Growing Global Executives. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
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projecting credibility vertically (to those at headquarters) requires that one demonstrate authority.
In only one aspect of gravitas is pivoting unnecessary, and that’s in demonstrating integrity. Integrity is table stakes. Unless you’re seen as a person of your word—as someone who can be counted on to honor your commitments, no matter how onerous those may become—you won’t get traction with any of the other behaviors. Globally dispersed team members won’t go the extra mile for you because they don’t believe you have their best interests at heart. Peers won’t allocate work to your team or deliver resources that you request because they suspect your motives. Integrity is the foundation on which trust is built and relationships endure across both distance and difference. If you can’t project it, you’ll be incapable of driving results.
Integrity can take time to demonstrate. It often takes a crisis, as subordinates want to see not only how firmly you will stand in the face of a storm, but also whose interests you will shield. Nicolas Japy, CEO of Remote Sites and Asia-Australia for Sodexo, describes being repeatedly tested: crises are perpetual because his people—some seventy thousand employees—are working under extreme circumstances in some of the world’s most far-flung places, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the wilderness of Alaska. Japy depends on his on-site managers—who are fully empowered to hire, train, and deploy local talent, negotiate local partnerships, command resources, and otherwise do what’s necessary to fulfill Sodexo’s contract—to handle whatever comes up. Since the success of his division depends on these managers going the extra mile for him and the company, it’s imperative that he demonstrate he will go the extra mile for them—quite literally. Japy tells of one such opportunity that he seized early in his global role when a site manager in New Caledonia, where Sodexo ran a camp serving a mining operation, called to tell him he had a crisis that he couldn’t handle. “The client doesn’t want to listen to me,” the manager told him. “I don’t know what to do.” Japy, a French citizen who was working in central Africa at the time, got on a plane for the South Pacific. After two full days of travel, Japy arrived to learn that the client “didn’t have the time” to meet with him. Japy went out to the camp to wait. Two days later, when the client showed up, Japy calmly told him that Sodexo could no longer do business with him. The client’s deputy, sensing that Japy wasn’t bluffing, quickly intervened to speak to him alone. Fifteen minutes later, Japy had what he came for: the client’s commitment to honor Sodexo’s terms of engagement. “That happened ten years ago, and my people on the ground are still talking about it: ‘Nicolas flew twenty thousand kilometers, went to the campsite, and negotiated intensely with the client to sort it out.’ And that site manager? He is still there working for me.”
Authority vs. EQ
Our interviews with rising leaders and seasoned global executives make clear that what marks a leader as ready for global responsibility is knowing when to assert authority and when to demonstrate emotional intelligence. To put it another way, rising global leaders can’t afford to misread context. A failure to adapt your style to the situation can undermine your credibility as a leader in irreparable ways.
Ron Lee, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who heads up its private wealth business in Asia, has had to learn the importance of the double pivot: having grown up in Ohio and spending the formative years of his career in New York, he has a cultural background helpful for communicating to the firm’s senior leadership; and having spent the last twenty years living and working in Hong Kong and Singapore, he’s acquired Asian cultural smarts (an acquisition aided by the fact that Lee is of Korean descent). So it fell to him, he says, to coach a colleague who struggled to project credibility with Goldman’s senior leaders.
Lee gave his colleague an ideal forum in which to demonstrate his acumen and leadership: a convening of an important executive committee in Asia. But to Lee’s disappointment, when the strategic group began discussing a topic with which his colleague was very familiar, he remained silent. Afterward, Lee took him aside. “I’m shocked that when we were discussing material of relevance to both us, you let an hour go by without saying a word,” Lee told him. “Why didn’t you jump in to offer your expertise and insight? We all would have benefited.” His colleague seemed genuinely surprised at the censure. “But I’m never sure I’m senior enough to say something,” he told Lee.
As Lee regards this colleague highly, he was surprised that he hadn’t grasped just how important it is to pivot to a more communicative style when invited into the boardroom. “Some of our businesses in Asia have been run by colleagues from outside the region,” Lee observes. “That’s partly because local talent has not yet gained the visibility needed to be given the role.” Local talent, like his colleague, is sometimes perceived as having more technical and quantitative skills than strategic vision and as lacking the ability to build the credibility necessary to interact with divisions worldwide. Lee believes it’s an unfair characterization, but concedes that sometimes he can see where the criticism originates. “There’s definitely a case to be made for developing local talent to think more broadly and for equipping them with the executive presence that projects credibility to global leaders,” he says. On the other hand, “there is also a strong case to be made that in order for Western leaders to become global leaders, they need to develop the cultural sensitivity to recognize forms of leadership that may be different from their own,” Lee adds. Western leaders need to also master the double pivot.
Lee’s story underscores just how treacherous the waters can be between the shores of local culture and headquarters—particularly with regard to demonstrating authority. Navigating these straits demands recognizing that corporate culture is its own country, reflective of, but not limited to, the leadership norms of the country (and industry sector) in which it’s based. As Rosalind Hudnell, a global leader at Intel, puts it, “Corporate culture is defined by the people and norms of the organization, which continue to evolve. Our global employee base is made up of ambassadors for Intel around the world.”
Our dataset affirms this divide between the West and growth-hub geographies. If we aggregate data from our US and UK samples, where most multinational firms are headquartered (certainly most of CTI’s eighty-six Task Force members are headquartered in North America or Europe), a familiar array of boardroom behaviors emerges as salient. According to senior leaders in these markets (“the West”), demonstrating authority (after showing integrity) is what projects credibility. Demonstrating emotional intelligence is at the bottom of the list.
In growth-hub markets, however, the reverse is true: when we aggregate our data from Brazil, mainland China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Turkey, we see that gravitas derives from inspiring a following and demonstrating emotional intelligence. In essence, being authoritative makes you credible with Western top brass, whereas exercising emotional intelligence is likely to earn you the trust and respect of your team in local markets.
We heard countless stories to this effect. Nicolas Japy, who runs his division out of Singapore, arrived before Sodexo’s new office complex there was completed. The local manager, mortified that he had only a small room to offer to a member of the firm’s executive committee, insisted that Japy take over his own office. Japy wouldn’t allow it. “You’re a somebody here, and others should see that when they walk into your office,” he told the manager. “You’ve built this team, you’ve built this business, and it’s thanks to your success that we’re able to build a new facility in Singapore. When it’s ready, I’ll have a nice office. Until then, the small room is fine.” Though it cost him some credibility with Western visitors, Japy says that in the end it won him the undying loyalty of his new team in Singapore. “You’ve got to show your people that if everything goes right where they’re based, they have a future not just in their country, but in the company,” he remarks.
Gender Matters
Pivoting is further complicated by cultural expectations around gender—and by where the parent company is on the maturity curve of gender equity. In many markets (and in many corporate cultures), asserting authority and exercising emotional intelligence look very different for men and women.
Take, for example, one executive’s experience running a team in Bangalore from New York. Having created a standardized approach to pricing for the firm’s