The specifics of companies operating internationally
Why is international business a specific sphere of business coaching and mediation / conflict management?
impact supports international leaders. Being exposed to the international business arena entails issues that go beyond the experience in domestic markets.
- Companies that are positioned internationally or globally are subject to a specific range of internal dynamics not known to companies that operate mainly in the domestic arena.
- International leadership and team collaboration require a special skills-set.
- Relocation of assignees is an experience with a multitude of unique professional as well as personal implications, the rising diversification of assignments raises new challenges for companies.
Current trends amplify the challenges.
- The ongoing transition to a globally highly distributed workforce calls for new approaches to managing the workforce.
- International assignments in all their new forms are to a fair extend untrodden ground. Entailing new work designs have yet to be explored with all their implications. They offer the chance to implement highly innovative future work models but are not devoid of certain risks either.
- Assignee experience or rather global workforce experience are becoming ever more important, especially in view of the skills shortage.
Some of the challenges for International HRM and HRD
- New assignment formats and new work designs need to be framed, accompanied and evaluated on a personal level as well as on the corporate level.
- Forms of remote leadership and cooperation – implemented out of necessity during the pandemic – need to be taken to the next level.
- The different groups of the mobile workforce, their needs and expectations need to be understood and harmonized with company objectives.
- The changing mindset towards international relocation.
Even with the current trend of opening international assignments to a much larger staff population, leadership quality stays an essential success factor. Presently leaders are the targets, the experts as well as the executors of new work designs. Their international skills in these new dimensions will be key. We assist your policies with targeted formats and efficient tools.
leadership is key to success
Managers play a key role in the success of a business. Business coaching for international leaders provides the tools to improve their skillset, but also to develop the organisation.
Leadership and management in international business is a challenge creating many exigencies “on top” of day-to-day challenges known by every manager. Also, managers play a leading role in the success of the foreign investment – in terms of the firm’s outward performance on the market as well as in terms of internal efficiency. This is not a trivial task. In this context, Business Coaching for international leaders can help managers to develop the skills they need.
International companies are subject to an elevated degree of complexity. Complex setups always produce their own frictions and contradictions. They are inevitable.
In daily management leaders face these dynamics. Consequently, the quality of a company depends to a substantial degree on how managers and leaders succeed here. Business coaching supports leaders to deal with those challenges with a hands-on as well as a strategic approach. In case fault lines develop into conflicts Mediation and Conflict Training provide means to address these.
addressing new challenges
Classical challenges of international leadership have been: working across geographical distances in a multilingual context with culturally diverse work styles and leadership expectations. On top of these, the pandemic led to the adoption of “virtual” collaboration tools by sheer necessity. Leaders are now facing the challenge of transforming some of the advantages of these tools into permanent best practices, while at the same time avoiding their worst pitfalls. Additionally, international leadership practice needs to adapt to the ongoing emergence of new international work designs, which will amplify the “classical” issues.
Supporting and accompanying your international leaders is a strategic decision to assure the quality of your international management.
conflicts are normal
the earlier they are managed, the better there negative effects can be mitigated.mediation addresses conflicts in companies in a constructive way.
Conflicts in international companies
Conflicts are inevitable in the business sphere. Some conflicts have structural backgrounds, some are based on personal differences. International companies are subject to additional specific stress factors with the associated potential for conflicts:
- An elevated level of complexity: multiple axes of management, product lines, geographical dimensions, functions entail internal dilemmas.
- A high degree of interconnectedness and dependencies, conflicting interests and goals.
- Conflicts arising from regionally different business-, leadership- and work-cultures.
- Ensuing hazards from communication across languages.
- Collaboration across time zones.
Mediation addresses conflicts in companies in a constructive way. It uses a structured approach to build solutions based on the interests of all conflicting parties.
The nature of conflicts
Conflicts bear risks and opportunities. They may on the one hand considerably degrade the companies’ operational capacity, disrupting communication, operational processes and workflows. Conflicts decrease efficiency to a mounting degree, the longer they last. Ultimately, they can lead to people getting ill or leaving. All those effects are damaging to your company, even more in the current situation of skills shortage. Consequences represent costs to the business, sometimes significant costs.
But conflicts may also trigger important developments, since they might be indicators of unbalances, contradictions, fault lines or due innovations. Whether conflicts are productive, or cause damages depends to a large degree how management and leadership deal with them.
Why should leaders be skilled in conflict management?
leaders who are skilled to act on conflicts early on by targeted, flexible interventions have the highest chance to limit damages resulting from conflicts. Skilled leaders render the organisation more resilient to conflicts
People are not born as managers. By experience and learning they shape a leadership personality, develop a mindset, develop their skills and learn how to work with a team to achieve goals.
Handling conflicts is an overall “unloved” task (not only in companies). As all other leadership skills, it needs building up knowledge, adopting strategies and … PRACTICE.
On a pure cost-level companies can benefit strongly by tackling conflicts in a timely fashion. Leaders of all levels are in the position to perceive tensions, ignore them if they are just bad days or occasional hick ups and address them if they recognise them as developing conflicts.
Leaders can contribute to a considerable degree to a constructive conflict culture in their team or unit. In case of actual conflicts, they can also, through well measured and adapted interventions, make sure that conflicts are addressed, solved, and thus restrict their damaging effects.
Our aim is to support companies building up their leaders’ expertise in internal conflict management.
virtual counselling – complementary, not inferior
How impact came to propose counselling services via internet-based tools?
Coaching and Conflict Management processes between clients and the coach or mediator depend on the quality of the interpersonal relationship. For decades, it has been “common sense” that in-person contact was the only acceptable setting to conduct these activities.
With the advances of network technology, impact started in 2015 to explore the opportunities these technologies could offer in a counselling context. impact based the development of its tools on research showing that the quality of “connection” in a virtual, internet-based encounter is not inferior to a personal exchange even in areas requiring a strong personal relation between the communicating parties.
Working through the pandemic has shown to everybody that internet-based communication, collaboration and also counselling are possible. It also has shown that the quality of a “virtual” work relations depends heavily on the way the existing tools are used, and on the skill and experience of the people using them AND on the coaching and mediation experience.
Today impact is following its mission to make coaching and conflict management available in settings where counselling that is limited to “classical” settings would be prohibitively expensive