The internationalisation of an ETI is not limited to opening a subsidiary or conquering a market. It radically transforms the way in which decisions are made, arbitrated and the vision embodied, with direct effects on the development of international business. A management committee spread across several countries, remote zone managers, international multicultural teams across several time zones, asynchronous economic cycles: the organisation is changing. But above all, the nature of leadership is changing.
What is undermining your company is not operational complexity, but the gap between leadership designed for a national scope and the demands of global management. This misalignment has a cost: delayed decisions, divergent priorities, scattered investments, actions taken without overall coherence, turnover of exhausted senior managers. Aligning international leadership is therefore becoming a competitive issue.
And that's where the international coaching enters the scene - beyond the logic of ad hoc advice - as a demanding space for the progressive development of this type of leadership.
Contents
How internationalisation transforms leadership
Setting up in a new market, acquiring a local SME, a change of shareholders, succession within your international CODIR... These stages amplify the differences in ways of exercising leadership and often reveal latent tensions. Anticipating them can prevent them from crystallising.
The challenges will vary depending on your stage of development. international development. An ETI setting up for the first time on an international scale is discovering the complexity of transnational arbitration. An ETI that is already multi-country may face gradual fragmentation between head office and subsidiaries. And a family business in generational transition has to deal with an implicit redefinition of international power. Identifying your own stage of international maturity helps you to understand where the tensions really lie.
International leadership and the changing role of managers
International leadership does not mean duplicating abroad a model that has been successful at national level: it means maintaining a coherent vision on a global scale while organising responsible local autonomy, and regulating tensions between head office and subsidiaries over the long term.
In a company undergoing international expansion, the organisation becomes denser, with more reporting, more committees, more coordination, and so on. Processes are duplicated, indicators are consolidated and governance rituals are structured. On the surface, everything seems to be under control. But that's not the whole story. It concerns the very nature of leadership, and the evolution of responsibilities and autonomy.
Who has the right to interpret the strategy, and how does this interpretation translate into communication between head office and subsidiaries? How far can subsidiaries adapt without being perceived as «deviant»? Where does autonomy end and control begin? And what role does the hierarchy still play in these arbitrations? These questions are rarely formulated explicitly, but they profoundly structure the dynamics of transnational leadership.
International leadership and strategic alignment in SMEs
Let's take an example. I'm talking about a service company with operations in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia, whose Paris-based Management Committee sets uniform profitability targets. On the ground, the business unit managers are operating in radically different market dynamics. They say they are gradually finding themselves caught between their loyalty to the Group and their local responsibilities.
The model that has made you a national success - direct, centralised, strongly embodied - becomes less effective as decision-making chains lengthen and cultural contexts diversify. It's no longer just a question of steering, but of articulating interdependent rationales. Which begs the question: is your CODIR simply coordinated... or is it really aligned around an assumed transnational leadership?
The challenges of international leadership: tensions, alignment and performance
Organisations do not suddenly come out of alignment. They fragment gradually, often without apparent conflict. And standardising processes is not enough to guarantee strategic alignment.
International leadership: alignment issues
In an international CODIR, everyone operates in a different reality, linked in particular to the specific dynamics of the international economy, which makes collaboration more complex: a mature market in Europe, growth in North America, a complex regulatory environment in the Middle East, competitive tensions in Asia, etc.
Representations also differ. The same word - «priority», «investment», «transformation» - does not cover the same issues depending on the context, let alone how it is translated into different languages. Everyone operates with their own interpretation grid, often influenced by cultural biases that are rarely made explicit. For example, when head office talks about ’accelerating« a project, a subsidiary in a mature market may understand this as a need to optimise margins, whereas a team in a fast-growing market may see it as a need to invest more to gain market share.
