What Do Global Leaders Actually Do? The Nature of Global Leaders’ Work

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

Short Description

In 1973, Henry Mintzberg observed five domestic leaders and explained what they do in The Nature of Managerial Work. This research team recently studied five global leaders to learn what effective global leaders actually do on a day-to day basis. The presentation will compare and differentiate findings, and suggest implications for research and practice.

Detailed Abstract

In 2016, inspired by Mintzberg’s (1973) book, The Nature of Managerial Work, which is often cited as seminal research in the fields of leadership and work studies (Tengblad, 2006), I followed five global leaders for a week each, mirroring Mintzbrg’s research processes in the global context. As a former telecommunications executive from Germany, who has lived and worked throughout Europe and North America, I was curious to understand how a global leader’s work differed from that of the subjects in Mintzberg’s study. This presentation will overview my research and compare them to Mintzberg’s conclusions.

Mintzberg observed five chief executives of large corporations each for a week. All five lived and worked in the United States and led domestic organizations. Mintzberg’s (1973) purpose was to understand (1) the job of the manager rather than the man, (2) the similarities in managers’ work rather than the differences, and (3) the essential content of managerial work rather than its peripheral characteristics” (p. 230). Over the last 40 plus years, his findings, combined with a vast body of research that built on his work, has helped to establish and develop the field of management science and connect it closely to what managers actually do.

Despite the significant influence of Mintzberg’s research, to-date no one has done a similar study in the field of global leadership. This is important to do to advance the field of global leadership. Bird and Stevens (2013) suggest that for global leadership research to proceed, more work is needed “a little closer to the ground” (p. 140). Like Mintzberg (1973), they argue that we need to know what effective global leaders actually do on a day-to day basis.

My research process included observing five global leaders each for five days, conducting informal interviews with them and their colleagues, and collecting archival data about the leaders and their companies to assess the nature of their work.

All five participants were male and had advanced degrees, compared to only one of the five participants having an advanced degree in Mintzberg’s (1973) study. Except for one entrepreneurial leader who was leading his own global company, the leaders we observed were heads of different functions in global firms.

They all were responsible for business results that crossed geographic boundaries. As such, they were not only leading global teams, but they were also closely involved in global tasks associated with their function. All of them were successful in influencing others in pursuing a common goal and thus fit Reiche, Bird, Mendenhall & Osland’s (2017) definition of a global leader as an individual who inspires and influences a range of internal and external constituents from multiple national cultures and jurisdictions to willingly pursue a common goal in a context characterized by significant levels of task and relationship complexity.

Methodology

Mintzberg (1973) used a methodology he called “structured observation.” During the observation, he kept three kind of records. The chronology record maintained data on activity patterns, the mail record maintained data on each piece of mail, and the contact record maintained data on each verbal contact. Mintzberg (1968) also recorded notes “without any particular structural framework” (p. 67). We used a similar methodology but called it “semi-structured observation” because we wanted to give equal billing to the unstructured field notes as we did to the structured observations. We kept a chronology record, mail record, and contact record, and we also took extensive field notes, conducted informal interviews with our participants and their colleagues, and gathered archival data. We then analyzed the data using the conventions of grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013; Charmaz, 2014).

Findings

We found that our global leaders worked more total hours and more hours in the evening and on weekends and holidays than did Mintzberg’s executives, and that they spent less time in both scheduled and unscheduled meetings. Our global leaders sent and received far less “snail mail” than did Mintzberg’s executives, and rely far more heavily on electronic media. This is not surprising given the developments in technology. We also found they spent more time working “alone” at their desks and less time in face-to-face interaction with colleagues than did Mintzberg’s executives, and that again, not surprisingly, they spent much more time in virtual interaction with colleagues enabled by technology.

We further focused on global activities and broke those down into tasks. The global nature of the global leaders’ work was less apparent in the type of tasks they engaged in (what they did) but in how they addressed the complexity of the work environment. We discovered that:
1. Despite the extensive use of technology to create virtual offices, global leaders still place a premium on face-to-face communication and travel extensively to support it.
2. Across the board, our global leaders embrace a life style where work and private life are intermingled.
3. They enjoy working in a global environment and have passed on the “global bug” to their children.
4. Our global leaders are leading people while being engaged in functional work.
5. They rely on local partners to work through the intricacies of local regulations and ways of doing business.
6. Our global leaders’ primary task is to solicit and provide information.
7. They constantly scan the environment for information relevant to their businesses and keep current about the news in many different countries.
8. Complexity lies in the nature of the global business activities themselves.
9. Risk and security, especially as they relate to the threat of terrorism, are impacting global leaders’ work and life.
10. Global leaders either delegate complexity to functional or regional leaders or absorb complexity by being the connectors in an intricate network of specialists.

These findings take us “closer to the ground,” for which Bird and Stevens (2013) indicate a need as we seek to understand the nature of a global leader’s work. We will explore these findings further, along with their implications for additional research, as part of this presentation.

Participants

• Tina Huesing, Wyrmwood Consulting

• Jim Ludema, Benedictine University