Page 253 - DMGT548_GLOBAL_HRM

Global HRM

Notes are quickly earmarked for the “Development” list, where their progress through the pools —
company, national, business group and/or region, global, executive committee — is guided not
only by their direct bosses but by managers up to three levels above. “We want bigger yardsticks
to be applied to these people and we don’t want their direct bosses to hang on to them,” explains
Herwig Kressler, Unilever’s head of remuneration and industrial relations. To make sure the
company is growing the general management talent it will need, the global HR director’s
strategic arm reaches into the career moves of the third pool — those serving in a group or
region — to engineer appointments across divisions and regions.
To build this type of global HR database, you should begin with the Step 2 role descriptions
and a series of personal-profile templates that ask questions that go beyond each manager’s
curriculum vitae to determine cultural ties, language skills, countries visited, hobbies and
interests. For overseas assignments, HR directors correctly consider such soft skills and
cultural adaptability to be as important as functional skills. The fact that overseas
appointments are often made based largely on functional skills is one reason so many of
them fail.

4. Construct a mobility pyramid: Evaluate your managers in terms of their willingness to
move to new locations as well as their ability and experience. Most HR departments look
at mobility in black-or-white terms: “movable” or “not movable.” But in today’s global
markets this concept should be viewed as a graduated scale and constantly reassessed
because of changing circumstances in managers’ lives and company opportunities. This
will encourage many more managers to opt for overseas assignments and open the thinking
of line and HR managers to different ways to use available in-house talent.
Some multinational companies, for example, have been developing a new type of manager
whom we term “glopats”: executives who are used as business-builders and troubleshooters
in short or medium-length assignments in different markets. Other multinational
companies are exploring the geographical elasticity of their local nationals.

To encourage managerial mobility, each personal profile in your database should have a
field where managers and functional experts assess where and for what purposes they
would move. When jobs or projects open, the company can quickly determine who is able
and willing to take them.
Managers can move up and down a mobility pyramid at various stages of their career,
often depending on their family and other commitments. Young single people or divorced
managers, for instance, may be able and eager to sign up for the glopat role but want to
drop to a lower level of the pyramid if they wish to start or restart a family life. Or
seasoned senior managers may feel ready to rise above the regional level only when their
children enter college.

Example: IBM uses its global HR database increasingly for international projects. In
preparing a proposal for a German car manufacturer, for instance, it pulled together a team of
experts with automotive experience in the client’s major and new markets. To reduce costs for its
overseas assignments, IBM has introduced geographic “filters”: a line manager signals the need
for outside skills to one of IBM’s 400 resource coordinators, who aims to respond in 72 hours; the
coordinator then searches the global skills database for a match, filtering the request through a
series of ever-widening geographic circles. Preference is often given to the suitable candidate
who is geographically closest to the assignment. The line manager then negotiates with that
employee’s boss or team for the employee’s availability.
The shape of a company’s mobility pyramid will depend on its businesses, markets and
development stage and will evolve as the company grows. A mature multinational food-
processing company with decentralised operations, for example, might find a fiat pyramid

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