PERSPECTIVE: THE MYTH OF THE GLOBAL EXECUTIVE

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1178.

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The key to success is to com­bine corporate culture with local knowledge and include, not reject national characteris­tics, writes Tony Jackson

Multinationals running their various businesses the same way all over the world may have been perfectly acceptable 30 years ago, but it is not the way today. Nevertheless, the vast majority of even the biggest companies still have a culture rooted in their country of origin. Changing that is one of the biggest challenges to becoming genuinely global.

Richard Greenhalgh, head of management development and training at the Anglo-Dutch con­sumer group Unilever, says that in a few areas, such as integrity and the Unilever code of conduct, cor­porate culture takes precedence.

“But you need a balance between having a very international cadre and having a national presence,” he says. “A few years ago, we were concerned that we had too many expatriates. Five years ago, three of our four business heads in Italy were expatriates. Now they're all Italian. In a consumer business like ours, that's important.”

The global executive, in fact, may be something of a myth. According to Mr Greenhalgh, the use of expatriates goes against the policy of providing a career ladder for local managers.

In fact, however global the com­pany may be, it remains necessary to manage people differently in dif­ferent countries. Within Europe, Mr Greenhalgh says, Unilever has traditionally been much more open with managers in northern than southern countries, on mat­ters such as where they stand in the salary scale or what their prospects are. But that is chang­ing, he adds. A younger generation of managers is more likely to have travelled when young, and many have taken an MBA in the US.

But if the members of top man­agement are all nationals of the home country, it makes it much more difficult to attract and keep talented and ambitious managers from other countries. In fact, the problem lies not in attracting peo­ple - a talented Indian or Korean manager will typically want early experience with a multinational -but in keeping them. “People will join the company to learn,” Mr Bryan says, “but unless they feel they're part of the core company, they're going to leave, and exploit the brand status of the company in their next job.”

So given the importance of local cultures within the global company, an obvious question is how to appraise and identify talent around the world on a consistent basis. Unilever, Mr Greenhalgh says, has been working on this for the past four years.

“We've been developing a set of eleven management competencies we can use worldwide”, he says. “The aim is to have a clear objective measure of potential. We mea­sure such things as entrepreneur­ial drive, the ability to lead and develop others, and integrity. That makes up a common core of behaviours. We've tested it, and so far it seems to be culturally transfer­able.”

From the Financial Times