavior and an international organizational behavior perspective to help with leadership development and develop your competencies as leaders. Now I want to talk about the concrete leadership challenges that uniquely apply to international leaders. I want to do it with an example, so I want you to just focus on this guy. The gentleman Kofi Annan, you all know him as the former Secretary General of the UN: a highly decorated individual. A lot of really important initiatives at the UN are accredited to his name. He changed leadership and the management system in the UN and then development goals, Global Compact and the Global Fund. Many of those really important inititives are credited to his name where he was a driving force in making that happen. We can imagine anything that is that global and that ambitious as the product that he tried to advance is not easy. What do you think the challenges are that somebody like him, who tries to really advance such a global agenda faces? There are so many different agendas from different countries. Yeah. It can get more complex because there's pretty much all the countries represented here. Yes. It's not only agendas maybe it is also priorities, goals, and approaches too. That is right, yes. So it could be there are those interests. It could be these different agendas, different priorities but also different ways of thinking, different mindsets that you have to contend with, that you have to try to get to understand to how are people even thinking about why things are important? Not everybody has your same conceptualization of what the issues really are, what the environment is like. Wrapping your head around those different mental morals that people have around the world is a big intellectual challenge. It really increases the complexity of what you have to face as a leader. Now Kofi Annan had a really good starting point; education-wise, to deal with some of this, he has a Degree in Economics, International Relations, and Management. He can already relate pretty well to different domains of society, be it business or politics or civil society. Again though, all those, domains operate differently. In some cases, extremely differently around the world. Understanding those nuances, Understanding those complexities can be really tricky. These differences between countries even if you just think about management that was always striking to me. Possibly because my own management education at Bachelor level completely ignored those cultural differences. Pretended they did not exist, that everybody was doing management the same way: for example the German at least as I have experienced it is to think about management in a very Economics and operations research driven way. It is all about rationality, efficiency, “the German way” and once I started working as a consultant and actually started working abroad that I was shocked. I was totally unprepared for the differences. Kofi Annan was better prepared than I was, clearly, when he started started working. That is the challenge that he faced, and that all global international leaders ultimately face. You cannot stop at just embracing the different leader. You have to bring different positions together. A pure pluralism, and saying, “Oh yeah, that's wonderful.” We all think about these things differently. Clearly you do not get anywhere building a global compact, or a global fund, or nearly globally accepted development goals. You have bring people together for that That is the big challenge: to have respect for local logics and local mindsets. To build a community and bring them together towards a global orientation. A global vision, if you like. These differences in thinking and doing not only create complexity; But they also can create uncertainty as you interact with others. Why would that be? Well, then they could not predict people's behaviors. That's right. We are already complex animals to start with but if you think about an international context where there are language barriers in the first place You have misinterpretation that really becomes even more difficult then to anticipate how others may react to what you do as a leader: your leadership practices It becomes particularly problematic if that complexity and that uncertainty come together because when situations are very complex, what do we usually do? Try to make them simpler? We try to simplify. In the way that often works, cognitively fallback on heuristics rather than fallback on some simplifications. Now those heuristics are of course based on your own culture and in many cases they work to simply things for you quantitatively in your own culture, but as soon as you enter into other cultures they often lead you astray. They actually create problems rather solve them. I discovered that myself that, You develop certain habits when you are embedded in a particular culture. that you then have to painfully discover they are no longer appropriate. I went to boarding school so I learned about the the art of understatement. Then I went to Germany and discovered that that is actually very useless in a conversation with other Germans. I had a lot of experience teaching in the US. And the first time I taught in China I thought naturally you want to be relatable and open with a joke. That’s all they had as I had developed in the US. The first couple of times I wondered why nobody was laughing about my opening jokes. Maybe they were bad jokes, but he point is that it is just a very different context where people do not want that relatability in their teacher. It does not mean that they do not ever share a sense of humor. The Chinese have a great sense of humor but in that situation that is not what was expected. Discovering as a leader that your habitual ways of doing things and relating to others by communicating, solving problems, solving conflicts no longer work can be devastating. I mean really emotionally devastating to look at it all of your tools are useless all of a sudden. That can be that can be a big challenge, re-learning some of the basic things. How do you do that in a different context? That can be a really steep learning curve. We know that it is not just what leaders think and what they do that is important. We said, we emphasized that what may be more important is? Relationships. Exactly. Relationships between the leader and followers. In Kofi Annan's case, what could be some relational challenges that he encountered? People might not have accepted him as a leader. Yes, why would that be? Maybe they see that they do not know if this outsider can offer them anything? Yes, wants to or cannot offer them anything. He is an outsider and so he has this legitimacy