4 Secret Pillars Of Every Amazing Global Leader

In previous issues of The Global Leadership Pillars Newsletter, I focused on some themes pertaining to the personal leadership and people leadership pillars. But I suddenly realized that I never really shared what the 4 pillars of global leadership are. So, for the benefit of the new leaders coming into this sphere of global leadership practice, I'd like to define a little bit about the 4 pillar competencies in global leadership.

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During my years as a corporate executive, I noticed that many global executive competencies are not often accumulated purposefully. Most global leaders navigate their careers and acquire their competencies based on what they need at the moment without much planning. That is one way to go.

A less overwhelming way to make progress in our careers is to plan how to acquire global leader competencies step-by-step. Leaders who have used this approach had faster career growth compared to those who didn’t. Professionals who experienced quicker career advancements planned ahead and worked on these 4 secret pillars of success: personal leadership, people leadership, organizational leadership, and cultural leadership.

Each of these pillars contains a specific set of global leader competencies that most successful people seek in order to achieve greater results in their leadership experiences.

In this article, I will discuss each set of global leader competencies and where you can start to develop them more. But first, let’s discuss who this is for so that you can see if this post resonates with you.

Who Should Work On These Global Leader Competencies?

In my leadership blog, I talked about the 3i global leader — what they are and where to trail the blaze to become one in the corporate world. I dare say, however, that these 4 pillars are important for any leader who wants to be outstanding. Working on these 4 pillars is something you should do if…

• If you are an executive that works for corporations that have a regional or global reach
• If you are a diplomat that has international connections
• If you are an entrepreneur that works with international providers and clients and/or has a multi-cultural team
• If you are a coach who works with multi-cultural clients and countries
• If you are a governmental leader who has international relations
• If you are a PR (public relations) who helps entrepreneurs and corporations in their communication in different cultures
• If you are an artist or performer who performs globally
• If you are a doctor or healthcare provider who works with international health access or research
• If you are an edupreneur or teacher who educates students in different parts of the world
• If you are a parent who wants to raise their children with a global mindset

So let’s talk about each of the 4 pillars of global leader competencies:

Secret # 1: Global Leader Competencies In Personal Leadership

Personal leadership is, in my opinion, more of a foundation than a pillar, so important it is. As a global leader, it took me a while to truly see how important having personal leadership is and what is it about.

So what is personal leadership?

Personal leadership is the ability to take care of your wellbeing, have an assertive and positive mental game, manage your willpower, control your stress, and lead a balanced life to exert your full personal power.

In other words, if you don’t have personal leadership, even when you are doing your best, your results won’t be the best that YOU can really deliver, simply because you won’t be using all of your personal power.

And that’s why I think it is the foundation. If you are not using all your personal power, it means that no matter how much you know, how much effort you put into whatever you do, and how effective you are, it will never become the best output you can produce.

I hope I convinced you that personal power is essential because otherwise, as you grow in your career, you’ll go through shit (as I did) if you ignore it. Trust me. Your life will be much easier once you understand that this is the foundation, and you have to master this first.

What are the global leader competencies in the personal leadership arena?

