Press Releases
Language Flagship Speech
Ms. Donna Kimmel, Head of Human Resources for Sensata Technologies
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Highlight of the speech:
To continue to be successful, we will need to hire employees with multicultural skills, provide international assignments and experiences, and develop close working relationships with our overseas co-workers. It also means partnering with organizations such as the URI Chinese Flagship Partner Program and the URI’s International Engineering Program which offers engineering students the opportunity to study another language while participating in internships in countries such as Germany, Mexico and China. These experiences not only build engineering and language skills, they also give students a new appreciation for what it means to work in another culture and to build cultural intelligence.
Fortunately, after years of declining enrollment in the engineering field, numbers compiled by the American Society for Engineering Education Statistics show that Engineering bachelor’s degrees are on the rise again from a slight dip in 2007. In 2008, the 68,206 engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded marked the highest total since 1988. Enrollment in undergraduate engineering programs is up almost 10 percent from 2005. However, there are very few engineering students who participate in language and cultural immersion programs.
In addition, about 24% of science and engineering master’s degrees and 33% of science and engineering doctoral degrees awarded in the U.S. in 2007 were awarded to foreign students, who in many cases will return home with newly gained multicultural intelligence along with their engineering and technical skills. By the very act of coming to the U.S. and immersing themselves in another culture they have multicultural step up on their American peers who have not lived and studied in a foreign culture, learned another language and had to navigate the ins and outs of daily life. Though we will look to hire those types of students in our overseas locations, we would also like to hire U.S. students with the same competitive global skills.
The entire speech:
Good morning and thank you. I’d like to extend a warm welcome to our audience and to
- Bob Slater, Director of the National Security Education Program,
- Paul Ruppert, Founder & CEO Global Point of View and Board member for the Language Flagship
- And, my co-presenters, Mike Byrnes and William Zollars
I am very pleased to represent Sensata Technologies at this Press Conference in support of the Language Flagship and its very important effort to develop the next generation of global professionals.
Sensata Technologies has been an international company for a very long time. Our entrance into the international scene was into Mexico in 1950, followed by the Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Canada, Brazil and Japan. We opened a facility in Malaysia in 1974 and Korea in 1983. We entered our first joint venture in China in 1995, which is now wholly-owned.
Today we have major business centers and manufacturing plants in 9 countries and operate in more than 20 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia. We have a total labor force of about 11,500. Slightly more than half of our revenues come from markets in Europe and Asia which drives our need for a global workforce.
Even though we have been an international company for a long time, it has never been more critical than it is today for us to able to attract and retain business and engineering professionals who have the global mindset needed to compete in today’s global economy.
Our work flows around the world 24/7 as design teams in business centers interact with quality and process engineers at manufacturing sites while sales and marketing teams call on customers around the world.
It is not unusual for our team in the Netherlands to be the primary contact with a European automotive customer for a sensor that is designed in the United States and the Netherlands and then manufactured in Malaysia, China or Mexico. It’s the way we do business every day. Faced with short development cycles, our design teams pass work around the globe every eight hours to meet demanding customer schedules. There is also significant business travel and extended overseas assignments.
The fact that we are truly global and that we can apply our knowledge and expertise from one market in one region of the world to another industry in another part of the world gives us a distinct competitive advantage. It is also one of the reasons it is so important for us to be able to tap into a labor force that has the cultural skills and global mindset needed to succeed in this type of environment.
As Ed Cohen notes in his book, Leadership Without Borders, it is no longer sufficient for just a few individuals in an organization to have passports, to speak foreign languages or to have completed a study abroad program. What is needed by successful global businesses today is a global mindset -- a way of thinking that combines an openness to and awareness of diversity across cultures and markets with an ability to synthesize across the cultures. Immersion experiences enhance that learning.
David Livermore, another expert on cultural intelligence, notes in his book, Leading with Cultural Intelligence, one of the best ways to increase cultural intelligence is through learning another language. Leaders who speak more than one language have an advantage over those who don’t because when you are fluent in a language, speaking and thinking in that language becomes a subconscious action. Learning languages provides a deeper sensitivity to cultural differences and an understanding of how others see the world.
It’s also worth noting that although many people think that English is the language of international business, English is the mother tongue of only 5 percent of the world’s population.
So why does it matter to business?
