Global leadership involves leading organizations with people from various cultural and regional backgrounds. Essentially, global leaders in business have the responsibility to ensure the management of businesses and teams to ensure these organizations are productive. Global teams that are led by these leaders are distributed across various time zones and in most cases; these managers are forced to preside over meetings and operations through the use of communication technology. Arguably, leadership is most cases defined on its own on the account of an individual being able to make changes within an organization and influence its development. However, it is significant to understand that leaders should be defined by the existence of followers. These followers include employees and other leaders under the global leaders such as managers of branches and supervisors or team leaders. The follower leader relationship is a crucial element in any organization as it determines the development of both the workers and the business itself.
Relationship between Leaders and Followers
The working relationship between leaders and workers is likely to slow or speed up the development of an organization. More than 79% of workers globally quit their jobs as a result of a lack of appreciation by those leading them. This statement suggests that there are various instances in organizations across the world where leaders fail to cultivate an atmosphere that accommodates all of their followers (Haider et al., 2018). More than 71% of the businesses across the world have expressed dissatisfaction in the ability of their leaders while only 19% of the best performing multilateral companies attribute their success to the leadership of the organizations.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Pragmatist leaders inspire their followers to maintain standards of the organization making it possible for the workers to conform to the needs of the leader and consequently the company. For instance, the amazon company has proven to be a world leader in business. This success can be credited to the relationship between Jeff Bezos and his employees. Bezos uses transformational leadership which involves working together with teams to create a vision and execute goals. In this case, the leader is a charismatic leader who ensures that his vision for the company is driven by the workers themselves by demanding their contribution. The focus of the leader and the 56000 employees in the case of Amazon is the 164 million customers across the world ( Grădinaru et al., 2020). In most cases, global leaders may apply the contingency theory by ensuring that their quality and approaches regarding their relationship with their followers are determined by the situation. In situations where the business is facing stiff competition or is growing, there is a need for the leader to be demanding to ensure that high standards are set and followed.
Global Leadership Principles
Fill Necessary Gaps
There is a need for global leaders to ensure that gaps within the company are filled. These gaps are filled through processes such as recruitment and promotion. These processes are meant to ensure the discovery of skills and talent among the potential group of workers of the company. This process must take into account the need for the organization to acquire only skilled individuals in accordance with the hiring needs of the company. Hiring is an expensive process that leaders must avoid doing within a short range of time as it might cost the company-y more than is necessary.
Fillings gaps within the company is a significant principle as it helps to create a working relationship between the employees and the leader. This fact is since the process brings together people with required skills which make it easy to achieve goals and meet set standards of the company. Promotion is crucial as it replaces retiring leaders with new leaders who are likely to bring on board new ideas. In essence, hiring and promoting workers based on their skills and qualifications improves the relationship between the leader and the workers as there are reduced cases of workers feeling disgruntled or discriminated against (Haider et al., 2018). This principle must therefore be reliant on meritocracy. None the fewer leaders must also ensure that commitment of workers is rewarded with promotion.
Integrity
The global leader must be able to differentiate between core values and cultural values. In essence, the leader must always ensure that core values of leadership such as honesty and vision are followed. The character of the global leader may easily affect their interaction with the workers. For instance, corrupt global leaders are likely to be unable to inspire honesty among their followers. For the standards of the company to be maintained the head of the company must keep the standards themselves.
Displaying unethical behavior by the leader influence employees negatively by causing them to adopt a trend of loose morals in the place of work. For example, 39% of CEOs from a list of 2500 top companies in the world quit their positions in 2018 due to cases of lack of integrity (Haider et al., 2018). This percentage was had risen from 10% that was recorded in 2010. Significantly, these cases involved unaccounted loss of money by their companies. Martin sorrel who is the former executive of WPP was fired as a result of various allegations including financial misconduct after a period of 33 years in leadership of the company (Haider et al., 2018). The reason for the need by these leaders to step down or be fired is because their conduct is likely to negatively affect workers due to their inability to inspire integrity among followers.
Teamwork
Leaders must involve their followers in decision-making processes. All members of the organization must be treated as part of a cogwheel. The mission of the organization can be achieved by allowing all members to contribute to the development of the business. These teams include small groups within departments such as the communications team within the marketing department. Departments are also teams that must be encouraged to work as a group to produce the needed results.
The entire business is also a team which indicates that a global leader should view different branches of the company as teams. For instance, the Samsung Company has more than five affiliate companies which include Harman, Teleworld solutions among others (Haider et al., 2018). Additionally, these companies are spread across the world which means that they are difficult to manage. Significantly, to ensure improved that the business becomes manageable the relationships between the leaders of the various branches and their employees must be enhanced. This improvement of leader-employee relations in branches creates a link between the global leader of the organization and the employees in different countries.
