Global Leadership Teams: What’s Missing at the Top

Most organizations and most boards of directors recognize the need for integration at the top but they also know that integration is elusive and often temporary. Research—still in its early stages—by the Accenture Institute for High Performance, has begun to identify the behaviors, the composition and the cognitive styles associated with global top management teams that achieve high performance.

The questions are tough: should top management composition reflect the unevenness of the global terrain—for example, the diversity in culture, ideology and institutional experience of the markets in which a company sources and sells? Or should it strive for unity with a more homogeneous makeup? Should a “global mindset” be required of each top leader or should it be an attribute of the team collectively? Can top management effectively anticipate the need to adapt without exposing itself more directly to the winds of change?

Though there is no “one best approach,” the project has reached a fundamental hypothesis on the critical qualities of top team effectiveness.