meet
Cross-cultural thinking Peter Wilson investigates new notions of leadership in a diverse world with Fons Trompenaars.
Peter Wilson: ‘Command and control’ leadership was taught in the MBA schools in the late 1980s and 1990s. Those graduates are now CEOs and chairs and they’re holding on to a lot of these traditional notions, but is this changing? Are we seeing a different kind of leadership emerge? Fons Trompenaars: I truly believe certain leadership can be defined, first of all, as enabling other people to perform better. These new leaders are finding ways to reconcile dilemmas. What great leaders, especially servant leaders, understand is the connection between viewpoints and across cultures. The beauty of this is that the old paradigm is included in it. Servant leaders still sometimes give commands. And they are still in control. But the command is done after listening to your people. Control happens when you empower people, because if you don’t empower them, there’s nothing to control. PW: We have an outburst of diversity activity going on at the moment. HR divisions are doing a lot of work on the different diversity streams – on gender, ethnicity, ageing, disability and so on, rather than viewing
diversity as an issue or a solution to challenges. What better way forward could they be taking? FT: Thomas and Ely wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review where they looked at stages of diversity management. If you don’t go through them, you’re in trouble. The first stage is compliance. You need to have
“what great leaders, especially servant leaders, understand is the connection between viewpoints and across cultures.”
some numbers because otherwise nothing will change, but if you stop at compliance, you’re in trouble. Take the gender quotas for boards in Norway for example. After five years of this quota system being in place, company and board performance was measured. There was a correlation with gender but it was a negative one. And it shows that if you hire women because they’re female and not because they’re good – and if you force the board gender mix from 10 per cent to 50 per cent in five years – you don’t have enough time to educate this new influx of board members in order to get them up and running in that environment. But, if you don’t do anything, nothing will happen either, so you’re in a double bind. Once you have numbers, you have to really look at ways of making these people more successful. They are not just numbers. Companies that are successful in the diversity space take an issue as a point of departure. For example, if their company needs more innovation, they conclude that they need more diverse people, and go from that point. This is the third stage of diversity. PW: Which companies have practised crosscultural diversity successfully?
october 2013– H R monthly – 24