Rodionova O.Y.

Lugansk national agricultural university

An approach of building a corporate culture of international company

Many international companies with global reach and ambition are led by executives who all look about the same, speak the same common language, and went to the same short list of top business schools.

Ultimately, this is not the best model for building a truly corporate culture of international company, which requires cultivating a global workforce and creating a global business culture to compete for the best global talent. And the first step to these objectives is to understand what global diversity is and how you can reorganize your company to embrace it. Organizations that want to embrace global diversity need to invest in four areas: recognizing talent, building international work teams, building a global HR infrastructure, and leadership development/succession planning.

Tapping a talent pool that spans seven continents requires knowing how to evaluate people who do not look or sound like your current leadership. This becomes a greater challenge once you are operating globally, where the talent pool in each local market comes from a different set of schools you haven't heard of, with a different set of cultural values.

Challenging as it is, recognizing talent that looks different, sounds different, and sees the world differently is an essential capability in a global marketplace. One of die challenges involved in global diversity is putting together effective teams that operate in multiple cities and/or time zones, to produce a product that meets your company's high standards.

One might think a big risk in putting together multi-national teams is that they won't get along because of cross-cultural differences. In fact, die real risk may be that the participants try so hard to get along dicey lose sight of the team dynamics that contribute to a good final product.

If you look at normal team formation and function, die "storming, norming, forming" described in most group dynamics texts, we know that die conflicts, misunderstandings, and starts and stops most teams go through are necessary and ultimately help the group arrive at a high-quality outcome.

With globally diverse teams, however, participants often work so hard for collaboration and a sense of shared understanding that diere is little of die creative chaos that can lead to good results. In fact, team members are often reluctant to disagree with each other or to push their colleagues' thinking or methods precisely because no clear set of cultural norms or expectations is governing group decisionmaking. These teams often settle on a solution that placates all members and helps them avoid offending one another, but which is typically only a mediocre answer at best

The real challenge for a truly high performing multinational team is engendering die kind-of open dialogue and, if necessary, creative tension diat marks effective teams. While the concept, "Think globally, act locally," is overused, it applies when building an effective human resources platform for a global company. Successful organizations create global HR policies and practices that reflect the common cultures of their organizations, yet adapt their common organizational views to local realities.

For example, many European countries have universal public healthcare systems and stringent requirements around maternity and family leave, including pay and job guarantees.

Most Western companies value the ability to blend in widi Westerners over die ability to connect with the local community. For example, when a Western company looks for a leader for its office in Jakarta, they typically seek someone educated in the West who has strong, uninflected English language skills and can move easily within Western cultural circles. The leadership at "headquarters" chooses die manager they feel most comfortable working with—the one who might be an Indonesian national but who is also most like diem.

The problem with this approach is that "being on the same page" with the home office leaders may not be as crucial in the short run as being able to build strong relationships with local workers and within the regional economic community. In the long run, a global company that fails to groom and advance its international talent will lose its creative energy and loyalty.

A more effective approach involves looking for someone who reflects the native population and can operate in the home-office environment. Leaders in successful global organizations understand that trust built only on an assumed "sameness" is often less reliable than trust built through an examination of differences and a conscious agreement on shared values.

By insisting on Western-oriented leaders, companies lose opportunities to operate seamlessly within international markets. They also risk underutilizing genuine leadership talent because it is relegated to secondary or regional status.

Focusing on these four areas (recognizing talent, building international teams, developing a flexible global HR platform, and developing diverse leadership) is key to developing high-performing international organizations.

If your organization fails to focus on these issues, it could end up missing cross-border or cross-region business synergies or hiring executives who are only partially engaged in the mission of the firm because they recognize that your organization is only partially engaged in them and their development.