What is the Recipe for a Successful International Manager?

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Jeff Toms, Director of Marketing & Client Services, suggests a few key ingredients

As organisations take a more global view of their markets, they are finding an increasing need to interact, negotiate, communicate and work effectively as individuals and teams with people whose values, language, customs and business practices are different from their own, and where misunderstandings can lead to costly mistakes and even business failures.

It is not surprising therefore that the need for the acquisition of skill and understanding and the effective management of cross-cultural differences is recognised as one of the key core competencies of the successful international manager.

What is still somewhat surprising is that when selecting individuals or teams to work as part of international operations, so few organisations use these as a major selection criteria.

In reality, what tends to happens is that organisations, under pressure to provide resources, select people with the best functional skills and who understand how the organisation's systems and procedures work rather than those with appropriate cross-cultural sensitivity. Often consideration will not have been given to the cultural competencies required to work as part of what is often a multicultural team or in a particular market. Instead, individuals will be expected to 'pick things up on the way' and for a few this can work.

Clearly, appropriate levels of functional and management skill are essential. However, organisations do need to ask themselves how much more effective someone would be if some objective assessment criteria were to be applied and the learning and skill development training provided.

The really successful international manager will fully understand the cross-cultural implications of his or her role at a national and organisational level and, through the acquisition of appropriate skills, learn to recognise and build on similarities and reconcile the differences, turning both equally to competitive advantage.

At the organisational level, therefore, one of the key strategies for achieving international competitive advantage should be to develop both general and market-specific criteria for cross-cultural effectiveness, assess and develop people against these and provide pre- and ongoing support.