• Self-discipline & self-care: the ability to take care of ourselves is usually very overlooked, especially in Western cultures. We rarely understand that taking good care of ourselves is part of our jobs in any profession. If we are unwell or sick, we won’t perform any job well. So yes, it is a crucial aspect of our jobs. It actually should be in our job descriptions! And that is where self-discipline is important. Self-discipline is the ability to control one’s feelings and overcome one’s weaknesses, the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it. Without self-discipline, self-care becomes almost impossible. These 2 go hand in hand.
• Healthy Mental Game: the ability to be psychologically strong, with a resilient mind, continue to perform at a high level, and use your willpower properly despite dealing with adversity and stress. Those who compete in arts, sports, and strategy games know how important this is. If you ask them, they will tell you that the winner will always be those who have the strongest mental game given similar skill levels. Learning how to keep your mental game assertive and positive is crucial for success in ANY area of life.
• Productivity Strategies: the ability to create strategies for producing more priority work in less time, with less effort, and (hopefully) with greater fun. When people think about productivity, they usually think about tools. Although tools are important, the strategy you will use to tackle all your tasks, prioritize them, and work on them is more important than the tool. I have a free Time Management and Prioritization Masterclass that teaches that to those interested.
• Stress Management: the ability to reduce, mitigate, or completely eliminate stress in one’s life to function optimally. Although many would argue that this should be within the self-care department, I like to put this specific topic as a separate bullet because oftentimes, we let stress amount to greater levels before we do anything about it. And it can be too late. Therefore, stress management must be a top-of-mind skill within the global leader competencies.
• Values and vision: the ability to define your core values and success vision, and create strategies to lead you step-by-step all of the way to success. Thinking about values and vision is more than just pulling some nice words that you regard as important. This is an entire strategy cycle, from definition to planning to execution and tracking. When you have a well-defined set of values and a vision of what you want to achieve, it is easier to create solid, achievable strategies. And when you have good strategies, execution becomes much more effortless (and you can inject some fun into it, too). Younger professionals usually think creating value and vision is fluff. Still, I’d dare say that without this, you can have the greatest mental game in the world, the best productivity strategies, and the finest self-care, and still, you’ll achieve infinitely less than your full potential —clarity of values and vision matters.

Secret # 2: Global Leader Competencies In People Leadership

How to master work relationships in different cultures and create high-performing and collaborative teams is what people leadership is all about.

Most people leave their workplaces not because of the work, but because of the people at work. Most notably, their bosses. And when they leave, there can be many reasons, some of them being: because they don’t feel heard, don’t feel valued, don’t feel well compensated. Or they can feel harassed, burdened, bullied. Maybe they leave because they think their managers cannot properly manage their workload.

In more than 2 decades, I think I heard only once the answer “Because work was boring” to the question “why did you leave.?” Even if work was tedious, I bet if people at the workplace were fun, they would not have left.

It all boils down to people. People leadership is crucial for having high-performing teams and an engaging workplace.

What are the global leader competencies in the people leadership arena?