The Economist reported in 2006 that nearly 90% of leading executives from 68 countries named cross-cultural leadership as the top management challenge for the next century. The most pressing issues executives identify for why cultural intelligence is needed are to:
- Understand diverse customers
- Manage diverse teams
- Recruit and develop cross-cultural talent
- Adapt leadership styles
- Demonstrate respect
Organizations and leaders who prioritize cultural intelligence are more likely to accomplish their mission and experience several benefits including:
- Enhanced business performance
- Better decision-making and flexibility
- Ability to expand internationally and do it more easily
- Attracting and retaining talent -- a company’s chances of being an employer-of-choice is enhanced when ‘recruits’ see cultural intelligence is valued and modeled throughout the organization
In fact, a multi-year study on 100 different success factors for leaders sponsored by the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change, found that understanding the impact of globalization on business took a startling leap from near the bottom of the list in terms of present and past success factors to number 2 in terms of future leadership success factors. Number 1 was consistently treating people with respect and number 3 was creating and communicating a clear vision for his/her organization.
The study noted that “High potential leaders in our study are sending a clear message. While thinking globally may have been an option for the leader of the past, it will be a requirement for the leader of the future.”
As a leader in a large, global business, I can say that our ability to be multi-cultural makes a difference to our business and directly impacts our bottom line by:
- enabling us to develop new products by tapping into our most talented employees regardless of language or geography
- improving product innovation to meet customer needs
- closing sales and new business opportunities with local customers
- mitigating misunderstandings when we are interacting with local governments, customers and suppliers
- increasing understanding of local tax laws, environmental regulations, import/export controls and labor practices
Our success as a global business is directly attributable to the caliber and experience of our employees. In my WW Human Resources role for Sensata Technologies, I can speak directly to the criticality of attracting, retaining and energizing employees at all of our global locations. It is a complex dance of finding culturally intelligent employees and then retaining them through balancing state-of-the art HR practices with an understanding of the culture at each of our locations. Actions like customizing benefits & compensation to each location, developing labor strategies, introducing new employee programs or celebrating major business milestones, all require cultural understanding.
To continue to be successful, we will need to hire employees with multicultural skills, provide international assignments and experiences, and develop close working relationships with our overseas co-workers. It also means partnering with organizations such as the URI Chinese Flagship Partner Program and the URI’s International Engineering Program which offers engineering students the opportunity to study another language while participating in internships in countries such as Germany, Mexico and China. These experiences not only build engineering and language skills, they also give students a new appreciation for what it means to work in another culture and to build cultural intelligence.
Fortunately, after years of declining enrollment in the engineering field, numbers compiled by the American Society for Engineering Education Statistics show that Engineering bachelor’s degrees are on the rise again from a slight dip in 2007. In 2008, the 68,206 engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded marked the highest total since 1988. Enrollment in undergraduate engineering programs is up almost 10 percent from 2005. However, there are very few engineering students who participate in language and cultural immersion programs.
In addition, about 24% of science and engineering master’s degrees and 33% of science and engineering doctoral degrees awarded in the U.S. in 2007 were awarded to foreign students, who in many cases will return home with newly gained multicultural intelligence along with their engineering and technical skills. By the very act of coming to the U.S. and immersing themselves in another culture they have multicultural step up on their American peers who have not lived and studied in a foreign culture, learned another language and had to navigate the ins and outs of daily life. Though we will look to hire those types of students in our overseas locations, we would also like to hire U.S. students with the same competitive global skills.
Both technical competence and cultural awareness are critical to our global success. Foreign language skills such as those taught in the URI International Engineering Program and advocated by the Language Flagship will only enhance the competitive advantage of our US students.
In short, what is needed is a global mindset that often begins, with the act of stepping out of one’s comfort zone to learn a new language. As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Educating our students in ways that enable them to gain cultural intelligence, language aptitude, along with technical and business skills will not only serve them, but it will also provide a future workforce that is a competitive advantage to U.S. needing to compete in today’s global marketplace.
Thank you.
Download
• IEP Facts & Figures Report 2009 (pdf)
More Information
For more information regarding the IEP please contact:
International Engineering Program
University of Rhode Island
Heidi Kirk Duffy Center
61 - 67 Upper College Road
Kingston, RI 02881
p: 401.874.4283
f: 401.874.7008
iep@etal.uri.edu
