09 Jun How To Build a World-Class, World-Ready Team

The term “world-class” has been used frequently to the point of user exhaustion, but it still remains the gold standard for global mobility specialists who are always actively recruiting the best candidates from all over the world.

“World-class” means an individual, organization, product and/or service possesses the qualities and traits that adhere to the best international industry practices, making them extremely competitive in their particular game.

To be “world-class,” however, one must also be “world-ready;” this means all those respective entities had prepared themselves to succeed in the global business arena through various processes. Products and services had undergone stringent testing, while people took up training, mastered courses, built their network, and put in the necessary years of hard work in several locations that exposed them to global corporate structures.

As a global mobility specialist, to spot world-class talent and bring them into your fold, you do have to build a world-ready team who can support your goals. It doesn’t matter if you are a department of three; your staff must acquire a comprehensive working knowledge of how the best businesses in the world operate and develop the vital recruitment and people-retention skills that can fulfill their human resource requirements.

A program that implements the following can work wonders to make your team world-ready:

First, encourage your team to do short-term projects outside their comfort zone, which is another city or another country. Make this part of your own career development plan. Reading about the corporate culture of other nations and interacting with your foreign colleagues in business conferences do help, but there is nothing like hands-on experience to make you and your team appreciate the various layers that undergird a business operation in Asia or Europe.

The actual working experience in another society whose values and corporate practices may be different from yours can help develop a sensitivity to the unspoken but powerful behavior that can make or break a business deal.

Second, embrace technology especially when it comes to finding and recruiting local talent. Chances are you and your team are doing your share in reaching out to potential assignees through social media like LinkedIn and Facebook. But posting opportunities and PM’ing interesting profiles are just the tip of the iceberg. Forget what you might have heard about the supposed death of online recruitment. Global hiring will continue to make the digital world its online platform, and new technologies that will make the old favorite job sites look like yesterday’s bulletin are constantly being invented.

Google is throwing its hat into the ring, intending to capture a huge share of the $200 billion market. Expect online searches to be more targeted and international professionals to become more proactive in showing off their portfolio and progress on their career track. Video applications and individual blogs may soon become the new resumes. Study these new tools as soon as they become available. Mastering them may open up new talent pools that you didn’t even know existed.

Develop professional agility. You cannot be adaptable as a team or an organization if your own staff refuse to evolve with the times. Changes are constant, and every team member must accept the reality that he or she is a lifelong learner. Your team must not just grow in their fields, but must develop problem-solving abilities that can help them offer solutions to clients and the organization as well. They must be able to thrive in an environment of change and leverage it to their advantage as well as that of the group.

Professional agility is valued in centers of innovation like Silicon Valley, which is still among the preferred places of employment of assignees. Hard work and experience are not enough to make it in the world’s capital of IT creativity. Agility and the ability to reinvent oneself and their immediate environment have made the workforce in this area global winners. Your team must acquire these same traits to be always world-ready.