• Global Leadership Styles: leaders have to learn how to identify and “read” styles quickly. This can help address and cater to specific needs and interests, building trust and bonds faster. Different types of people value different things; therefore, they behave and give attention differently. When you identify what these general values are, you can lead a more robust conversation. Driving actions and leading initiatives becomes easier. It’s not about boxing or labeling people. It’s about zoning into what they value, as closely as possible. Each individual is unique. There are no 2 people that are alike, even within homozygote twins. But each individual on this planet leans towards certain styles more than others. And if you understand this, you can quickly create rapport, build trust, and share the same goal.
• Communication & Trust: we think we know the basics of communication , but we don’t. Communication has a lot more nuances than one thinks. For one, non-verbal aspects of communication have more impact on a conversation than anything else. You can plan arguments, and you can plan Copywrite and devise a bunch of things to say. In the end, that counts less than the subtle messages that you are (literally) communicating. Learning deep communication and the non-verbal aspects of communication and its cultural elements are critical in our globalized world.
• Influencing Skills: is the capacity individuals have to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others. In other words, it is the ability to guide people to come to certain conclusions without coercing them. Influence is not manipulation (although both use the same set of skills) because manipulation is for your own personal gain. Influencing skills is not good or bad. It can be used for good or bad. All leaders must learn to be influential if they want to create a real impact in the world.
• Impressions Management: you know the saying, “There is not a second chance to make a first good impression.” Impressions management is about you learning how to make sure people have (and perceive) the right impression about you. Again, it’s not about manipulating. One thing I learned in my career is that the best thing we can do is be authentic . Sometimes, even when we are 100% authentic, people get us wrong. I talked about the science of perception in my 2-episode special on The Leadership Nest podcast. So, impressions management is about helping people get us right. Leaders who learn impression management have been shown to make quicker progress in their careers than those who don’t.
• Managing Expectations: is your ability to communicate what you are expecting to happen while you learn from others what they are expecting in return. It sounds simple enough, and it is. But very often, people don’t care to learn this skill (because it’s too simple in their minds) and end up never exercising its use. Sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult ones. Like saying “I love you” or “I am angry.” So simple, but sometimes so difficult. There are fears involved, walking in shells, and so on. What leaders need is a straightforward methodology to help them manage expectations step-by-step. They’ll get it in no time, and this will skyrocket how much they can accomplish along with their teams.
• Manager Coaching Skills: is the ability to guide and coach your team on things that make them feel stuck or frustrated. Like influencing skills, it’s not about manipulation. It’s about helping individuals to set their mindsets correctly for what they want to accomplish. I’d dare say that manager coaching skills should be taught to every single leader who has any leadership role in an organization, regardless of title and power. When I started coaching my team members instead of mentoring them, I saw a HUGE increase in performance. But what surprised me most at the time was that I saw an incredible bond of trust form between us. When done right, manager coaching skills create a bond that goes beyond work relations because when employees feel guided and cared for, it becomes personal at an unconscious level.
• Collaboration & Motivation: people collaborate for different purposes. And people are motivated by different things. And these go hand in hand. We have to learn how to form collaborative teams as leaders to get optimal performance from our talents. Each individual talent, when summed, will never be as good enough as when all talents come together. I call this the power of collective brainpower. Focusing on collaborative teams is part of wanting to create a more inclusive workplace. People want to belong. So, leaders must do this the right way. They need to learn what drives people to collaborate and what are the motivational drivers, while defusing any miscommunication along the way.

