Lifting Leaders Of Global Expansion With Elevators
With more than 25 years in the area and arena of international content management, global product leadership and local customer experience, we have learned that people come first in all instances in order to perform and outperform both internally and externally.
Therefore, we make a point of positioning and developing people to ensure success remains a collective story. And a human story as well. It is crucial to ensure leaders of global expansion – aka globalizers in some cases – share an interest, a stake or an objective in terms of global reach, local resonance and personal satisfaction when it comes to delighting customers. In other words, all the people with a continued mission to leverage global leadership to craft local experiences.
We can think of content engineers, experience designers, linguists, copywriters, localization strategists, AI deployment managers and business analysts to name but a few. It is also essential to engage local marketing, product, operations or commercial leaders who are business generators and growth facilitators within their market(s). While they all deal with different facets of global content and product strategies, they must all have international customers in mind.
Although leaders of global expansion play a critical role in the AI age, some of them may feel tolerated rather celebrated or even sometimes invisible in some parts of global organizations. Elevating global content operations and product management from being challenged as a cost driver to being recognized as a profit driver is neither easy nor quick. Here are a few elevators and actions that can get these leaders out of the dark, a comfort zone or a low-level positioning. Team leaders and members should address this together, especially when they operate in siloed frameworks. Such actions should be translated in team charters and individual objectives as well.
Embrace the big picture
Leaders of global expansion must widen their world and move away from what they consider as their area of expertise to embrace different aspects of global content and product leadership. On the one hand it helps them grasp the big picture which their role and responsibilities fit in and they create value in. Engineers or linguists who clearly see how their contribution plays out in product lifecycles and customer journeys can not only enhance your current practices if needed but also enrich their knowledge, competencies and skills. This may be very useful when they have to negotiate trade-offs, do more work with less bandwidth or do less work with more value.
On the other hand it creates connections or strengthens relationships with other other roles and functions in their organization, including those who might not know who they are and what they actually do. This implies engaging to increase visibility. For example, user experience researchers and architects might not see the added value of collaborating closely with marketing directors or product managers, most of all if they sit in organizationally or geographically dispersed teams. Fostering mutual support and increasing complementary strengths create more efficient synergies aiming at delighting customers linguistically, culturally and functionally. Delivering on global business is like making a puzzle that requires that a number of people have and use the right piece(s) at the right time. Leaders interacting with stakeholders beyond their team is paramount to collaborate at scale and with agility.
Connect first, engage next
They must evangelize their organization about standards, best practices and imperatives in global business to fertilize the understanding of their activities with frequent communications, presentations and invitations. In addition to scheduled project meetings and business reviews they should plan training sessions to explain what they do in plain language and highlight their contribution to global and local growth. One of the best ways to demonstrate this is to share operational metrics and link these metrics to financial and experiential metrics that reflect the real impression, impact and imprint on the customer side. Combining several categories of data in a dashboard is best to visualize value quickly and tangibly.
Co-workers and business partners are also likely to appreciate informal meetings where they can discuss, learn and take away information at their pace. Such get-togethers usually help bring up comments, questions and requests that may remain unspoken or overlooked otherwise. Discussions can even be gamified via lunch-and-learn events or company breakfasts so that people can feel more involved. Why not highlight what would happen if content operations were not managed time and cost effectively? Why not organize a “Stump The Expert” quiz where people would have to ask and answer questions about fun facts and factors driving customer experience around the world?
Develop the know-how including the know-how-to-be
Leaders of global expansion should develop personal competencies that support their know-how and demonstrate their know-how-to-be. This goes through networking internally and externally to discover or dive into why others say what they say and do what they do, no matter if they share some common ground or not. Soft skills are as important as other skills when it comes to collaborating, communicating and executing for the sake of international audiences.
Their knowledge and their impact are most valuable when they are explained, understood and potentially transferred with a great deal of emotional intelligence. And it often happens by talking to human beings who feel what you do as much as they see it. A global designer who can describe his thinking and point out how it relates to values such as empathy or trust can amplify the power of his words and visuals. And he or she can also translate complex concepts into simple ideas.
At International Achievers Group, we help businesses scale better, faster, and smarter. With and without AI. With people who perform today and tomorrow. Whether you’re at the start of your global journey or refining your international strategy, we’re here to help you hire the right talent and build the operational backbone you need to succeed.
Get in touch today and let’s explore what AI-powered expansion could look like for your business.
