Practicing Mindfulness as a Global Leader

A recent New York Times Sunday magazine article featured the work of Ellen Langer, Psychology professor at Harvard and one of the pioneers of the concept of mindfulness.  This term is almost a buzzword these days, and is used often by those who lean towards meditation and Zen philosophy.  For example, Chade-Meng Tan has developed a meditation course that he offers to Google employees (Mr. Tan himself works at Google) and has written a book about his approach called Search Inside Yourself.  According to the New York Times (April 28, 2012) more than 1,000 Google employees have taken his class, which is offered four times a year.  Each class has 60 people and runs seven weeks.

            Professor Langer’s approach is different, and in her book Mindfulness, she herself writes that “My work on mindfulness has been conducted almost entirely within the Western scientific perspective.”  In the Times magazine article, she states clearly that her approach is different from the popular mindfulness meditation techniques in vogue today.  According to the article:

“Her emphasis is on noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms.  When we are ‘actively making new distinctions rather than relying on habitual’ categorizations, we’re alive; and when we’re alive, we can improve.”

Nonetheless, Langer admits that there are some parallels between her approach and the more mystical approach advocated by Tan and others.  What makes Langer’s work so important is that it provides a way to counteract the powerful unconscious biases we have that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize-winning behavioral economist, recently summarized in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow. 

So what is mindfulness and why does it matter for a leader working across cultures?  In re-reading parts of Professor Langer’s book, these are four take-away’s on how global leaders can improve their mindfulness.  I’ve summarized her suggestions and re-phrased them in ways that can be applied to the work of global leaders.

            First, “re-categorize” as you are interacting with business colleagues from different cultures.  As Langer explains this, what I think she means is that when we are actively taking in new information about others, we should pay attention to the situation and the context.  For example, say that you are meeting a female Argentinian executive on your first visit to Buenos Aires for a possible joint venture.  You have taken some Spanish lessons although you may not be that comfortable in speaking Rioplatense Spanish, which is the kind of Spanish spoken in the part of Argentina where your host is from.  You have an initial expectation of her based on what you know about her company and about her status in the company.  When you meet her, you might notice some other characteristics that might cause you to “re-categorize” your impression of her.  She might, in fact, be speaking excellent English since she went to university in England, you learn.  More surprisingly, you learn that her parents are actually from Spain, and that she goes to Spain quite regularly to visit relatives.  So by being mindful of these different “categories,” you get to shift and adjust your impressions.

            In their book Blindspot, Banaji and Greenwald provide research that shows that we have a category-forming capacity that enables us to think about four to six “identifiers” at any one time (pp. 82-83).  For example, they show that by considering six person categories simultaneously – race, religion, age, nationality, gender, and occupation - we can quickly form a mental image or a description of a person, e.g., white Catholic Polish male factory worker in his sixties.    

            Second, be open to new information.  As Langer puts it, “Mindfully engaged individuals will actively attend to changed signals.  Behavior generated from mindful listening or watching, from an expanding, increasingly differentiated information base, is, of course, likely to be more effective.”

            In psychology, such individuals are said to be “high self-monitors.”  They are aware of cues in the environment, and will not only pay attention to these cues, but alter their behavior accordingly.  In one of my first presentations to a Japanese audience several years ago, I noticed that not even halfway into my talk, about 70% of the managers in the audience had their eyes closed.  What was going on, I wondered.  Was my presentation that boring and uninteresting?  Perhaps they did not have enough sleep last night?  On the fly, I adjusted my presentation and began to ask questions to make my presentation more interactive.  Only later did I find out that closing their eyes is common for Japanese audiences, who want to concentrate on what the speaker is saying, especially if he or she is speaking in English.

              In high context cultures, as well as in cultures where direct confrontation is avoided, it is especially important to “read between the lines.”  This means paying attention to the tone of what individuals are saying, and their body language.  As a global manager, you may be receiving nods from your team but that may not necessarily mean that they agree with you, or that they will follow through on what you have asked them to do. 