Secret # 3: Global Leader Competencies In Organizational Leadership

Data matters. Organizational leadership is a leader’s ability to leverage data and help organizations set strategic goals while motivating individuals to execute their assignments to achieve those goals successfully. How to leverage information and data to produce problem-solving strategies is what organizational leadership is all about.

We can see very clearly when companies have organizational leadership. They seem smarter and faster than their competitors.

This type of leadership, however, is often overlooked. Most people and corporations think that a good strategy is good enough, especially when they have a talented team. The thing is: shit happens. Things are ever-changing, not always to the best. If an organization does not have the leadership that knows how to track, collect, and gather the correct data and leverage it the right way, they will slip with the first signs of stress.

They say that knowledge is power because it is. You can extract a lot of knowledge from data, so data is power as well. Organizational leadership is, basically, transforming data into power.

What are the global leader competencies in the organizational leadership arena?

• Finance Essentials: every leader must understand what each of their actions and decisions will create in terms of value to shareholders. We think “finance thinking” is reserved for those only in the finance department. But the truth is that companies who don’t help all their leaders learn the finance language , regardless of department, don’t thrive as much as those who do. Learning the essentials about finance will help leaders make smarter and faster decisions because they will know how their decisions will impact the shareholder’s value.
• Strategy & Decision-Making: every leader must know how to create a robust strategy cycle in their businesses and endeavors. If there is one in place, they must know the basics to ensure it is adequately maintained, and therefore learning strategy process is key. What comes next is decision-making. We make decisions every day. Small and big. And we make better decisions if we know the best process and approach to make them. There are a few elements in a good decision-making process , such as clarity of vision-values-strategy, clarity of processes, decision impact awareness, decision fatigue, and decision fears. When a leader’s decision-making process is unaware of these elements and how they work for them, the company can have the best PoA (power of attorney table) in the world. Still, leaders will make crappy decisions. So leaders must learn to create a decision-making process for themselves and their teams.
• Budgeting: although this is part of the finance essentials suite , I decided to put it separately because it is critically important, and most leaders overlook this, especially if they don’t hold power over their budgets (i.e., someone else makes the final decisions). Learning how to budget a department, an organization, a project, or whatever endeavor you want differentiates the leader who does not yet have budgeting ownership. And it catapults those who do. Leaders are shareholder’s housekeepers. Would you want a housekeeper who wastes things and can’t run a house smoothly or one who can make the most of what they have? Learning how to budget is equivalent to learning how to make the most of what you have. Regardless of your seniority, title, or authority level, this is a skill you must have as a global leader.
• Business Acumen: is your ability to understand the business that you are working for inside out. What are the products, what do they do, who is the audience that buys your products and services, how is your company positioned in the market, what is your company’s strategy, who decides on what, what are the main company policies, main values, original purpose, and so on. If you are in your silo and only know about your department, you will not be a good leader. But you saw how many aspects business acumen has, and I didn’t even get started. So leaders need to learn a process that they can use to gain that business acumen once they get into a new company.
• Business /Executive Presence: is the ability to project confidence, professionalism, trustworthiness, reliability, and inclusiveness through specific skills. People think of executive presence as a have or not have kind of talent. But that’s wrong. Executive presence is completely “learnable.” Business presence is a conjunction of etiquette skills, communication skills, impression management, posture and demeanor, adequate attire, planning & preparation, influencing skills, intuitive listening skills, and confidence projection. Right out of the bat, you can see why it is such a hard skill to master: because you have to master FIRST a bunch of other skills and only then learn the skill to glue them all together. However, it has been shown that leaders with perceived higher executive presence get higher pay than those who are not perceived in the same way. They are usually promoted faster too.
• STARS Model: this is a business evolution model developed by Michael Watkins, which I recently discussed in a previous article in my Leadership Blog. Like leadership styles are not to box people, the purpose of the model is also not to box a business. Understanding this model helps you quickly identify what actions to take based on what you know about a company’s stage. Models like this help us make sense out of situations faster and devise the proper set of actions to achieve what we want. That is why I recommend working on the STARS model to every single leader, in their first 90 days. By the way, if you want our guide to crash it on your first 90 days as a global leader , make sure to get it because it’s really a gem. As a leader, the set of actions you work on in a start-up is entirely different from one in a turn-around stage. Learning this model and what to do with it is critical for every leader who wants to impact businesses positively.

