Building and Leading a Global Sales Team
The Highest Art of Leadership
“Through the exchange experience, … students gain intercultural understanding, learn mutual respect, and develop a sense of social responsibility. Their experience abroad gives them leadership competencies necessary to meet the challenges and benefit from the opportunities of a fast-changing global community.”
from yfuusa.org
The setting was Shanghai, China, a Sunday circa 2005. I had filed the paperwork for a new legal entity, rented space at a serviced office, hired a staff of two to start Monday, took a taxi and purchased two desktop computers, and now was trying to set them up … in Chinese … without having any Chinese language skills; Driven by the pride to have a fully functional work environment by Monday morning; And … finally admitting to myself that I had reached the limits of my cross-cultural skillset.
I guess I am not alone in understanding my limits. Numbers from the Global Leadership Forecast indicate that 74% of leaders consider themselves highly effective in communicating and interacting with others. However, when it comes to doing business internationally, those numbers drop dramatically:
Integrating oneself into foreign environments – 45%
Intercultural communication – 39%
Leading across countries and cultures – 34%
Understanding the limits is a good start. In a world where every start-up business wants to quickly expand and leave a mark on the world, the obvious question is how to do this successfully. For most businesses, it does start with building out a global sales team; Taking the service or product developed in one part of the world, and selling it in another.
Language, travel cost, and responsiveness are just some of the factors that point towards hiring local salespeople (as opposed to flying them in from overseas). And with it comes the leadership challenge for a global head of sales.
Deborah Rowland suggests that flexibility and curiosity are the two critical skills required by the sales leader in this situation. She adds that “being able to tune into a culture without pre-conceived biases or judgment is a skill all leaders need in complex, global organizations.”
Culture, of course, has more to it than language: one’s curiosity has to extend to the non-verbal communication, the forms of government, the economic system, social organizations, religion, arts and literature, as well as customs, norms, values, beliefs, and traditions.
Tsedal Neeley writes about a five-year study of the global workforce at Rakuten, an e-commerce company based in Japan. She identifies key actions that create a global work orientation. Two are particularly crucial for cross-cultural sales leadership:
Identifying with the global organization rather than your local office. This is a leadership challenge. If you feel a sense of belonging with the larger organization, you’re more likely to share its values and goals. Organizational identification, the term for when an individual feels at one with the organization, is crucial for fostering job satisfaction, commitment, and performance. A genuinely global sales leader needs to create reasons for an individual salesperson to have this global organizational identification; i.e., as the result of the leader’s particular vision, positivity, or trust.
Seeking interactions with other, geographically distant subsidiaries. This behavior is important to global work orientation because when interactions are high, there is a greater ability to develop trust and shared vision among international coworkers. Interactions are also vital for sharing knowledge and learning from one another’s common experiences can accelerate the spread of business efficiencies across the global organization. As a sales leader, encourage those interactions and emphasize the examples when sharing of knowledge led to improved results.
Companies looking to expand internationally for the first time often lack in-house expertise. Hiring an interim or fractional sales leader with the right skill set to successfully take a business overseas can quickly fill the void.
Talk to us how we can help building and leading your global sales team
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DDI – Global Leadership Forecast 2014/2015
Deborah Rowland – Leading Across Cultures Requires Flexibility and Curiosity
Tsedal Neeley – How to Successfully Work Across Countries, Languages, and Cultures