REFLECTIONS ON CHARACTER AND LEADERSHIP

252 REFLECTIONS ON CHARACTER AND LEADERSHIP

What can be said about career path management in these geocentric,

global organizations? Is their way of managing people different? What

steps should companies take to make the expatriation – repatriation

process seamless? Let ’ s have a look at observations from the fi eld.

Career - path Management in the Global Organization

In most cases, an international assignment is initially seen as a step up a

career ladder. That being said, expatriation remains a diffi cult issue and

what makes it so is the way companies deal with re - entry.

In a number of the global organizations I have studied the following

practices could be observed. To start with, an obvious method in dealing

with the expatriation – repatriation issue is the establishment of a talent

databank for the purpose of making an inventory of an organization ’ s

human talent. The companies more effective in dealing with this issue

set up a special monitoring unit (e.g. as at Philips, IBM, Unilever, Sony,

or Shell) to take responsibility for their key people, and in particular,

the expatriate executives. Such a unit would play a major role in career -

path management by assisting in succession planning with the expatriate

executive prior to departure — a process that considers length of stay,

projected responsibilities when abroad, systematic management reviews,

and subsequent job position on repatriation.

If companies put a monitoring unit in place, it would report to

someone at a suffi ciently senior level in the organization to make sure

that the expatriate ’ s visibility would be maintained. What most expatri-

ate executives fear is that they will lose touch with the center of action

and be overlooked for promotion at the corporate center or centers. To

minimize such fears, top management in these companies have to make

very clear in word and deed that an international assignment to key

markets is a major factor for eventual selection to senior leadership

positions.

What I also observed is that such a monitoring unit would also

engage in regular reviews of positions to be vacated because of retire-

ment or resignation and changes of assignment for development reasons.

The need to recruit outside candidates would be assessed periodically.

Much attention would be paid to succession planning. To engage in such

evaluation practices of high potentials, ranking systems were often uti-

lized to enable their identifi cation.

In these companies, headquarters found it essential to be kept

informed of expatriates ’ achievements while they were away; otherwise

the latter ’ s work may go unrecognized, not giving these executives