            Third, adopt a “multiple perspectives” attitude.  This means trying to understand the situation from others’ points of view.  As a manager going into a subsidiary from headquarters, for example, you might think of yourself as someone who is there to make sure that the local employees understand what is expected from them by “corporate.”  You might think that you should be welcome because you are coming from the mountaintop to “enlighten” the local population.  Well, consider the situation from their point of view.  They might see you first of all as a corporate “spy” who has been sent to check up on them.  They might also see you as an ivory tower, naive manager who has very little idea of what goes on in the country and who is trying to impose corporate-wide solutions that will not work locally.  As Langer suggests (p. 69):  “If we cling to our own point of view, we may be blind to our impact on others; if we are too vulnerable to other people’s definitions of our behavior, we may feel undermined, for observers are typically less flattering of us than we are of ourselves.”

            Nonetheless, this ability for perspective-taking is critical for global leaders.  There is evidence that this is one of the characteristics that distinguish effective negotiators from average or ineffective negotiators.

            Fourth, pay attention to process and not just outcomes.  As a global leader, especially if you are sent overseas, you will no doubt be focused on producing results and on achieving the goals set out for you.  Being mindful means understanding that different processes may lead to the same outcome.  Langer says (p. 34):  “Throughout our lives, an outcome orientation in social situations can induce mindlessness.  If we think we know how to handle a situation, we don’t feel a need to pay attention.” 

            An American expatriate I was speaking with recently mentioned to me that in his first trips to Asia, he was very concerned about getting things accomplished in the short time that he was visiting a few Asian countries that he became impatient with his hosts, who wanted to take him out to dinners and have him meet with various managers in the country.  He was especially annoyed during meetings, when it seemed so difficult to reach decisions and move forward on the actions that he wanted them to take.  Only later did he realize that by focusing so exclusively on “getting things done” in the most efficient way, he was ignoring, and in fact, violating, some processes very important in these cultures.

Banaji, M. and Greenwald, A.  (2014). Blindspot.  New York:  Delacorte Press.

Grierson, D.  (2014).  What If Age Is Nothing But a Mind-Set?  New York Times Sunday Magazine, October 22.

Kahneman, D.  (2011).  Thinking Fast and Slow.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kelly, C.  (2012).  O.K., Google, Take a Deep Breath.  New York Times, April 28.

Langer, E.  (1989).  Mindfulness.  Cambridge, MA:  De Capo Books Press.

Tan, C.  (2014).  Search Inside Yourself.  New York:  HarperOne.

Boss, Manager or Leader?

After reading two excellent books with the word “boss” in their titles (Robert Sutton’s “Good Boss, Bad Boss,” and Linda Hill and Kent Lineback’s “Being the Boss”), I became intrigued with the connotations of this term, and how a boss differs from being a manager and a leader.

Sutton, Hill and Lineback don’t really make a big deal over these distinctions; it seems that for them, the three terms are synonymous.  I’ve observed that we use the term “boss” more frequently and more informally, both in the context of work and outside of work.  My children used to wonder who the real boss in the family was, and some of my male friends would sometimes defer making decisions by letting others know about their spouse that “she’s the boss.”  In my experience working internationally, I find that the word “boss” is commonly understood and used in many countries.  Sometimes the English word “boss” is used; at other times, its local equivalent is.  In Japan, for example, where titles are important, there are many different gradations for the title of boss, for example, honbucho, fuku-honbucho, bucho, jicho, kacho.

Most good managers at work will avoid throwing the weight of their authority around by telling their employees to do something because “I’m the boss.”  Many employees, however, will comply with their manager’s request (although they may not say it out loud) because “he (or she) is the boss.”  In fact, the dictionary definition of a boss is “a person who exercises control or authority.”

You won’t find many organizations where the word “boss” is in a job title, but you will find that a great majority of organizations uses the terms “manager” or “leader” in their job titles.  While managers tend to avoid referring to themselves as the boss, they are not reluctant to describe their job as managing or leading a group, department, or business unit.

In my opinion, Kotter’s article on managers versus leaders did no favors for managers.  When he wrote that article in 1990, he claimed that “most U.S. organizations today are over-managed and underled.”  Although he stated in the article that both managers and leaders are needed, the implication is that in a world of constant change and complexity, it is more important to be a leader than a manager.  As Sutton has pointed out, however, the distinction may be accurate but dangerous.  Why so?  Let me illustrate (with details disguised).

A number of years ago, I was coaching a marketing executive who I shall call Julia.  She had just been promoted and assigned to another country from her native Australia, where she had been the marketing head for one of her company’s product lines.  In this country, she was going to be the Chief Marketing Officer for the subsidiary.  The subsidiary had also just hired a new CEO, Ron, a native of the country who had been educated in the U.S. and Europe, and had actually come from a competitor’s European operations.  Ron was charismatic and energetic, and he went about exciting the subsidiary with his grand vision and plans for turning the subsidiary around. 

