Excelling at Global Leadership: Lessons Learned

The phrase “global leadership” may sound like a cliche, but as someone who has practiced it for the past several decades, I can assure you it’s essential for launching and growing a business.

I’m a global person: I was born and raised in the Middle East and have since resided in the United States and Canada. Over the past 35 years, my work has taken me to 120 countries. Global leadership is about respecting other cultures, of course, but also your competition and employees—no matter where they are. 

The first time I worked as a manager at Cisco in San Jose, California, I enjoyed managing people, budgets, and products. I give a lot of credit to David Jones (now the vice president of analytics and IoT solutions at Gemalto), who was my director at Cisco and an excellent coach and mentor. I learned to be myself and manage with balance, caution, wisdom, and respect.

As I grew from smaller management roles to the C-suite, I directly managed teams across the globe.  When I traveled to a new country for business, I maintained respect for their culture, language, religion, and laws. I tried not to engage in discussions about religion or politics, although I’m widely read and keenly aware of geopolitical issues in many of the countries where I managed teams or traveled on business.  

When I was at Motorola, I managed R&D centers in several countries, including the U.S., Canada, Poland, Israel, India, and Malaysia. We faced many cultural, language, and legal differences. Even though each R&D center had a manager, with over 1,200 employees in these centers, there were many miscommunications and misunderstandings between these teams. In one situation, I had to mediate between HR and all parties concerned following leadership challenges at a center in Poland. Communism had just come to an end in Poland, and it was well on its way toward becoming a Western capitalist country and joining the EU. I was very respectful of Polish culture, language, and religion as I explained to the local leadership that we must balance our needs as a company with Polish and U.S. labor laws. I worked to understand the myriad challenges and how they operated and then coached them to be more open-minded and transparent in their decisions, and encouraged them to openly communicate with their teams and staff. 

We started training programs for various managers, established an HR hotline, and held weekly calls with the leadership team. We also established “skip levels,” where different leaders (including myself) talked to employees several levels below in an open, respectful, and transparent way. This process took several months, but we started seeing amazing results in staff performance and communications among the U.S., Polish, and global teams. This success helped us retain talent in Poland and made the Krakow R&D team one of the most productive centers in Motorola, releasing software products on time and with high quality. 

Respecting other cultures isn’t enough: It’s also important to maintain respect for global competition. After reading the “Art of War” by legendary Chinese military leader Sun Tzu, the theme of “respect your enemy” resonated with me. In business settings, of course, your competition is your “enemy.”  However, it’s essential to be mature and professional; do not stoop to petty attacks. It is possible to show who is better with products, prices, services, attitudes, and relationships. 

Maintaining respect for the competition is something that I also learned in my travels and responsibilities. I came across many situations in the U.S. and in many countries where the competition was operating. My approach was not to put them down or speak badly about them; my strategy was to do the best I can with my team, and the customers will decide who is the best in pricing, quality, design, support, etc.

Global leadership is, ultimately, respectful leadership, and it’s crucial to show that respect whether you’re dealing with clients in a country you’ve never visited before, shaking the hand of the CEO of a competing company, or conducting an annual review with an employee who’s been with your company for just a few years.