It's also about effectiveness. Global effectiveness requires a leadership team that thinks globally, is competent cross-culturally, and comes from a variety of national and cultural backgrounds. Elevating people with these traits to leadership is the function of succession planning. For the plan to work, people with these traits and backgrounds need to be in the pipeline. Increasingly, leadership teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds.
Global effectiveness requires a willingness and ability to share information, people, and resources.
For sharing to occur, key managers, professionals, and technicians need to maintain a buzzing network of personal relationships that is global in its reach. Short-term staff exchanges go a long way toward helping to create such relationships. An aggressively globalizing company moves people in every direction to promote global leadership competencies and operationalize global communication effectiveness. A company determined to globalize will spare no effort to learn from them and to reassign them strategically. The objective is to reduce the ethnocentrism and increase the economic global-mindedness of high potential employees.