A couple years ago, as Canada was becoming serious about the need to develop its access to global markets, I wrote an article for Canadian Affairs titled “Would you risk your life for your career?”
Its premise was that Canadian businesses need to become better at developing and rewarding talented employees who take on dangerous and challenging international assignments. That article was about actual physical danger, drawing from my own experiences working in countries undergoing political upheaval and corruption.
But a more prevalent problem, in my experience, is that Canadian companies are horrible at re-shoring talent. Brave and ambitious people who take on challenging international assignments often find themselves disadvantaged and frozen out of bigger career opportunities when they return to the mother ship.
This is a profound failure of senior leadership, and one we must fix quickly if we are serious about forging a deeper relationship with the European Union, potentially as its first associate member. And this is to say nothing of Canada’s active membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, our trade agreement with Pacific Rim countries.
The corporate world can be roughly split into two human archetypes: people who primarily focus on “managing up” to their bosses, and people who focus on adding value in their roles.
Of course, effective leaders need to do some of both. But in many organizations, influence and opportunities are disproportionately hoarded by the managing-up crowd: the cliff dwellers who carve out comfortable niches close to the top of the corporate hierarchy, and whose primary subject-matter expertise is validating their dear leader’s every word and gesture. These people treat sycophancy as an art form. And weak-willed, low-EQ or simply inattentive CEOs often reward them for it.
Employees who live closer to the pointy end of the business — particularly when they are far away on international assignments — develop the adaptability, skills, perspective and ideas that are critical to a business’ growth in international markets.
Which leads to an uncomfortable question: Does your organization value proximity to the problem or proximity to the leader?
For many, it’s the latter. I see this repeated over and over again in my practice coaching CEOs. And I lived it myself during my own corporate career.
A banker with extraordinary global finance experience in Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai is frozen out of Bay Street in Toronto because they didn’t spend the past five years having lunch with the CEO each week.
Or a CEO succession candidate at a large Canadian industrial company is cautioned against working internationally because no senior executive at that firm has ever not worked on the same executive floor. In this case, leaving the building — let alone the country — is considered career-ending.
I was cautiously optimistic that COVID-19 and the rise of remote work would help remedy this problem. But I don’t think it has moved the needle.
It takes intentionality, discipline and commitment to ensure international leaders are respected, kept in the loop and successfully re-shored after their assignments. It also requires actively encouraging talent to go abroad.
At GE, where I worked, we would often list international experience as a necessary criterion for senior roles. This was a remarkably effective technique, as it highlighted international executives who were ready to return, while also providing an incentive for aspiring cliff dwellers to push themselves out of their comfort zones.
The real treasure is the skills and knowledge these pioneers bring home. After several years away, executives return with valuable relationships and an understanding of how business really gets done in different markets.
They have learned to operate across different cultures and institutions, solve unfamiliar problems with imperfect information, and recognize patterns that may be invisible from the mother ship. When successfully reintegrated, they can transfer that knowledge to colleagues and help build international capability throughout the organization.
For decades, Canadian companies could afford to be surprisingly parochial. We had easy access to the world’s largest market immediately to our south, and building a business around North America was often perfectly rational.
Capital constraints, technology gaps and a risk-averse culture are also often cited as reasons for failing to expand internationally. But our poor record managing international leaders is a significant factor as well.
If Canada is serious about developing much deeper ties with Europe and Asia, our companies will need leaders who don’t merely know about these markets. They need people who have actually lived and operated in them.
That means rewarding the people who move closer to unfamiliar markets, customers and problems, even when doing so takes them farther away from the executive floor.
We need to make proximity to the problem more valuable than proximity to the leader.
