SO WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?
,When I reflect on my thirty years of business experience at Baxter, Madison Dearborn, and numerous boards, I realize the significant commonalities among the people who are valued in these organizations. The first is that these individuals are grounded in the four principles of values-based leadership. Second, they have a global perspective on the entire organization, which gives them breadth. Although they have depth in a particular expertise—whether a business unit, geography, or function—they are not limited to that. These are the well-rounded individuals with both breadth and depth who are valued on any team and who can contribute significantly to the overall organization.
To explain further what I mean by breadth and depth, let's say that the company has five different businesses and that it operates in forty countries. This leads to two interrelated questions. Is the company participating in five businesses that operate globally, with each of those businesses active in as many as forty different countries? Or does the company operate in forty countries, with each country business unit participating in as many as five businesses? The answer is both. To be successful, therefore, the company needs people who understand each global business as well as how products are sold in highly diverse markets. They need to have depth in their areas of expertise, whether sales, marketing, finance, or product development. They also need to see clearly how each function is part of the whole.
Having a global perspective is essential in any organization, large or small, public or private. Rather than staying within their silos, people must operate across multiple businesses, departments, geographies, and functions. They need to have the intellectual curiosity to commit to understanding how their particular unit fits into the whole; and the broader the perspective, the better.
Helping your team develop the necessary depth and breadth requires a purposeful approach. It is critical to gain expertise broadly instead of only pursuing opportunities narrowly. Let's take a look at how this dynamic plays out in a typical organization that has multiple divisions and functions spread over several geographies. Think of a company's operations as a series of parallel lines, as illustrated on page 102. As I've mentioned, there are people whose only concern is advancing in the unit, reaching a higher point on one of those lines, in the shortest time possible. They look at another person who graduated from business school a year after they did and calculate where on the hierarchy they should be relative to that person. Their ambition puts blinders on them: all they can see is the next rung on a vertical ladder.
In your role as that person's manager, your challenge is to introduce broader thinking, showing him that pursuing a vertical trajectory is only one way to move, and often not the optimal way. There is an alternative, which is to develop a global perspective. That means looking beyond a specific line to the greater whole, which is the circle, gaining a holistic global perspective of the entire organization.
As a leader who owns the talent management and leadership development of your team, you coach others to look at how they can broaden their horizons by applying their knowledge and experience in ways they had not previously considered. When a team member first hears of an opportunity in an area about which he knows very little, his first concern is that the new job could be construed as a downward move, or as a lateral move at best. What he fails to fully appreciate is how this opportunity could enable him to gain a global perspective early on in his career.
Focusing only on a vertical trajectory for their careers in one business unit or function (the parallel lines), people often fail to see the whole of the organization (the circle).
Frankly, I always find it surprising how few people in an organization decide early in their career to gain a broader view. Perhaps they are so fixated on moving up that they don't see the value of getting their arms around the entire organization. In their hunger to advance, however, they end up shortchanging themselves.
If a team member is self-reflective and balanced, however, he usually becomes more open to the possibility that the move to another department, division, or geography could be good for his career. He begins to see how he could learn and contribute in this new position. Further, he recognizes that the people who most often become senior leaders are those who understand the entire organization, not the specialists who know only one or two areas of the business. The bottom line is that gaining a global perspective is key for career development. With that understanding of the opportunity, a team member usually commits to developing a holistic view of the company as soon as possible by taking the new position.
In my career, whenever I was asked to take on a role in another division or to participate in a project in another region, I always said, “Sign me up!” because I knew I would gain a broader perspective of the entire organization. I understood that in order to become a senior leader, I had to have a comprehensive view. If I limited all my experience to one function or business unit, it would be very difficult to distinguish myself as someone who had a true understanding of the total organization. Maybe I wouldn't be the hotshot who went from point A to point B in record time, but I would have the broad perspective that was necessary to prioritize and allocate resources across the entire company.
Admittedly, not everyone on your team is going to want to pursue a global perspective. You will probably find highly capable individuals who want to specialize in one area and go really deep into it. That's great, because a team should be balanced by a variety of expertise and perspectives that are complementary and helpful to you as the leader. Thank goodness there are people who want to specialize in such things as optimizing the global corporate tax rate across multiple countries. As a leader, however, you also want to look for individuals who can cut across numerous areas and see how things really fit together.
There will be times when finding the right people who have the broad view takes an unconventional turn. On one occasion when I was vice president of Baxter's international group, we needed to put someone in charge of the IT department. Our main criterion was not deep technical knowledge, because we already had specialists in that department who could handle the IT issues. Rather, we needed someone who could translate IT to the broader mission of the company; a person who could look beyond the technical components to the overall needs of the company, particularly to bring multiple groups together. Our decision was to choose someone who understood the needs of all the business units and divisions that utilized IT, even though he was not an IT expert himself. Combining his breadth with the depth of expertise in the IT department was a successful solution.
As a leader, you can help your team members develop a global perspective even while they are still assigned to your division or unit. One way is to encourage them to participate in as many projects involving other departments as possible. For example, when I was working in finance, I made a point to have lunch in the company cafeteria with people who worked in other areas, such as marketing or engineering, in order to learn more about what they did. One day at lunch, I sat with a couple of engineers who had blueprints spread across the table. When I asked them what the plans were for, they told me about an intravenous fluid plant the company was considering building in China. As a finance guy who did capital expenditure analysis and built economic models, I eagerly joined the conversation. Before I knew it, with my boss's blessing, I was in China helping with this project. I didn't have to move to engineering; all it took was a genuine interest in broadening my horizons and the willingness to lend my expertise in finance to a global project.