Building a global leadership team

In the last part of the three-part series, Sanjay Dawar and Anurag Gupta explain how the successful Indian globalisers excel at leadership and talent management to pull ahead of the competition

Indian companies that successfully expand overseas craft clear global growth strategies and execute them through dynamic global operating models. They also excel at managing the talent, cultural and leadership challenges that come with doing business internationally.

In this article - we explore the people side of the global-expansion equation. In particular, we assess how the advanced Indian globalisers attract and retain global talent, reach across cultural barriers and build globally minded leadership teams.

Attracting and retaining global talent
For many Indian companies, talent acquisition and retention become more complex in an international environment. Among enterprises seeking to successfully expand overseas, executives must formulate talent-management strategies that balance globally standardised arrangements with practices tailored to local realities. Those that can manage this delicate feat position themselves to recruit and retain the best workers, create a stable labour force in foreign markets, boost workforce productivity and identify high-potential leaders who can take on overseas assignments.

Savvy Indian companies have already moved aggressively to accumulate pools of overseas talent, crafting innovative talent strategies. A leading Indian beverages company is a case in point. To source talent in highly competitive markets, the company began giving talented employees opportunities to take on more challenging roles with an international reach. It also shared talent across regions to disseminate best practices and develop globally minded leaders. In addition, to identify the roles it needed to fill, the company created a global talent and succession planning tool. This tool helped the company identify 120 critical roles across its global operations and then build an internal talent pipeline for majority of these roles.

Reaching across cultural barriers
Many successful globalisers create a corporate culture that enforces global corporate values while also remaining locally relevant. Though reaching across cultural barriers through such moves can be daunting, Indian companies may have an advantage over their counterparts in the region, given their English-language proficiency and the fact that Indian employees tend to be highly collaborative, comfortable with diversity and able to work harmoniously with people from other cultures.

Still, Indian companies can encounter significant cultural barriers when expanding overseas. According to recent Accenture research, such barriers can include language difficulties when overseas staff do not speak the language spoken at headquarters and differences in work style and work ethic between local and expatriate staff.

The most effective Indian globalisers reach across such barriers through initiatives focused on such areas as communication across global operations and development of shared cultural values in the workforce. A leading Indian healthcare company has set out to create a common "language" reflecting its corporate culture. Not the spoken language, but the commonality of terms and understanding and values. The company is developing a unique and unified way of working across locations.

Building a leadership team with a global mindset
Indian globalisers need strong leaders with a global mindset who can empower local leaders and manage cultural differences. However, Indian executives recognise the problem and have started making efforts to fix it. Specifically, they are trying to nurture a global mindset in their next generation of leadership.

In our study, 62 per cent of Indian executives believe that their company's high-potential managers will have a strong global mindset. In some Indian companies, executives have taken steps to manage this challenge, including nurturing a global mindset in their next generation of leadership. A leading Indian conglomerate, for instance, has designed a leadership development programme to train senior executives to be coaches and next-generation global leaders through self-reflection exercises and experiential learning that features demonstrations, role plays, visualisations and team exercises. To instil a global mindset in their leadership teams, we maintain that Indian companies must master these practices:

• Institutionalising leadership development across global operations
• Building mentoring, evaluation and coaching into formal job descriptions
• Cultivating leaders across the organisation's geographic operations
• Establishing global rotation programmes that support international career paths
• Promoting collaboration and real-time information exchange through technology

Such companies also need to establish the right governance structures.

Consider this: Indian companies' senior leaders generally have little familiarity with overseas markets. As a result, they tend to concentrate decision-making authority at headquarters or leave decision making completely to local management teams. Each of these extremes has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, tightly centralised decision-making can rob local business units of the ability to rapidly respond to local market conditions. However, completely decentralising decision making can hinder companies' ability to develop globally consistent strategies and value propositions.

Rather than taking an either/or approach, Indian companies need to design governance structures to strike a balance between the two approaches. For instance, they can separate larger strategic issues (which require consistency in decision making) from more pressing tactical ones (for which local flexibility is paramount). To achieve this balance, global management teams must clearly outline the framework within which the local teams should operate. If local teams want to deviate from this structure, each decision can be considered in the context of its impact on international operations.

Furthermore, when it comes to encouraging innovation, companies looking to go global would benefit by letting local teams make more decisions. This is particularly true in industries where success hinges on a sophisticated understanding of consumer tastes and preferences.

Indian companies that overlook the people side of international expansion risk stumbling badly - even if their global growth strategies and operating models are perfectly sound.

That's because going global poses serious challenges related to talent acquisition, leadership development and cultural differences. Forward-thinking enterprises have shown that these hurdles can be overcome with disciplined strategies. But the work becomes more difficult for companies that rely heavily on M&As to drive their global growth.

Sanjay Dawar
Managing Director & Lead, Accenture Strategy, India

Anurag Gupta
Managing director, consumer durables & retail, Accenture India