Challenges of Leadership and Management Roles in Global Environments

What role can enterprise leaders play to overcome these challenges?

In today’s global environment, to succeed as a leader and effectively drive business outcomes, you cannot simply focus on your individual objectives as well as those of your team and your business component. You must also focus on enterprise outcomes and be an enterprise leader.  Enterprise leaders must manage with involving not just building capabilities but an adaptive mindset that enables them to apply capabilities in changing situations and challengers.

To be able to transitions into management roles are more difficult than making the move from leading a function to leading an entire enterprise for the first time. The scope and complexity of the job increase dramatically, in ways that can leave leaders and managers feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. This is why they need to be prepared to be able to face these oncoming challenges. These challenges may impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the global environments they work within.

The main challenges of leadership and management roles in global environments include:

Personal challenges

In our personal lives as well as on a global scale, we face challenges that test us. Leaders must get international experience to learn the emotional dimensions of working in different cultures and with different mindsets. At the same time, they must maintain a supportive network at home to avoid losing out in promotions after returning from overseas (Nirenberg, 2002)

External Challenges

Global leaders and managers address many challenges on a day-to-day basis. In addition to differing challenges, global leadership involves certain external elements that individual leaders are not able to control or handle easily. These issues arise when the world becomes more interconnected and dependent on various sources which may be controlled by others in different countries, with different cultures, and with differing worldviews (Friedman, 2007)

Conflict Resolution

A conflict is a disagreement between people with opposing opinions or principles. This is when a conflict resolution must be considered. Since conflicts in a business are a natural part in a global environment, it is important that there are people who understand conflicts and know how to resolve them. These are leaders and managers. Their challenged every day to put aside everyone’s differences and resolve the following conflict’s taking forward. This is important in today’s market more than ever. Everyone is striving to show how valuable they are to the company they work for and at times, this can lead to disputes with other members of the team. These are what techniques are used.

The following 5 techniques include:

Forcing:

Resolving conflicts by satisfying one’s own needs at the expense of another’s

Collaborating:

Resolving conflicts by seeking an advantageous solution for all parties.

Compromising

Resolving conflicts by each party giving up something of value.

Avoiding:

Resolving conflicts by withdrawing from or suppressing them.

Accommodating:

Resolving conflicts by placing another’s needs and concerns above your own.

Enterprise leaders can play several roles to overcome these challengers above that I’ve talked about. They need certain skills in order to perform the duties and activities associated with being an enterprise leader.

First skill involved are technical skills. These skills are techniques needed to perform specific tasks proficiently. These skills tend to be more important ­ for lower-level enterprise leaders because they typically are managing employees who are using tools and techniques to produce the organisation’s products or to service the organisation’s customers. Because of the importance of these skills at lower organisational levels, employees with excellent technical skills often get promoted to first-line manager on the basics of those skills.
 

Then we have human skills. Human skills are basically the ability to work well with and understand others, to build cooperative effort within a team to motivate and to manage conflict. These skills are important for enterprise leaders at all levels. Leaders and managers need to be aware of their own attitudes, assumptions and beliefs, as well as being sensitive to their employees’ views, needs and motivations. Because all enterprise leaders deal directly with people, human skills are crucial.

There are still very relevant in understanding what skills enterprise leaders at various organisational levels need in order to perform well in their jobs. However, other important management skills that have been identified are overcoming these challenges in a global environment. In today’s demanding and dynamic global environment, employees who want to be valuable assets must constantly upgrade their skills. Developing management skills can be particularly beneficial in today’s workplace. There is no doubt that skills will continue to be an important way of describing what an enterprise leader role plays.

Challenges are always the starting point of the biggest competitor when transforming into the path to success. Besides the everyday problems in the global environment, enterprise leader’s challenges can quickly close a company. These challenges arrive in many forms, from personal flaws to keeping employees and team leaders from having disputes. I’ve found that most solutions for leadership challenges reside in simple communication and strong relationships within the global environment. This applies to the executive level, down to the lowest-ranked employee. The sooner you learn these methods, the smoother your path to success will be.

Great leaders don’t become great just for their accomplishments, but by the opposition they have encountered. This is also by the courage showed in maintaining their struggle against overwhelming the challenges they face throughout their journey. 

REFERENCES

• Maranga, K. & Sampayo, J. (2015), Management and Leadership in a global environment, Journal of Management Policy and Practice, Vol. 16, no.1, pp.83-88
• Robbins, S., Bergman, R. & Coulter, M. (2018), Management, 8^th edn, Pearson Australia. (Chapter 2 and 18)
• Robbins, et al. Management, P.Ed Australia, 2017.

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