One of the ways of promoting teamwork is through the improvement of communication and communication skills. The leader must involve other leaders in corporate communication. For example, communication of important changes in the organization should be done through branch managers and supervisors. Communication must be two-way instead of one-way. This kind of communication involves making sure that the grievances and suggestions of the followers are heard even as the policies and changes are communicated from the top downwards. It is also important to learn who does what. Knowing the roles of the followers is significant in ensuring that they are fully involved in roles that they can easily handle during teamwork. Teamwork can also be enhanced through team building activities that help members to interact with leaders and improve communication skills during work.
Bias of Action
This principle is crucial as it relates to leaders and followers being keen on the execution of plans. The global leader must ensure that actions are quick in every branch of the organization. Instead of spending too much on planning, employees must be encouraged to act to be more productive. By demanding action from all employees, the leader ensures that opportunities such as new groups in the market are acted upon immediately, they are discovered. This principle will improve the leader-follower relationship by encouraging both the leader and followers to focus on the goal. In this case, the leader drives the action by following up on supervisors and employees through demanding regular feedback. Global leaders may from time to time convene leader’s conference calls to demand briefing on various projects and the results achieved. Admission of new innovative ideas from employees is also one way of bringing the leader and follower together towards a common goal especially through the execution of these ideas. By executing plans developed by followers the CEO develops a closer relationship with the employee.
Extreme Ownership
Significantly, the leader must take full responsibility for the actions and performance of the company. This statement indicates that the manager should not blame workers for the failure to produce as expected. The leader is expected to own up the failures of their strategies and the inability to execute plans. The point in this instance is to set aside ego as a global leader and own all the processes as the vision driver.
However, the leader should avoid owning the successes of the business and instead view the achievements as being efforts of the team. This approach ensures that the employees own the achievements while the leader takes responsibility for mistakes within the strategic plan. This principle guarantees that leaders under the global leader such as managers and heads of departments share the burden of production with the works. This culture ensures there is no condemnation thus encouraging improvement not only on the side of the follower but also on the leader’s side. Particularly, this culture is crucial in creating a feeling of belonging and ownership of projects and programs by employees. In essence, there is a closer relationship between the leader and employees as they individually hold the company in high regard to avoid failure and work for success.
The need for avoidance of ego by the global leader is because ego limits the ability to evaluate and analyze performance. For example, the leader who does not acknowledge the shortcomings of the company and themselves cannot assess the milestones individually achieved and those achieved by the company. Regular assessment of workers is a crucial approach as it helps the head to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the company and individual workers. The assessments are therefore effective in creating a bond between followers and leaders through the discovery of special skills.
Decentralization of Command
There is a need to delegate more duties to other leaders and to create smaller groups. Creating more supervisor positions for example is likely to help leaders in various departments to build a closer relationship with workers. Smaller leaders do not execute their commands but the intent of the general leader. In this case, the supervisors are agents of the commander and only use the strategies of global leaders to achieve the mission of the company. This fact indicates it is easier to manage and coordinate smaller groups. Communication from the top to the lowest employment is easier when there are team leaders of smaller groups to explain to workers information and to execute plans. Therefore, the followers in the branches and departments in different regions are connected to the global leader more.
In essence, the information and actions taken by the smaller leaders are a reflection of the global leader’s actions. It is difficult for a leader to effectively inspire or influence the workers who have never met him in a highly centralized system of management. However, it is easier to learn the needs of workers who are in a different region from where the leader is through the leader’s representatives who are the supervisors, managers, and team leaders.
Simplify
To ensure that all employees are part of the plan and process of implementation, it is important to apply simplicity in plans and communication. The complexity of strategies is likely to cause issues to seem more problematic than they are. Additionally, followers have different understanding abilities. For instance, workers who have specialized in communication may fail to clearly understand strategies and plans connected to the engineering department. This occurrence is mostly caused by the use of technical language (Haider et al., 2018). Also, policymaking must be done in the most simplistic way to avoid cases where workers break rules of the organization due to the inability to understand policies.
The operating relationship must allow workers to ask questions on matters that they do not understand. The leader should explain the content of their strategic plan including apply the use of smaller groups and facilitators that can easily explain at the level of each group. The consideration of all members of staff regardless of their skills creates the feeling that they are significant. This approach is important in equalizing all workers and making them part of all programs.
Challenges
There are, however, challenges that global leaders face while managing large businesses. For instance, as a result of geographical distance and cultural differences of employees, it is difficult to create shared goals. This fact is because the employees in different countries have different needs thus it is hard to devise a common strategy to enhance the relationship. There is the challenge of communication as the global leader has to use technologies such as teleconferencing hence hard to create a relationship with employees based on proximity. Further, it is difficult to foster a working relationship between corporate and local. The leader has to learn how to manage tensions existing between regional offices and the headquarters. These tensions create communication barriers and difficulty in aligning the goals of the mother organization with those of affiliate companies.
References
Grădinaru, C., Toma, S. G., & AndriÈ, G. (2020). A view on transformational leadership: The case of Jeff Bezos. Manager Journal , 31 (1), 93-100.
Haider, S., Nisar, Q. A., Baig, F., & Azeem, M. (2018). Dark Side of Leadership: Employees' Job Stress & Deviant Behaviors in Pharmaceutical Industry. International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Sciences , 7 (2).