discount. What what followers often ask themselves when they evaluate leaders is they ask themselves, “are you one of us?” Clearly the leader's going to be slightly different but the, the question at its heart is ultimately, do you care about the things that we care about? Also, can you actually deliver? Can you help us achieve the things that we really care about? It is a tall order for somebody like Kofi Annan to really deliver that to that wide of an audience. Being an outsider to so many cultures and countries. Clearly he is a diplomat. Even negotiating with businesses to contribute towards the the projects that he had pushed. That is really tricky. Okay, so we know it can be tricky to overcome those barriers and to be accepted as a leader and an outsider, and it’s particularly tricky when you are interacting with different culture groups at the same time. You don't want to pretend and pander. If I speak with you as an American for example, I could say I lived there for seven years so I feel like an American, so that could be my connection; but if I interact with Europeans at the same time and claim that at heart I'm a European, then it becomes obvious that I'm not truthful to either one of the parties. The question is who are you really? Who are you, and can we really trust what you're claiming what your interests are? That's the big challenge for leaders: not to just pretend and pander, not to just resort to this pure pluralism that you're trying to embrace and fully adapt to each individual country, but to find a connection, a common ground that's really global to really align people under that global vision. Arguably that's something that Kofi Annan did exceptionally well. Now, I talked to Bocconi alumni and I wanted to hear how they are dealing with those, with those challenges. they have worked around the world in many different industries. So let's see what what they had to say, what their experiences were. Thinking about it I guess I guess I limit it to to theory things, and of course, there is always more than that. I think leaders set a vision and a context and they make sure that people can follow and will follow. I think that’s a first. I think leaders coach, and that means providing the right support, the right direction, and the right opportunities for people who work for them to learn. Then what I find is more and more important especially in this context is leaders integrating. I'm fairly passionate about it. It is the whole premise of working in a world which is more and more global. And actually even companies that believe are fairly local companies, if you look at the supply chain, if you look at a number of aspects, you're more and more reliant on things that happen outside of your close limit. One of the big tasks and big challenges that leaders have is to integrate and take different people coming from, whether it's different cultures, or different genders, or different education and actually ensure… and that's all about diversity, but diversity is nothing unless you can take teams and actually ensure that people can work together and make the best out of that difference. To me, whether it's integrating different technical backgrounds, different cultures, at each layer and level of organization and complexity, I think that that is probably more and more important. Usually, we spend a lot of time to discuss, what winning is, but we don't discuss which game we want to play. It’s critical for a leader to define what is winning. You can define winning in terms of market shares, it terms of the size of your business, in terms of cash, in terms of profit, or in terms of sustainability. I learned through the good and the bad experiences that while I was spending all the time trying to be better than someone else, I was not spending enough time to define what the definition of success was. Sometimes market share or growth can be a very false definition of success, because then you end up with an unprofitable business growing very fast, but structurally not attractive. That is the part of a visionary leader. In the end, you need to try to see what is the end point that you want your business and your organization to achieve. There is no leader that can achieve anything by themself. I don't believe in supermen or superwomen that just parachute into a situation and are able by themselves, because of their skills, to do better than anybody else before. Usually it is about putting together the right people, the right team, but it's also about leveraging them in the right way. I have seen the same people be very dysfunctional in certain situations, and all of a sudden under the right guidance, the right leadership, it become a real team. The real team is about getting the best out of everybody. If you define winning in the right way, if you make the right choices, because you cannot do everything, in the end, you need to choose a few things that are more important than others. You need to accept that there are some things that you will not do Then you put together a team, which is a team with people with great strengths that is working very well together. Usually these three steps bring you to glory. I always thought that leading by example is actually going to get the message out to my management boards that it's okay for the leader to say, “I don't know,” “What do you think about it?” or, “I don't have an answer to that question,” “Help me get to that question,” et cetera. I think you really need to say, you know what, I'm not in this position, and it's true, no leader is in a position of leadership, or no leader should be in a position of leadership because they know everything. People should be in a position of leadership because they can get other people to actually contribute, and that sum of the individuals is much better than… you know, the individuals together are better than individually. I think that leading by example is a good one. The second is just about rewarding behaviors that are more towards dialogue incorporation, that behaviors that are more towards conflict and antagonizing and proving that you have a better way of doing. I think the two are very much related. If you can get two individuals to talk about an issue and solve it together, not only will you find that they both learn, they both might say, “Oh, look, you know more on this topic than I do, so help me get better.” But also you minimize the potential for conflict. You should always work on priorities because sometimes, a small problem is, you always have to have your priority list in your daily work, because every day there is a new issue. You should understand which one is the most important. I think that takes a lot of time