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Unit 13: GHRM Trends and Future Challenges

adequate, whereas a multinational company in a fast-moving, high-technology business Notes
might need a steeper pyramid with proportionately more glopats.
5. Identify your leadership capital: Build a database of your company’s mix of managerial
skills by persuading people to describe the information in their C.V., their management
talents and their potential on standard personal-profile templates. Jump-start the process
by having your senior managers and those in the lifeline posts complete the forms first.
Add others worldwide with the potential to move up. Include functional specialists who
show general management potential.
Require over time that every executive join the global HR system. This makes it harder for
uncut diamonds to be hidden by their local bosses. Recognising that people’s situations
and career preferences shift over time, hold all managers and technical experts responsible
for updating their C.V. and reviewing their personal profiles at least once a year.
Companies should make it clear that individual inputs to the system are voluntary but
that HR and line managers nevertheless will be using the data to plan promotions and
international assignments and to assess training needs.
6. Assess your bench strength and skills gap: Ask each executive to compare his or her skills
and characteristics with the ideal requirements defined for the executive’s current post
and preferred next post. Invite each to propose ways to close any personal skills gaps —
for example, through in-house training, mentoring, outside courses or participation in
cross-border task forces.
Compare the skills detailed in the personal assessments with those required by your
business strategy. This information should form the basis for your management
development and training programs and show whether you have time to prepare internal
candidates for new job descriptions.

Did u know? Unilever uses a nine-point competency framework for its senior managers. It
then holds the information in private databases that serve as feeder information for its
five talent pools. The company thoroughly reviews the five pools every two years and
skims them in between, always using a three- to five-year perspective. In 1990, for example,
its ice cream division had a strategic plan to move into 30 new countries within seven
years. Unilever began hiring in its current markets with that in mind and set up a mobile
“ice cream academy” to communicate the necessary technical skills.
7. Recruit regularly: Search for new recruits in every important local market as regularly as
you do in the headquarters country. Develop a reputation as “the company to join” among
graduates of the best universities, as Citibank has in India, for instance.
The best way to attract stellar local national recruits is to demonstrate how far up the
organisation they can climb. Although many Fortune 500 companies in the United States
derive 50 percent or more of their revenues from non-domestic sales, only 15 percent of
their senior posts are held by non-Americans.
There may be nothing to stop a local national from reaching the top, but the executive
suite inevitably reflects where a company was recruiting 30 years earlier. Even today,
many multinational companies recruit disproportionately more people in their largest —
often their longest-established — markets, thereby perpetuating the status quo.

To counter such imbalances, a multinational company must stress recruitment in emerging
markets and, when possible, hire local nationals from these markets for the middle as
well as the lower rungs of its career ladder.

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