Secret # 4: Global Leader Competencies In Cultural Leadership

How can we drive culture and values in an organization so that it becomes resonant with its vision?

When I was starting out as a global leader, I came across a start-up that only hired students for their client’s short-term international assignments. Their vision was to form global leaders for the future. They started to make plenty of money, and soon they realized they could make more money if they hired professional global leaders instead of students who wanted to become one. They soon became a headhunting company, like all others, with no extra flair. They ended up not surviving the big players in the market.

The culture and the values of a company must be the driving force for its success. If you disconnect these with its vision, there is doom ahead, no doubt about it. You may get some success short-term, but it will also be short-lived. Culture and values MUST be aligned with vision.

If you ever reached the top of an organization, you probably know how difficult it is to maintain the culture and the values aligned with its vision. It’s easy to explain why: a company’s culture and value are a sum of many “entities.” Each individual in an organization brings their own set of values and their own culture. If you don’t have the right leadership to stir and bond everything, they will not hold together.

Cultural leadership is about driving culture & values and influencing stakeholders so that the company’s vision can create an impact in the world. This goes beyond people leadership because it is as if the organization is a living being. In a sense, it is.

What are the global leader competencies in the cultural leadership arena?

• Unconscious Bias: is a bias that you might have towards something or someone, without being aware of it. You might have a bias toward black people. Toward white people. Asian. Immigrants. Tall people. Little people. But you might not know it consciously. Your body knows it, however, and you will send signals showing this. And people will catch it. And they will feel hurt. Unconscious Bias is not only race-related. It can be a bias towards anything. It could be a bias where you FAVOR people instead of discriminating against them. In my humble opinion, knowing your personal Unconscious Biases and working on biases will become the single most important differentiator for new global leaders going forward. In order to create an inclusive environment, leaders cannot simply be politically correct. They have to BE inclusive. And you cannot be inclusive if you have biases holding you back. Learning what they are and working on them is crucial.
• Understanding Different Cultures & Drivers: every part of the world has cultural aspects that influence the way people behave and what values individuals attribute to things and people. There are 195 sovereign countries in the world, according to the U.N., and a number of other sub-regions that have their own cultures and governing systems. No leader can know all nuances from all places. But they have to learn how to best work with those within their work environment if they want long-lasting business relationships.
• Building Inclusive Culture: an inclusive work culture is a place where everyone feels comfortable being themselves. The reason leaders should care is that an inclusive workplace has been shown to produce better performance measures with average talents than top talents in a non-inclusive workplace. People who feel good perform better. Simple. If you make me feel like crap, how can I perform at my highest level? That is not possible because when stress levels are higher, I will not function optimally. Think about this: If you had a thorn in your side, would you go about your day as if nothing is happening? I advocate in favor of an inclusive workplace because I like to see people happy, but if that is not a strong argument for you as a leader, just focus on the fact that an inclusive workplace helps talents perform at their best levels. It also creates greater affluence (for themselves and their businesses). So, learn how to create inclusive work cultures and workplaces.
• Managing Uncertainty: managing uncertainty has been a top key skill for global leaders for many years. More so nowadays. Besides strong market competition that drives uncertainty, we have a more globalized environment that naturally creates ambiguity. Learning how to manage people, processes, and decision-making rules in an uncertain and ambiguous environment is essential in any globalized business.
• Becoming Inclusive: it is not only about creating an inclusive culture and environment. It all starts with each leader becoming inclusive themselves. There are many elements of an inclusive leader, some of them being how empathetical you are, how open-minded you are, how much exposure and experience you have culturally speaking, how aware you are about your unconscious bias, how approachable you are, how much appreciation you demonstrate, how much respect you demonstrate, how well you make people feel, and so on. And… there is the intention—the intention of being inclusive. Your intention must be to make everyone feel included and valued. Becoming inclusive is a process of becoming. And for you to become, you have first to learn what traits you don’t have or display, and then start working on that—becoming inclusive starts with becoming self-aware.

Final Remarks: The Orchestra Of Global Leader Competencies

If we were to compare global leader competencies with an orchestra, this is what I would come up with:

Personal leadership is how all musicians prepare themselves to play their parts well. They rehearse their roles, they take care of their instruments, musicians train every day, each player makes sure they are hydrated before every performance, and so on.

People leadership is how the music composer decides to pair instruments and sounds to perform the music they envisioned, which instruments should be used, which accords should be played by whom, etc. It’s the act of coordinating people, instruments, and sounds.

Organizational leadership is how show masters leverage the data they have about that composition to best allocate musician’s chairs, instruments, sound enhancers, and viewers to hear an optimal performance. They know how fast a sound travels the room, and which are the positions they should place chairs and viewers.

Cultural leadership is how the maestro (or conductor) leads the entire orchestra to produce the music as per the music composer’s vision. The maestro knows what each player brings to the table, or the orchestra, and how to engage their uniqueness to make the whole sound better.

We think highly of the maestro but think about this: if all the players didn’t rehearse well (personal leadership), the performance could go terribly. If the composer made crappy music (people leadership), no maestro could save it. If the show masters didn’t do their parts well (organizational leadership), Mozart would sound like a 3-year-old due to reverberation and distortion in the hall. And, of course, if the maestro just waves the baton like a magic wand (cultural leadership), the orchestra is doomed.

Although it’s not the perfect analogy, if you like music like I do, hopefully you appreciate the analogy as well.

All parts are important for the whole to be successful. No one part is more important than the other, and THAT is what I wanted to highlight about the 4 secret pillars. No pillar is more important. You have to master all four of them. The orchestra must come together with all its elements to make that perfect music.

If you are looking for a leadership development partner and consultant to help you develop these competencies, you can hire me as your executive and development coach or consultant. Have a Free Strategy Call with me. We will review your situation and devise a methodical but fun way to achieve your goals.

If you are interested in developing specific global leadership skills, personally or team-wise, check out our online Global Executive Leadership program . We go over all The Global Leadership Pillars? during 9 online modules, specially meant for global leadership development. It’s a unique leadership training methodology that will change the way you think, relate, and strategize as a global leader. You can also subscribe for free to our global leadership podcast, The Leadership Nest ., where we share global leadership lessons and concepts in a variety of ways.

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This article was first published in the Coaching Expatriates blog. Read the original article at https://www.coachingexpatriates.com/4-secret-pillars-of-every-global-leader/