Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model and 360° Assessment Survey

Introduction

The Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model and 360° Assessment Survey are pioneering tools for assessing essential competencies for global leaders’ success across cultural boundaries. The tools are designed to help develop current, or future, leaders with global responsibilities. The model provides a template for ideal performance, and the multi-rater instrument allows a global leader to solicit feedback against this ideal state. The process provides reliable feedback that identifies key global strengths for the participant to leverage, as well as possible developmental needs that, unaddressed, could derail the global leader.

The Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model is unique in two respects. First, the cultural competencies comprise the foundation of the Polaris® Model and second, the cultural competencies are interwoven with the other sets of competencies for an integrated global competency model. Research has clearly shown that cultural intelligence is integral to the effectiveness of executives and managers with global responsibilities, and the Polaris® Model captures these essential competencies brilliantly. In fact, The Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model includes many of the skills we admire in global citizens, such as demonstrating concern for world issues as they conduct global business, and communicating clearly across cultural and language barriers.

The Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model and 360° Assessment Survey includes five dimensions, with nineteen competency sets. The 360° Assessment questionnaire has 75 questions. The five dimensions integrate cultural intelligence with emotional intelligence and with organizational leadership, as shown in the model below.

Why Use A Competency Model? Begin With the End in Mind

A well-established means of evaluating leaders in organizations is by defining the desired and required qualities of leadership, then measuring individual leaders against those qualities. A 360° or multi-rater survey instrument offers a reliable means of providing executives, managers and team leaders a comprehensive analysis of their abilities using a simple feedback process that is anonymous and confidential.

Multi-rater surveys solicit behavior-based feedback from those who interact with the participating leaders most often: their manager(s), colleagues & peers, direct reports, and customers. Such feedback from multiple sources is considered a powerful tool for personal and professional development because it offers participants the rare opportunity to compare how they and others view their performance and the qualities they bring to their interactions on behalf of the organization. They gain a new and broader perspective on their own effectiveness.

As a professional development tool, Polaris® Global Leadership 360° Assessment Survey feedback is then provided to participants in the form of a confidential, written report with written comments by raters and graphs of their competency ratings. This report is the basis for discussion with a coach to develop a viable action plan, which the participant can then discuss with his/her manager and other raters, as desired, to implement the plan.

Wise leaders understand their leadership behaviors and take steps to improve their style, performance, and resulting impact on people and the organization. They appreciate instruments which enable them to develop even more awareness of their leadership strengths and their gaps – areas for development – and subsequent opportunities for skill-building.

Polaris: Research-Based Competency Model and Assessment

The research behind the development of the Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model and 360° Assessment Survey is quite comprehensive. First, it has 28 years of research by Organization Systems International’s standard Polaris 360® Leadership Model and 360° assessment as its foundation. The majority of the Global Business and Leadership competencies, for example, have been previously validated by thousands of users in international companies.

Literature Review: The research on specific global competencies expanded with a thorough literature review on global leadership, cultural intelligence, and intercultural effectiveness. Several primary sources were: the GLOBE Study — published in Culture, Leadership and Organizations; The Globe Study of 62 Societies; publications by the Canadian Foreign Service Institute; and Global Literacy: Lessons on Business Leadership and National Cultures, by Robert Rosen, Patricia Digh, et al.

Expert Review: Our Polaris® Global Leadership Competency Model and Polaris® Global Leadership 360° Assessment Survey has been reviewed by 23 experts in international business, intercultural relations and global leadership practitioners, leaders and professors, of diverse backgrounds, ages, and countries, from China to Croatia to California. Their agreement on the competencies and 360° questionnaire items has given the items high face validity.

Field Testing: We have conducted field tests with Nokia managers in California and with Johns-Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland and the Middle East. These beta tests allowed us to further refine our 360° questionnaire and confirm the validity of our questionnaire items. Inconsistencies and ambiguous items have been identified, eliminated or revised.

Authors’ Expertise: Our research also includes the knowledge, insights, and expertise of the authors, Carolyn Feuille and Bruce Griffiths, gained from many years of professional experience in the international arena. See their profiles below.