Julia was excited too.  She had met Ron soon after she arrived in the country’s capital, and was impressed by his passion and zeal.  However, she did have a bit of a concern about him.  Looking at his background and experience, Ron had an MBA and had been in sales for most of his career.  Now he was being asked to run a subsidiary that had a strong R&D function but had grown somewhat “bloated” over the years.  The subsidiary had not been turning out enough innovative products, and was not profitable enough, according to internal company and external industry benchmarks.  Did Ron know enough about the technical aspects of the business and about its operations to manage the entire subsidiary enterprise?

A few months after Julia arrived, the subsidiary began its profit planning for the following year, and she spent a couple of weeks with her team, individually and as a group, to get a detailed understanding of expenses and sources of revenue.  She grilled them on each line item, and made sure she understood exactly where the money was going, and how it was being spent.  She remembered her old boss in Australia, who would spend several hours with her on her budget every year that she learned to come in thoroughly prepared to respond to questions he might have about any line item on the budget. 

With this experience, Julia prepared for her first meeting with Ron.  She had sent him her profit planning figures a few days before, and came into the meeting with back-up notes and documents, ready to answer any question he might throw at her.  To her surprise, he did not have any questions.  He had not even bothered to open the e-mail she had sent him with the profit plan figures she had attached.  He glanced at the numbers she showed him, nodded, and then told her he would get back to her if his CFO had any comments or requests for more information.  He then started to talk to her about his vision for what Marketing could do to help launch some new products the following year. 

Julia was a bit stunned, but she went along and brainstormed some new ideas with her boss.  Ron lasted a couple of years with the subsidiary before he left.  While he injected a breath of fresh air into the subsidiary, his lack of attention to detail and the operational aspects of running a business did not help.  He was a leader, not a manager.

In my experience, the best bosses today both lead and manage.  They are able to wear both hats, and know when to “zoom in” and when to “zoom out.”  Take Alan Mulally, who was until recently CEO of Ford Motor Company, and who engineered a very successful turnaround of the company.  He set a clear direction, aligned his team and Ford employees towards a common purpose, and inspired people.  Yet, from all reports, he also was very conscious of Ford’s challenges in returning to profitability, and spent considerable amounts of time managing the bottom line and diving deep into the operational aspects of the business.

My advice for today’s bosses?  First, you can’t be a good leader without also being a good manager.  Get to know your functional area, and what your team is doing.  Ask questions and get into the details.  Second, as a leader, one of your first orders of business is to create a compelling purpose and direction for your team.  Don’t do it in a vacuum, or on a mountaintop where you come down to make your pronouncements.  Involve your team, find out what might excite them, and connect your team’s purpose with the larger goal of the company.  Third, as a boss, use your authority to set a direction; recognize and reward those who perform and who show the right values; and take action on those who don’t.

Then there is the leader as coach.  That’s a subject for another post!

Hill, L. and Lineback, K.  (2011).  Being the Boss. Boston:  Harvard Business Review Press.

Kotter, J.  (1990).  What Leaders Really Do.  Harvard Business Review.

Sutton, R.  (2010).  Good Boss, Bad Boss.  New York:  Business Plus.

Are Global Managers Portable?

I met Jacques Renard in Shanghai a few years ago, where he was CFO of the subsidiary of a global consumer products company.  A French national, Jacques has had a long career as an expatriate for his company; the last time he worked in his native France was fifteen years ago.  He has been assigned to Austria, Warsaw, Caracas, Jakarta, and now Shanghai.  His wife and their two children are used to moving with Jacques every few years.  Jacques is part of a small but enduring breed of managers who spend their careers working outside their home country. 

As I have written elsewhere, cultural sensitivity and global mindset – in addition to having the right set of technical skills and integrity - are important for success as a global manager.  Recently, I came across a study that suggests that these may not be enough, although this was not a study of global leaders.  Let me explain.  Groysberg et al. examined 20 high-level executives who were leaving one company (GE) to join another company at an even higher level of responsibility (e.g., Chairman, CEO).  In their study, which covered the years 1989 to 2001, they found mixed results for what they called the portability of these executives; some were successful, others less so.  For example, Robert Nardelli went to Home Depot and failed there; James McMerney went to 3M and thrived.  Both were at some point considered to be potential successors to Jack Welch at GE.

