Question

For the past year, Anshuman had been working as the head of organizational development and learning for the high-growth regions of Honeywell. This assignment required Anshuman to leave his home country of India to live and work in Shanghai, China. Anshuman couldn’t help but reflect on his boss’s final comment before going home from work the night before: “We can’t afford to give profit and loss responsibility to our strategic business group leaders in these high-growth countries. We have too much riding on the future performance of these markets and can’t risk someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing messing it up.”

Anshuman thought they needed to give the business unit managers the autonomy necessary to make their own strategic decisions. The problem was, in order to make effective decisions, the business unit managers would need to know how to navigate the local market as well as the Honeywell bureaucracy. It was easy finding one or the other, but finding both seemed a bit daunting. Anshuman and his team began exploring the attributes and competencies needed from future leaders.

Honeywell’s HR department has one of the most extensive and thorough archives of data on managers and leaders all over the world. Anshuman and his team started by examining the company’s list of twelve behaviors of and six criteria for successful general managers. These factors consisted of things like “makes people better”, “takes intelligent risk,” and “gets results.” After some exploratory analysis to determine which behaviors were most highly correlated with a person being promoted, the team turned to a more predictive model and examined what managers were saying about employees when they promoted them.

What they found was somewhat surprising. The most successful managers were those who spoke up and communicated with the leadership team in New Jersey, the company’s headquarters. The most important type of communication revolved around understanding the company’s strategy and being able to tie that strategy back to the local environment. This required managers to fly to headquarters and also to invite members from the corporate team to fly to the local subsidiary location.

But communicating with corporate was not enough. Managers needed to have a strong understanding of the movements and shifts in the local environment. For example, if they couldn’t negotiate with local suppliers to get the deals the local buyers were getting, then these managers weren’t able to succeed in their role. They also needed to be willing to take risks by looking for gaps in the market where customers could be using the product for something different than its original intention.

Anshuman had just presented his findings to the head of HR for Honeywell and was given the green light to develop a specific leadership program for managers in high-growth countries, starting with China as the pilot location. He had designed many leadership programs before, but this time much more was at stake.

Case Discussion Questions

1. What specific leadership traits are most important for Honeywell managers in high-growth regions?
2. How do these global leadership traits differ from domestic leadership traits?
3. How would you create a leadership development program for high-growth region managers using the RAP framework?

Answer 1

1. The specific leadership traits which are most important for Honeywell managers to perform in high-growth regions are as follows:

· Accountability: The Honeywell managers need to be accountable and responsive for the projects allotted to them in the high-growth regions. This sense of accountability will facilitate their performance in such critical projects.

· Local Responsiveness: As the high-growth regions are quite critical for business, the managers handling those accounts need to have a fair trait of local responsiveness. They must have a clear understanding of how the local market works of the host country. This trait will help them to crack the best deals for the company.

· Communication Skills: The manager needs to meet and negotiate with the local suppliers of the high-growth regions. Excellent communication skills will help the manager in his interactions with the local leaders as well as the corporate house of business.

· Networking Skills: When a manager is working on projects in high growth regions, he must be able to grab the opportunities trending in the industry. Having a dedicated network would facilitate the manager to grab such opportunities for business.

2. The global leadership traits are different from the domestic leadership traits. This is so because the global manager needs to have a wide coverage in his operations while the domestic leader will be limited to the home market. Global manager needs to be tactful enough to analyse the market and adapt himself to get facilitated by the same. Domestic leader needs to keep track of business in the home market and hence his traits get narrow in scope as well as implementation.

3. Leadership development program for the high-growth region managers using the RAP framework:

· R: Recognizing and reviewing past behavior

• The past behavior of the managers needs to be analysed to identify their weak points and area of improvements. These weak points may had deviated the performance of managers in the past and need to be corrected for future projects. the strengths of the managers also need to be recognized and rewarded or appreciated so as to keep the morale and confidence of the manager high in future projects

· A: Aligning future behavior for improved performance

• The manager is given constructive feedback about his strengths and weakpoints. He is also given guidance about what the company expects from him and how he must align his goals to match the business objectives. The managers are encouraged to give inputs in the designing of their development plan. This makes the development plan more inclusive.

· P: Providing purpose for future behaviors

• The managers are given light about how their contributions are bringing difference to the company’s mission and objectives. This acts as a motivation for the managers who work hard to enhance their overall leadership and performance in future projects

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