Global Resonance for Global Leaders: A Transformative Being-Knowing-Doing Cycle

• In Event: Global Leadership Strategies

Short Description

Turbulence calls for resourcefulness to flex and flow in the global whitewater. Global resonance expands on extant theoretical constructs of global competency, linking competencies critical for successful global leadership with the ability to embody and employ transformative, interdependent capacity and the capability for co-creation.

Detailed Abstract

Global leadership is not an individual, independent activity, but significantly, an inter-dependent and facilitative one. Concurring, Mendenhall et al. (2012) highlight the turbulence of the global environment that compounds the leader’s enterprise with contextual multiplier effects of interdependence, multiplicity, ambiguity and flux. Together, they can significantly impact boundary spanning imperatives that support driving innovation and change, leading cross-border and cross-functional collaborative tasks, and inclusively cultivating global diversity as core organizational strengths, all of which require a dynamic collective for success.

Many global competency constructs, such as cross-cultural and intercultural competence (Black and Mendenhall, 1990; Rhinesmith, 1993; (Bennett, MJ, 1993; Gregersen et al., 1998); cultural intelligence (Early, 2002; Early and Ang, 2003; Thomas et al., 2008) and global mindset (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2002; Javidan & Bowne, 2013; Levy et al., 2007) have rigourously examined and developed approaches to identify and cultivate the mindset and skills needed to meet challenges global leaders face. As organization’s strategies for global growth and development have evolved in focus over the past decades, especially in terms of changing relationship dynamics within diverse markets, there is a growing need for global leadership development to keep pace.

Many models of intercultural competency development, cultural intelligence and global mindset, it is suggested, appear to be predominantly cognitive and individualistic in orientation and instrumental in aim, and based on an implied assumption that understanding and adapting to cultural differences can be developed and applied with individual effort. As a result, closing a knowing-doing gap is often highlighted as a key aim in the global competence development research as it pertains to global leadership; optimistically, both scholarly and practitioner approaches assume little differentiation between holding intercultural knowledge and skills and using them in the complex, diverse and interdependent environment.

Given the criticality of intercultural connection, there is a need to expand the extant theoretical global competency constructs to include Global Resonance, a dynamic, relational and transformative concept and process that engenders connection, balances power, cultivates a “we” perspective and leverages liminal space for conscious co-creation from which advocacy grows. Global Resonance offers a way of both conceptualizing and operationalizing competencies supportive of fulfilling on the definition of global leadership and transforms the noted gap into a multiple loop learning cycle of development, that is, being-knowing-doing.

Grounding an individual's identity and practice, Global Resonance is not meant to replace the crucial capabilities that the present global competency constructs provide. Rather, in a spiralic fashion, they provide the platform of substance from which the global leader can embody the state of receptivity for forming of deep connections as individual humans - informed not distorted by culturally influenced perceptions, thus bring the inherent and somewhat neglected attention to emergent and relational aspects of global leadership, so key in the global whitewater.

This paper concludes that global leadership is a journey through a number of constructs proposed in the global leadership literature and contributes vital relational elements of intent and emergent co-creation to the theoretical development of global leadership mindset and embodiment in practice.

Participant

• Kathleen A. Curran, Intercultural Systems