Why GE?  For many years, especially during Jack Welch’s time, GE was well known as a breeding ground for leadership.  I know several executive recruiters who used to keep close tabs on up-and-coming GE managers because of the company’s reputation for identifying and developing leadership talent.

What Groysberg and his colleagues found was that portability depended on a match between the executives’ skills and the requirements of the new position in terms of four areas: strategy, industry, relationships and culture/systems/processes. For example, companies’ subsequent performance was better when those executives had strategic skills that were a good match with their new company’s strategic requirements.  If an executive’s strengths were in cost cutting but the new environment required skills in growing the business, the chances were that the executives’ new company would not perform as well.  In other words, the portability of an executive (at least in the limited sample they studied) was a function of the match between the executives’ strengths and the company’s situation in these four areas:  “The more closely the new environment matches the old, the greater the likelihood of success in the new position.”  Subsequent research by Araoz supports this idea that “origin and destination matter.” 

What about managers like Jacques?  Despite the moves from country to country, he and other global managers for the most part remain in the same company.  Will similar cautions apply to the portability of global managers who are assigned to different country subsidiaries?  Or does having cultural sensitivity and a global mindset trump any potential mismatches in portability?

Many years ago, the company I was working for acquired a small business in an African country that was founded by a very successful entrepreneur.  To help integrate this business with the company, we sent a British manager who I shall call Philip.  He had been with the company for over twenty years, had been assigned to several overseas subsidiaries during that time, was highly experienced in operations, and was very familiar with the company’s culture and processes.  Unfortunately, Philip did not do well in his assignment.  His constant clashes with the local founder and his attempts to run a command-and-control operation did not fit with the loose, free-wheeling culture of the local company.  Using the Groysberg framework, there were mismatches in all of the four areas:

·      Strategy.  This was a situation that called for an executive with skills in blending together an entrepreneurial company with a massive global enterprise; Philip had never faced this kind of challenge before.

·      Industry.  As an emerging market, this country’s regulatory environment was not sophisticated, consumers had little awareness of the brand that the global company represented, and the competition was mainly other local companies.  These were unfamiliar challenges for Philip, and very different from what he had faced in the past.

·      Relationships.  Philip flew in “solo;” he had met the founder briefly but had no friends or allies in the company whom he could trust.  As a result, he had blinders on and was not able to get feedback or advice that could have helped him adjust his behavior and style.

·      Company culture/systems/processes.  Philip was used to working in a bureaucratic environment where processes were defined and well established.  Nothing in his past experience prepared him for this situation.

While Groysberg’s framework certainly fits, a certain level of cultural sensitivity and global mindset on Phil’s part could have helped mitigate these risks.  For example, being willing to learn about other cultures and building connections (two critical elements of global mindset) would have helped him understand the local company’s industry and processes, as well as establish productive relationships.  Therefore, the first screen in selecting potential global managers is still their global mindset orientation.  Assuming that companies have vetted their global managers on global mindset, what if it is apparent that there will not be a good match?  A company has three alternatives:

1.     Find someone else in the company with a better match for the situation, while sending the manager to another country where there is a better match for him or her.  This presupposes that the company has a pool of such managers and the capability to match them to the most appropriate situations.  If not, at least find the closest matches.

2.     Fix the manager by providing her with some counseling and coaching.  A global manager who may not be familiar with the regulatory environment in the country she has been assigned to can prepare by learning from more experienced colleagues about what to watch out for, consulting with country experts, or doing a lot of homework. 

3.     Fix the situation to enhance a better match, for example, by sending the global manager to a subsidiary where he already has a network.  Angela was a global manager for a technology company who had led a global team whose members were primarily in India.  When there was an opening for a manager to be assigned to the company’s Indian subsidiary, she was the logical choice, and Angela was able to take advantage of the alliances that she had already built in the subsidiary to have a successful assignment there.

Araoz, C.  (2014).  It’s Not the How or the What But the Who.  Boston:  Harvard Business Review Press.

Grosberg, B., McLean, A. and Nohria, N.  (2006).  Are Leaders Portable?  Harvard Business Review.