In a management team I recently worked with, the steering rituals were rigorous and decisions were taken collectively. However, the way they were implemented varied greatly from one region to another. This was not a problem of individual skills or discipline, but the absence of a truly shared strategic language. Everyone interpreted the guidelines through their own local prism. As Edgar Schein, professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT University), has shown in his work on organisational culture (2010), misalignments do not result from a lack of commitment, but from different unspoken beliefs about what underpins performance and legitimacy.
Another sign that the shared vision is crumbling: if online meetings seem to be flowing smoothly but decisions are delayed, or priorities fluctuate, or there is an avoidant silence around certain words (unfortunately often interpreted as a sign of agreement). Everyone thinks they are acting in the best interests of the group, but from a different personal perspective.
International executive leadership: pressure and decision fatigue
Differences in interpretation are not just a matter of intercultural management or local cultures. They also concern power dynamics, local histories and relationships with head office. Investing in an Asian subsidiary rather than a French site, harmonising HR standards in the face of divergent cultural expectations: these trade-offs are at once strategic, symbolic and identity-related.
For managers of subsidiaries, zones or business units - who have to manage multicultural teams from a distance - the tension is even greater. In coaching, some describe growing decision-making fatigue and a feeling of losing control, as if decisions were being taken elsewhere. These tensions are primarily strategic and political. The culture amplifies them, without creating them. And they gradually impair the quality of collective leadership.
Risks of misalignment of international leadership
The risk is not an open explosion of conflict. The risk is the development of a double discourse: a clear alignment at the top, and divergent interpretations in the territories. In the long term, this could lead to local micro-strategies, a loss of credibility on the part of the head office or more and more decisions influenced by internal balances.
In practical terms, insufficiently aligned international leadership slows down the speed of arbitration: decisions circulate, but are not anchored in the same way in different countries. It increases the risk of investment duplication, when each territory interprets the strategy in its own way. It can lead to the loss of local opportunities because of a lack of clearly defined autonomy. Ultimately, it hampers innovation and the ability to launch innovative projects on an international scale, as teams hesitate between complying with head office and adapting to the market. So leadership alignment is not just a question of relationships: it's a lever for efficiency and growth.
These dynamics have a direct impact on performance. Arbitration delayed for lack of implicit agreement, priorities interpreted differently from one country to another, initiatives launched without global coherence, and local actions painfully aligned with each other: these are all signs of fragmented leadership. International misalignment does not always cause a stir. But in the end it costs.
Leadership development: the role of international coaching
Firstly, it is important to distinguish coaching from traditional intercultural training or any other standardised training system. Understanding the codes of a country is useful; it does not transform governance. One of the main challenges of international coaching, is to provide a protected space, based on a structured and demanding approach, to work on leadership at three inseparable levels: personal posture, relational dynamics and organisational architecture. This type of support is not aimed at a one-off behavioural adaptation, but rather at developing leadership capacity to function in a system of transnational powers, loyalties and interdependencies. It is not a question of learning «how others do it», but of collectively redefining the way in which strategy is interpreted and embodied from a distance.
International executive coaching: posture and global leadership
On a transnational scale, leadership means dealing with ambiguity. Information is incomplete, economic cycles are out of sync, and political contexts are in flux. Decisions are never perfectly optimal for all countries. Most of the time, my coaching focuses on issues such as :
- «How can we embody a global vision without over-controlling local variations?»
- «How can you adjust your leadership style to suit different cultures without losing your professional identity?»
It's not about applying simplistic intercultural management grids, or limiting ourselves to ready-made phrases about cultural differences. Paris changes the ability to execute in Warsaw or Shanghai. Going international doesn't just require more international experience. It calls on specific skills and soft skills and demands a different kind of maturity: tolerance of ambiguity, cultural decentring, the ability to share the power of interpretation.
International coaching: restoring CODIR alignment
At a collective level, the challenge is to develop a shared strategic language:
- What does «speeding up» really mean in different zones?
- Where are the implicit disagreements?
- What tensions are avoided in the name of cohesion?
- Rather than smoothing out the differences, how can we make them debatable?