Advantages of the Polaris® Instruments

The Polaris® Global Leadership 360° Assessment Surveyis a diagnostic tool for measuring the most important feature of the Polaris® system a a valid competency model related to individual and organizational effectiveness in the global business context. The Polaris® system not only provides targeted feedback and action planning processes for the individual, but a systematic methodology of looking at developmental strengths and improvement needs across the employee groups surveyed. The Polaris® Global 360 measures a robust set of competencies correlated with effective managerial performance in dozens of successful organizations, established in the highly successful Polaris Standard 360 for the past 20 years.

We offer reliable survey data and methodology across an international client base, which allows the Polaris® Global tool to provide you statistically reliable norms to which your leaders may be compared. Clients also have the ability to define progress and milestone success if they re-take the survey every eighteen to twenty-four months, demonstrating how the action plan enabled them to build leadership success. Aggregate (group) reports also provide managers going through the 360 process together a chance to calibrate their own performance directly against a peer group.

The Polaris® 360-degree survey has been created and written by experts in the field of industrial-organizational psychology, global business and leadership development. These expert resources have designed the survey and individual report to provide survey participants with actionable feedback and action planning guides that ensure participants have every opportunity to understand and act on the feedback they receive from others. We also can provide certified external coaches to assist participants in understanding and acting on results.

As development dollars become harder to justify and come by with each budget cycle, organizations need to target development expenditures to their most urgent requirements. We help by aligning development to the organizational strategy, and by documenting the most significant development needs of the employee groups being surveyed.

Global English is used as much as possible toward rendering the instrument culturally neutral. This is especially important for raters and participants who are not-native speakers of English.

You will have access to the best of both worlds: First and foremost, the methodology and tools that have provided insight to leaders across the world for over two decades, and secondly, the local expertise and talent to respond to your design and process needs through the consulting advice of OSI and EGL.

OSI and EGL have a certified, world-wide network of multilingual coaches to provide the absolutely necessary follow-up interpretation and guidance to realize a full return on investment.

Increasing globalization demands that organizations fill their leadership pipeline with managers and team leaders who incorporate the mindset and skill-set of the global leader. If you are ready to explore how you can add culturally competent leadership to your core leadership strengths, contact us for a free consultation.

About the Authors

CAROLYN FEUILLE is an international training consultant, coach and organization development practitioner. She is President and founder of Esprit Global Learning. She has broad experience in developing and delivering corporate learning programs in the areas of leadership, coaching skills, intercultural relations, quality system improvement and ISO 9000 certification, interpersonal communication skills, business writing, presentation skills, new employee orientation and teambuilding. Her passion is enabling leaders and professionals to grapple successfully with the challenges of global business and to increase their cultural competence, as well as preparing executives and their families for successful international assignments.

Carolyn has spent most of her career working with people from all over the world in such diverse countries as Colombia, Europe, Japan, and the United States. She has been an immigrant in France as well. She has over 18 years experience as a training consultant, coach and organization development practitioner in various industries such as financial services, pharmaceutical and high tech. She served as a training manager at Synopsys and as an internal quality system consultant for VLSI Technology in Silicon Valley; as a senior trainer at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco and at Kodak-Pathé in Paris. She has coached managers and executives for such clients as Nokia, Impax Laboratories, LSI Logic, JDS Uniphase, Solectron, Satmetrix, and Infinera.

BRUCE GRIFFITHS is an organizational consultant, and President and founder of Organization Systems International (OSI). For the past 28 years OSI has specialized in assisting organizations choose and develop leaders and leadership teams. Bruce has more than 30 years experience in leadership and consulting roles. After graduating from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1969, Bruce served for five years as an active duty officer in both the United States Coast Guard and Navy. He formed OSI in 1980 after several years as an HR executive, managing corporate assessment center and performance management systems.

Bruce has consulted to over 200 public and private organizations. Public sector clients have included the United States Departments of Energy, Defense, Interior, and Transportation. He has also worked with city and county governments, as well as non-profit and charitable organizations. His extensive private client experience has included Nike Inc., The Walt Disney Company, Siemens, AT&T, NCR, Dow Corning, ITT Industries, Hallmark Cards, Callaway Golf, PETCO and Crayola.