A recent Fortune article recognizes that companies that are best at developing leaders are those that have taken a long term perspective with their employees. To ensure the quality of their leadership, companies invest in their most promising candidates by requiring them to go on global developmental assignments. Most return with global, cross-cultural skills to effectively build the company’s presence in the global marketplace, which is where most now look to for revenue.

IBM came in at number one in the world for developing leaders in Fortune’s “Top Companies for Leaders” in 2009. One of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps teams was assigned to market locally crafted Ghanaian products around the world. The job “stretched me in a way we all absolutely need,” and “it gave us a shake in perspective,” said one of the team members.

“Developmental assignments like his are among the most important tools that great companies use to build leaders — and that average companies rarely use at all,” according to the article.

“The importance of such assignments and how they’re being adapted to pay off in today’s global economy are two of the strongest messages emerging from the research behind our new ranking of the world’s Top Companies for Leaders.”

International assignments have had a history marked with a mixture of success and failure, but perhaps this doesn’t need to repeat itself because you can learn the skills to adapt to other cultures, and to be successful in a global function. Individuals must spend significant time learning how to adjust their behavior to successfully interact with people from around the world (and before this, to recognize that there’s a cultural gap between themselves and their counterparts in other countries). Intercultural learning is another investment that many global companies make to prepare their leaders-in-the-making, especially in tandem with global assignments. Another key point is that as the global marketplace has grown, companies are recognizing how crucial it is that their leaders understand the range of global markets in which the company operates.

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