Managing global talent in cross-cultural contexts: HSBC

Hello and welcome to this session. My name is Dr. Tinkuma Edafioghor, and I'm a senior lecturer in human resource management from the University of the West of England in the United Kingdom. I'll be discussing expert trade performance management and in particular HSBC's global talent strategy.

So we'll be exploring an applied case from HSBC that highlights key challenges and solutions in managing expatriate performance across borders. As you may know, international assignments are central to talent strategies for multinational corporations or global firms like HSBC. They also come with serious cultural, personal, and organizational challenges or risks. This case that we want to consider focuses on how HSBC addressed underperformance among expatriate leaders, and also redesigned the support systems to retain and grow top global talent.

HSBC, like many multinational companies, depends heavily on expatriates to fill key leadership positions in strategic locations. However, they were seeing a troubling pattern, high failure rates among expatriate leaders, particularly in culturally distant markets. This wasn't just about job performance, as many expatriates couldn't adjust to the host country's cultural norms, business practices, or team dynamics. The difficulties often led to early returns, which are expensive when you have your expatriates returning back home that can be very, very costly. Research shows that a single field expatriate assignment can cost between $250000 and $1 million, depending on the role. Beyond cost, there are organizational consequences as well, you know, team disruptions, stalled projects, and damaged relationships with some local stakeholders. The challenge for HSBC was very clear here. How can we support expatriates to succeed not just technically but culturally and relationally? To tackle this challenge, HSBC introduced a suite of