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Omar Khan
Founder and Senior Partner
Sensei International

When You Descend for the ‘Royal Visit’
A few leadership tips for interacting with your global teams.

By Omar Khan

Business leaders who oversee global enterprises often do not reflect adequately on what real value-addition would look and feel like from the perspective of their teams overseas.

For example, many businesses have placed a high percentage of their growth bets in Asia. That being the case, global leaders insist on convening numerous meetings with their overseas senior teams and/or making numerous visits themselves each year.

At the overseas end, all business grinds to a halt when senior directors or the global managing director descends for the “royal visit.” Rather than concentrating on serving the market, engaging customers or building a robust leadership pipeline, local leaders call a halt to important work and, instead, gear up for presentations, field trips, and staged interactions with employees.

As one senior CEO said to me, “Given how pristine the paint jobs always are, how beautifully manicured the gardens, you’d think we spend all our time as interior decorators and landscape artists.”

Although we can blame our local leaders for pandering in this way, the pandering implies adapting to someone else’s expectations. If we weren’t flattered by this almost whimsical attention, we’d send a clear message that such “ring kissing” and diffidence isn’t what we’re after.

Suppose you want to be different and to exercise the strategic influence that would be a positive catalyst for your worldwide leaders. How can you and I, as a member of a senior global team, make a meaningful impact? Here are some suggestions:

1. Minimize the number of command performances for your leaders.
Plan two or three meetings that everyone attends. One should be strategic, another a business review, and the third a talent evaluation where real global career development is considered.

All these meetings should have clear, expected outputs, and should encourage wide-scale interaction. If part of the purpose of these meetings isn’t to build relationships, share diverse perspectives, and enlarge everyone’s paradigms, we’re wasting time.

2. When making trips, ask your local groups what you could do that would be most valuable.
Minimize formal presentations and meetings and, instead, spend more time together. It’s amazing what valuable ideas can flow when there is enough time for dialogue, exploration, and the sharing of imagination. Real time together very often produces real insights.

3. Use all your interactions as “coaching opportunities,” not “audits.”
Make certain all your top team members are clear about the two urgencies trumpeted by A.G. Lafley of P&G: “Where are we going to play (and why)? How are we going to win?” I would add another two: “How well are we executing? And why should the best people want to be a part of our team?” These vital, exciting conversations endow our teams with the clarity and confidence to create the future we’re after.

4. Decide what you need to have reported.
That might be a few key numbers and indicators, at a set frequency, in a clearly known simple and user-friendly format — and then leave your leaders alone. The time for high involvement is the selection of the right people and then ensuring they have the right priorities and plan. After that, one of our highest value contributions is to give our leaders the space to create, correct course, and deliver.

5. Finally, make sure all visits and interactions allow you to learn something.
Get educated about the specific markets, the culture and the people, and how your company can become a valued part of the fabric of life there.

Steve Jobs once expressed the aspiration of his team as wanting to “nudge the world a little.” To nudge effectively, we have to understand what we are nudging, in what direction, and to what purpose.

Leaders are judged finally by their productive impact. The best role for global leaders is to create dynamic boundaries for their teams and opportunistically provide enough healthy provocation to spur their designated leaders to deliver. The job of global leaders is emphatically not to stifle, to second guess, or to siphon off precious time and energy in deadening or even cosmetic interactions.

Omar Khan is founder and senior partner of Sensei International, specializing in transformational learning and leadership. His recent book is Timeless Leadership. He can be contacted at omar@sensei-international.com.