- What decision-making rituals should emerge?
I'm thinking in particular of the CODIR of an industrial ETI established in Europe and the United States, which I accompanied. The meetings, whether face-to-face or remote, were structured, the decisions were formally adopted and everyone declared themselves to be in line. However, on the ground, priorities differed. The real turning point in our work together came when the committee agreed to devote time to collaboration and collective consistency rather than correcting local discrepancies, as part of a work programme dedicated to aligning the CODIR. This gradually improved the fluidity of arbitration without losing the common direction.
It is a mistake to believe that seminars, roadshows or clear communication are enough to create alignment. Strategic alignment requires explicit work on implicit disagreements. Without a framework in which to discuss them, they shift without disappearing. Amy Edmondson's (2018) work on psychological safety shows that collective performance depends on a management team's ability to make disagreements debatable without turning them into personal threats. In an international context, this condition becomes even more critical, as differences of interpretation can remain silent. My job is not to harmonise points of view, but to make strategic disagreements productive.
International coaching for subsidiary and regional managers
As for the managers of subsidiaries, zones or business units, coaching enables them to tackle dilemmas that are rarely addressed elsewhere: multiple loyalties, influence towards head office, mobilising their international network, managing local power relationships, perceptions of fairness in Group decisions. In this confidential space, sensitive trade-offs can be explored without immediate pressure to perform.
Area HR Directors and HRBPs are often the first to spot the weak signals: high turnover of expatriate managers, recurring complaints about a head office that is seen as out of touch, gradual misalignment between subsidiaries, silent tensions at international meetings. These indicators don't just point to operational difficulties; they often reveal that the organisation of leadership responsibilities is in transition.
In this context, the systems approach is crucial. It involves examining not only individual positions, but also their interactions within the overall ecosystem - head office, subsidiaries, International HR and local authorities, and external stakeholders.
- Is your leadership truly transnational or does it remain centred on the head office?
- Which decisions are taken at Group level, and which are left to zone or BU managers without a clear framework?
- What reflective spaces exist for working on tensions outside of the operational emergency?
In this context, the Group HRDs are the ones - along with the Management Board - who can decide to open up demanding working areas, take political responsibility for framing support and make the development of international leadership part of the global strategy.
The 3 conditions for effective international coaching for small and medium-sized businesses
Obviously, coaching alone does not solve structural problems - unrealistic group objectives, shareholder tensions, weakened business models, etc. Used on an ad hoc basis, it remains insufficient, as would a simple consultancy intervention without work on the underlying dynamics. On the other hand, its effects become significant when it is part of a clear vision of international leadership development, subject to three conditions:
- A precise, tripartite framework between management, HR and the coach: the objectives must be explicitly linked to the group strategy and be subject to regular evaluation. What are we trying to change: a posture, a mode of governance, a team alignment? Without clarification, the support remains peripheral.
- The relationship between the individual and the group: working only with one member of the CODIR without questioning the overall dynamic limits the scope for change. Conversely, collective work without individual space can leave certain personal tensions intact. The combination of the two creates a systemic effect.
- Long-term commitment: international leadership is not achieved in just a few sessions. It is based on progressive international experience built up over time.
It is in this context that coaching ceases to be a corrective tool and becomes a lever for solidifying operating methods when pressure increases - not to eliminate the tensions inherent in international expansion, but to enable them to be regulated with lucidity and coherence.
In conclusion - Towards truly international leadership
The question is not whether your organisation is international, but whether its leadership really is. There are a few systemic questions to help you think about this:
- Does your organisation still see international development as a question of adaptation... or as a profound transformation of its leadership?
- In what areas is your leadership still rooted in national reflexes, despite your international footprint?
- Are strategic disagreements between countries really worked out... or simply sidestepped in the name of efficiency?
- Does your remote governance encourage responsible autonomy - or more subtle micromanagement? And does it really support local capacity for innovation?