A Checklist for Global Managers

In his book, The Checklist Manifesto, Dr. Atul Gawande writes about what Wal-Mart did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  As you may recall, this was a major disaster in New Orleans, where 80 percent of the city was flooded and 20,000 refugees were stranded at the New Orleans Superdome.  Another 20,000 were at the Convention Center.  There was no power in the city hospitals.  Wal-Mart closed its 126 stores, but within 48 hours, more than half of them were up and running again.  Wal-Mart employees and managers somehow mobilized, with the use of simple checklists:

“They set up temporary mobile pharmacies in the city and adopted a plan to provide medications for free at all of their stores … They set up free check cashing for payroll and other checks in disaster-area stores.  They opened temporary clinics to provide emergency personnel with inoculations … within two days of Katrina’s landfall, the company’s logistics teams managed to contrive ways to get tractor trailers with food, water, and emergency equipment past roadblocks and into the dying city.  They were able to supply water and food to refugees and even to the National Guard a day before the government appeared on the scene.” (pp. 77-78)

Gawande’s point is not to praise Wal-Mart, nor to point to the superiority of the private sector over the public sector (i.e., FEMA).  This situation is where he started to understand the power of having a checklist.

As another example, Gawande writes about the Chairman of Surgery at the University of Toronto, who has been using a 21-item surgery checklist to catch potential errors in surgical care.  What is interesting is that the checklist also includes a team briefing.  “The team members were supposed to stop and take a moment simply to talk with one another before proceeding – about how long the surgeon expected the operation to take, how much blood loss everyone should be prepared for, whether the patient had any risks or concerns the team should know about.”  (pp. 100-101)

In surgery, according to Gawande, you can have checklists for three of the four big killers:  infection, bleeding, and unsafe anesthesia.  The fourth killer in surgery is the unexpected.  So how do you prevent this?  The value of having a checklist is that it facilitates a dialogue, and people have to stop and talk through the case together before surgery. Unfortunately, according to Gawande, this kind of teamwork is not common in surgical teams.  Some research that he cites shows that team members that regularly used checklists showed great improvements in their ratings of their own teamwork. 

According to Gawande, “ … under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.  There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided – and even enhanced – by procedure.” (p. 79)

What kinds of management situations might a checklist be used for?  Actually, Professor Michael Useem has come up with his own checklist for leaders, consisting of 15 principles.  Like Gawande, he argues that “ … when uncertainty becomes the norm and turbulence more commonplace … a Leader’s Checklist becomes more consequential.”  (p. 41)

Many of the items in Useem’s leader checklist can apply to managers leading globally.  They include articulating a vision, communicating persuasively, and building leadership in others.  However, as many of you know, global leaders face different circumstances and need to take into consideration other cultural variables. 

So I have come up a checklist for global managers.  The “targets” referred to in this checklist are those individuals, groups, or organizations from another culture that you will be interacting with.

1.     Understand your cultural assumptions. 

·      Are you aware which of your management style preferences and behaviors are influenced by your culture?

·      Are there aspects of your management style or behavior that works in your culture that might not work in other cultures?

2.     Map your targets’ cultural values.

·      What are the most important cultural values of the people or group you will be dealing with?

·      How do these values show up in how they do business with others?

3.     Establish cultural baseline behaviors with your targets.

·      Are there specific behaviors that you should be avoiding when dealing with them?

·      Are there specific behaviors that you should be sure to demonstrate when dealing with them?

4.     Clarify your managerial goals and your core values.

·      What do you hope to accomplish – not so much in terms of the task or work, but in terms of your management of your targets?

·      What are the most important values you hold, especially around management?

5.     Identify culturally appropriate options to achieving these goals.

·      Are there alternative ways to achieve your goals that might be more culturally appropriate?

·      Which of these may require your getting out of your comfort zone?

6.     Seek feedback and mentoring from others.

·      Are there people from the cultures you are dealing with, that you can approach to ask questions and get feedback?

·      Do you have a plan on building relationships with these individuals so you can gain their trust?

7.     Adjust, experiment and continuously improve.

·      Are you reflecting on what you are learning about others’ reactions to you and the feedback you are getting?

·       How are you applying what you have learned to improve yourself in your cultural interactions?

8.     Preserve your character and integrity.

·      Are people clear – not so much by your words but by your actions – on what you stand for?

·      Are you clear on what you stand for?

Gawande, A.  (2011).  The Checklist Manifesto.  New York:  Picador.

Useem, M.  (2011).  The Leader’s Checklist.  Philadelphia:  Wharton Digital Press.