To be successful, organizations need leaders who can drive productivity and innovation in today’s complex, uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world. The leaders of today need to be able to unleash the innate power of people to find sustainable solutions for the global challenges we face today. This often requires making decisions in complex or ambiguous environments, understanding cultural nuances and adapting one’s style accordingly.

As people are the most valuable assets of organizations, they must optimize these assets to deliver on the needed results . Today’s leaders need to be able to operate with ambiguity and complexity. This demands specific behaviours and competencies to be successful as a leader.

Right Management and Tucker International partnered on a unique study to help multinational clients address the challenges associated with developing leaders with global responsibilities. This first-of-a-kind study is truly breakthrough as it identifies the cultural competencies needed for global leaders to be successful, and it also predicts what success looks like when these competencies are present and well developed. They studied the competencies of 1,867 leaders of 13 nationalities between April of 2010 and December of 2011.  In this study, a wide variety of businesses were included, from mid-size firms to Fortune 100 organizations and some 134 industries were represented.

The study identified six essential competencies required for leadership success, especially for global leaders who operate across cultures:

Competency 1: Social adaptability

This competency represents a leader’s ability to socialize comfortably with new people in unfamiliar social situations and to demonstrate genuine interest in other people.

Competency 2: Demonstrating Creativity

This competency represents a leader’s ability to enjoy new challenges, strive for innovative solutions to social and situational issues, and learn from a variety of sources. This quality includes the ability to see around corners, predict outcomes and act despite uncertainty. 

Competency 3: Even disposition

This competency represents a leader’s ability to remain calm, not be critical of himself or others and to learn from mistakes. In good times and especially in bad times, people in an organization look to their leaders for guidance. Those leaders who maintain an even disposition in the face of change or in difficult times set the tone for an organizational culture that is resilient.

Competency 4: Respecting beliefs

This competency represents a leader’s ability to demonstrate respect for the political and spiritual beliefs of people, whether they are from the same culture or from a different culture.  It also includes a good sense of humor, which is an underestimated and underappreciated aspect of local and global leadership. Leaders who can use appropriate humor in stressful situations involving political or spiritual differences can diffuse tensions and loosen things up for more successful problem solving.

Competency 5: Instilling trust

This competency represents a leader’s ability to build and maintain trusting relationships. Trust is the glue that holds teams together. Building and maintaining trust across organizations and across cultures is a complicated process because trust does not mean the same thing for different people from the same or from different cultures. A successful leader takes the time to understand the personal and cultural differences among their people in order to build and maintain trust in appropriate ways.

Competency 6: Navigating ambiguity

This competency represents a leader’s ability not to become frustrated by vagueness and uncertainty but to see through it, and figure out how things are done in different teams, different countries and different cultures. Ambiguous situations are the norm when leading across cultures, so the ability to work successfully in these multicultural environments is clearly an advantage.

The research proves that successful leaders:

• Enjoy new challenges, strive for innovative solutions and situational issues and learn from a variety of sources;
• Build and maintain trusting relationships;
• Socialize comfortably with new people in unfamiliar social situations and demonstrate genuine interest in other people;
• See through vagueness and uncertainty, do not become frustrated and figure out how things are done in other cultures;
• Remain calm, do not become self-critical and learn from mistakes; and
• Demonstrate respect for the political and spiritual beliefs of people of other cultures.

Manpower and Tucker International point out that providing training to develop leadership coaching skills is crucial to develop the six key competencies that leaders need to lead effectively in today’s diverse and global environment because the number of ready-now leaders is scarce!

It is exactly these competencies (and more) that one develops in the ICF Accredited Professional Coach Training Program ROOT-GROW©: Creating a safe, supportive environment of trust and mutual respect, showing genuine interest in people, demonstrating a learning attitude, being comfortable with uncertainty, being open to not knowing, accepting what there is, demonstrating a non-judgmental attitude, being resilient and flexible in the process, trust the self and the other, respecting beliefs, demonstrating respect for other people’s perceptions and personal way of being, using humour effectively to create lightness and energy; confidently shifting perspectives and experimenting with new possibilities for action; demonstrating confidence in working with strong emotions; ability to self-manage and remain calm and not be overpowered by other people’s emotions or reactions, able to listen without judging, hearing concerns, values and beliefs, accepting and exploring the expression of feelings, perceptions, concerns, beliefs and suggestions, being able to integrate and build on ideas and suggestions, asking questions that reflect active listening and an understanding of the other person’s perspective, asking questions that evoke discovery, insight, commitment or action, asking open questions that create greater clarity, possibility or new learning, being able to communicate effectively and using language that is appropriate and respectful (e.g., non-sexist, non-racist, non-technical, non-jargon), being able to integrate and accurately evaluate multiple sources of information, being able to go beyond what is said in assessing people’s concerns, being able to identify  underlying concerns and fixed ways of looking at things, differences between facts and interpretations; and disparities between thoughts, feelings, and action; helping others to discover new thoughts and perceptions that enable the achievement of desired results, ability to shift between different viewpoints and find new possibilities for action; ability to create opportunities for ongoing learning and active experimentation, challenging assumptions and perspectives to provoke new ideas and find new possibilities for action, bringing forward points of view that are aligned with  goals set and engaging others to consider them without attachment.

That is why leaders need professional coach training