The Role of Expertise in Leading Global Change: Excellence Through Expert Cognition

• In Event: Global Leadership Excellence: Thinking, Doing, and Core Competencies

Short Description

How do global leaders think about change? This research explores expert cognition through two case studies of global executives leading significant change processes. The presenter discovered complex thought processes that draw from vast experience, making it possible to overcome ambiguity, exert influence, span boundaries, code-shift, and deliver excellence despite high-stakes situations.

Detailed Abstract

We may be in the midst of a global leadership crisis, with insufficient global leaders to meet organizational needs. One recent survey found a third of CEOs cancelled global initiatives due to talent shortages (PWC 2012 Annual Global CEO Survey).

Equipping global leaders requires turning our attention to one aspect of global leadership that remains largely unexplored – leading global change. Our aim in this presentation is to explore the role of expertise in global change via an in-depth analysis of two case studies and to explore how this knowledge can be used to accelerate the development of expertise in global leaders.

Expertise and the Global Leader’s Role in Change

Mendenhall, Reiche, Bird and Osland include change-leader work in their definition of global leadership: “The process of influencing others to adopt a shared vision through structures and methods that facilitate positive change while fostering individual and collective growth in a context characterized by significant levels of complexity, flow and presence” (2012, p. 8).

Expertise is required to manage significant levels of complexity, and must be developed and maintained through deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer,1993) with ten years of concentrated practice being the generally accepted minimum amount of time necessary to become an expert (Ericsson and Ward, 2007).

Experts are more able to apply their knowledge practically and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information than others (Sternberg and Davison, 1994). They are also more capable of grouping sets of relevant cues into meaningful patterns, which yields more accurate interpretations and diagnoses of situations and problems (Sternberg and Davison, 1994), and this pattern recognition allows them to better access and order their knowledge base (Hayashi, 2001). Furthermore, experts are better at perceiving interactions among cues and making sense of invisible or absent cues (Klein and Hoffman, 1993), which allows them to respond to unusual or non-routine situations better than non-experts and make better decisions in time-constrained, high pressure situations (Klein and Hoffman, 1993). Finally, experts are also more likely to generate a high-quality solution in their first attempt without needing to compare alternative solutions (Klein, 1998) and their increased cognitive variety enables their problem solving to be more innovative in nature (Scheerer, 1963).

The only research to date on expert cognition in business global leaders has been done by a research team that linked naturalistic decision making with global leadership to study the domain of global change (Osland, Bird, Osland & Oddou, 2007; Osland, 2010; Osland et al., 2012; Osland et al., 2013).

Osland and her team identified the following themes and types of expert cognition among global leaders in the domain of global change; these cognitive demands “go beyond that required in more domestic or expatriate settings” (Osland et al., 2013).
1. Participants spoke of managing multiplicities (working with numerous internal and external entities) and doing a large amount of boundary spanning.
2. The change tasks they described were complex, larger than normal, lengthier than expected, time-pressured, intense, and often driven by crisis.
3. Their changes represented huge challenges in their eyes, often something no one had ever done before.
4. They precarious high-stakes, high-risk situations wherein failure would have had serious repercussions for a company, government or regional economy.
5. Since other stakeholders could readily pull out of collaborations, the global leaders were limited to exerting lateral influence and horizontal influence instead of direct positional authority.
6. Their changes were fraught with many forms of ambiguity. Their method for dealing with ambiguity, however, fell back upon a familiar problem solving method learned during their career: careful selection of trusted teammates.
7. The work process categories that emerged were problem solving, strategic thinking, boundary spanning with stakeholders, influencing and global skills.
8. Their methods of influencing involved persuasion, focusing the discussion, continually seeking clarity on direction or progress, using their social capital, and taking a shared leadership approach.
9. Finally, the uniquely ‘global’ aspect of their expertise included (among other factors) reading people very closely, bridging cross-cultural communication or knowledge gaps, active listening to capture meaning, perspective taking, conscious code-shifting, and coaching others to develop a global mindset.

Two Case Studies in Global Change Leadership

To further test these constructs, my research partner and I extended Osland’s work through cognitive task analysis (CTA), an interview method designed specifically to distinguish between expert and novice cognition. We interviewed two global change leaders using the CTA methodology.

The first global leader was a regulatory affairs expert charged with identifying the legal path to separating a multibillion dollar, multinational pharmaceutical company into two separate but equal entities. The second leader was a global vice president of leadership development, with responsibility for reframing her multinational health care company’s leadership development offerings into a unified and culturally-relevant program that spanned geographic boundaries and met the needs of the 150+ operating companies within the overall company.

Despite very different change projects, in both case studies the findings aligned with those of Osland et al. (2013) to reveal the level of expert cognition necessary for global leadership change processes. Both global changes were characterized by a high degree of ambiguity that would have been difficult for novices; both leaders had a problem-solving approach that allowed them to proceed despite the ambiguity; and both processes involved extensive cognitive demands in the form of tracking numerous aspects of the change process as well as monitoring both human reactions and emotions and operational progress. Finally, both change initiatives required large funds of global knowledge in addition to cultural knowledge, and the ability to use empathy in understanding the perspectives of others.

As research into global leadership and its competencies continue, these case studies point towards the importance of expert cognition as a defining factor of what it means to be a global leader. In other words, how global leaders think is what equips them for global leadership.

Participants

• Lisa Ruiz, AbbVie, Inc.

• Amber A. Johnson, Benedictine University