of the leader. Hm. To establish priorities? Yeah, establishing priorities, making sure that people really don't get lost in too many things, but give a priority and follow that priority. Sometimes you also get into bottlenecks. Things don’t get solved, nobody is answering, nobody is giving a signal that things are progressing. Then I'm usually called in but I tell my people, call me when you really think it’s the last resort, that I am the only one that can help you reach out to solve the bottleneck, but I want you to make the effort first. Don't always call me in, otherwise you’ll never grow, you’ll never establish your ability to influence, so use your influence power first, and then call me in. This is not always easy because I'm very execution-oriented. I try to help all the time. I'm very generous in that, and that becomes a problem because people call me in too many times, so you have to really learn how to limit your availability and leave the issue on the table to make sure people follow up, otherwise you’ll solve the problem and next time they will come to you again. They have to experience it, and you have to be patient and wait until the thing is solved, which, in my case, is not always easy. The patience part? Yeah. Yeah. What makes leadership in that kind of international context particularly challenging, but maybe also rewarding? What is different about international leadership that domestic leaders don't experience? Yeah, I think it's a matter of you have to understand so many ways of thinking and styles you know? The Norwegian style is very cooperative. You ask for input from everyone, to a certain degree search for consensus a lot of the times, but at least consult your ways and you worked with some people that really don't understand that because they're used to orders and more hierarchies. Then you realize that, okay, I have to get that person to I need to explain how I operate and maybe I need to adjust a little bit too. Then maybe you adjust a lot of that. I think that that’s the think, you need to: one, share how you operate, once you get conscious about that, because in the early days I wasn't even aware of that. Then you get aware of it, so then you explain. But you also adjust a little bit. You always have to work on becoming clearer. In an intercultural setting I think that that would be a life long thing. You can always become clearer. I also realized that I've had to learn a lot about how hierarchies work, which I didn't know coming from Scandinavia. Now sometimes I meet people who come from there and I say “Wow!” Now I am surprised again because I’ve been out for so long. You always learn things, but I think this aspect of clarity, trying to get conscious about your own behavior so you can explain, you can be up front and say, here's how we do it. And, you know, I'm open to different ways and, at the same time, this is the way. Yeah. >> The challenge is to make sure people can understand how you, contribute to common objectives, the interpretation of the local context is very important, and also build a common language which is not necessarily your language, but is the ability to understand the other people's language, and make that kind of cross-cultural bridge in a way. Which can be very challenging. For me, for instance, living in Italy, a country which is extremely special in many ways, and working in an international company, my main challenge has been: making my colleagues and my supervisors understand the peculiarities of Italy, and act together in order to address difficult situations with the same lens. Which is not easy, because, especially with American corporations, they all think that America is the standard, everywhere. But America is not… U.S. is not Italy, is not Europe. Europe is not the same. So I think the main challenge is really to build a common language, and build a trust which also comes from a common language of course. You have the whole world, and that requires, not only mental strength, but also physical strength. I mean after these interview today, I'll take the plane, go to Brazil, then from Brazil I’ll go to Mexico and on Friday I'm back in the office, and today's Monday. So you can figure out how compressed things are. You land in a place, you have to meet the people, you want to go in stores to see our products, you see a few customers, you have a couple of dinners. And, so there is a physical challenge sometimes not to be underestimated. The other challenge of the international world is that it forces you to make more choices. You cannot win with the same intensity, with the same pace, at the same time, in every country. You need to accept that you want to win 60 or 70% of the matches, this is like a football team or a basketball team. It would be impossible to win all of that. You don't need to get depressed if you lose a few. And you need to choose those that are much more important to you. This is back to where we were talking about leadership, which is the definition of what winning is, includes which countries are really core, which countries are really making the difference. So that is one of the challenges, and the decision making, the fact that you, if you try to be average everywhere, you will have average results everywhere. So you need to be the best in some places, and accept that you are on a pause in some other countries and you will take care of that later. The last challenge of international environments is the pace in which things are moving. We are used to a certain pace in Europe, while when you go to Asia or you go to Brazil, the pace is very different. And therefore you need to learn how not to always predict the development of things based on your own personal experience, but you need to become versatile at the idea that different countries can move at a very different pace. It's complex job. It's a complex task. Part of it is a bit natural probably, but most of it, I would say, you grow through experience and through mistakes. You want to try and find what's common to human beings rather than what's different, in human beings. To me there are some things, there are some values, there are some, some behaviors that actually translate really well across cultures. And so it’s almost like “what are those?” because those are the things you can count on, and you can actually deploy in the team in the same way and then you'll need to be different, depending on the person that you talk to. But if that difference can be 10% and 90% you actually adopt a behavior which is consistent, then I think you're more predictable but also life is a little bit easier because it becomes more natural and it becomes less targeted to different populations.
