One of the special challenges of leading global teams is to win the hearts and minds of team members to your approach, while also getting them on board with an ever-changing context.
Additionally, global leaders must navigate the various leadership and management styles present across cultures.
Leadership in a Diverse Environment
Leading in a diverse environment means taking the views and experiences of many into account when making decisions. To do this effectively, leaders must demonstrate commitment from both a personal and business perspective – ie, accept the inherent value of diversity in terms of their own management style, and actively find ways to promote it.
Provide leadership that reflects your target market. Create a culture in your company that is open and welcoming to differences. Leaders should understand how their own culture impacts others, and that it can disrupt communication or cause you to miss opportunities.
Organisations that prioritise DEI are more likely to succeed. Candidates, customers and employees are increasingly searching for organisations that reinforce values of diversity, equity and inclusion, and by making this training available to them, the key skills to embracing these challenges are being developed.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is the process by which a business sets the direction of its business, by creating a concise vision and written strategic goals, and then setting up plans for achieving them, including aligning stakeholders.
With economic volatility, geo-political tensions, supply chain disruptions and more, today’s leaders are facing more uncertainty than ever. For their teams to remain harmonious, leaders must continue to keep them flexible so they can pivot when needed, and mitigate risk and protect business continuity.
In short, team-building involves knowing what each team member contributes to a group effort and building trust through operating under common guidelines to tighten team focus and performance under duress.
SWOT analysis can help your business by spelling out its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats the way that a project plan spells out the what and how of carrying out a project – and can help you to identify the key components of your strategy, making them explicit but also actionable; it will help you prioritise activity, focus resources where they can make a difference and get everyone in your organisation working towards the same vision.
Managing Global Teams
Nowadays, Global teams appear to be an integral and important part of a number of enterprise business organisations, which can effectively expand business customers and increase the business income and business growth rate, at the meantime, there are more language barriers and cultural difference that are the noteworthy resentment issues to leadership.
Furthermore, such teams usually consist of employees from different subsidiaries of a model that competes with other competing agendas or perspectives that conflict with each other.This cognitive diversity may, if not converted into a cooperative advantage, lead to either a competitive disadvantage, or it can be supported through processes that allow the team members to use their diverse ways of thinking or having ideas.
Communication is the second challenge. Culture might inform how a message could be better understood – for example, countries such as Japan has deep respect for hierarchy and seniority that might prevent communication within an agile team. Moreover, using casual writing styles such as using too much slang or idioms might confuse other team members.
Managing Internal Stakeholders
In addition, a leader has to look at the internal people, which includes employees as well as senior management. They are the people who would want a project to succeed and the ones who help in maintaining the productivity of employees. In such a case, a leader has to lay down effective management plans to keep the employees at ease as well as maintain the work life balance.
But as business leaders, they’re also constrained by external stakeholders, such as regulatory bodies and government agencies that set the rules by which they should operate. Business leaders would do well to take such entities into account when they make decisions, and comply with the laws.
External challenges, such as cyclical economic volatility, increasing geopolitical tensions and broader political realignments, threaten global supply chains and put further downward pressure on company bottom lines. This is especially true in rapidly developing countries where income levels and literacy rates are on the rise. Many local stakeholders feel empowered to hold corporations to higher standards of conduct, and to demand answers from leaders who fail to do so. Paradoxically, development is creating increased demand on leaders to live up to the growing expectations that local stakeholders now have of their responsibilities. The effective approaches to leadership challenges include serving others and servant leadership.
