What is a Cosmopolitan leader?
The cosmopolitan leader feels as a global citizen and at ease with individuals around the world, even those holding widely divergent values and beliefs from the leader. The cosmopolitan leader easily engages and interacts with diverse people, being insightfully aware of others, and creative in all relationships. These leaders leverage diversity as they uphold a learning approach in all relational encounters, especially during times of change. Cosmopolitan leaders deal flexibly with situations and people, adapting to meet the need. Cosmopolitan leaders can keep a balance of owning and understanding their own culture while accepting the diversity of other cultures, because they keep their orientation centered on the unique individuality of people. Cosmopolitan leaders are “person centered.”
Marquardt and Berger provide a list of eight forces changing the workplace for leaders and a list of the competencies necessary for a cosmopolitan or global leader to deal successfully with those forces.
The first “transforming force” is globalization. To be successful, the cosmopolitan leader needs to be able to see the whole work environment from the micro-workplace perspective while also viewing it from a macro-global perspective.
The second force, the change to the knowledge era, requires the leader to experience and model continuous learning while teaching diverse employees from his or her knowledge base, coaching from experience, and mentoring from awareness of employees’ needs.
Because of the third force, a continual changing nature of the workplace, a cosmopolitan leader serves those he or she supervises by engaging the worker from a holistic view. The leader provides a secure team environment which helps the follower grow into greater participation in leadership. The leader realizes that he or she stewards the worker’s life for someone or something else, such as the organization. In other words, the leader is not the worker’s owner; the cosmopolitan leader is a servant and a steward.
Because of the fourth force, rapid changes in organizational structure, cosmopolitan leaders need competency in systems thinking and doing many projects at one time. The cosmopolitan leader needs to go beyond looking at symptoms to discover real causes. This leader must grasp complexity as it develops over time, seeing a process rather than just a picture.
As a result of the fifth force, environmental needs and growing awareness of our responsibilities, cosmopolitan leaders engage the workplace at a higher level, addressing issues of life and work meaning, core values, and personal and organizational responsibilities. They work to increase a sense of ethics in their own lives as well as in the workers’ and the organizations’.
The sixth force, the current trend in technology, requires leaders with the ability to leverage technology. They need to know the positive and damaging influences and power inherent in our new technology. Simultaneously, cosmopolitan leaders understand the confines of technology—what it will not do.
Given the seventh force, the rapid change in what the market wants, cosmopolitan leaders think in the future, look for new products and services, and display a strong comfort with uncertainty. Cosmopolitan leaders must be creative and opportunistic, leveraging the greater intelligence of a diversified team. They regularly ask the question of a 5-year-old child, “Why can’t we do that?”
Finally, the eighth force, because of the increasing speed of change, the leader envisions the future, motivating and inspiring followers with that vision. The cosmopolitan leader thinks above the day-to-day planning and reacting. He or she pulls people together to both evaluate today and set direction for the emerging (and yet to emerge) tomorrow. Marquardt and Berger argue that organizations will find the true cosmopolitan leader out of those people “whose primary motivation is a desire to help others . . . [it] must be a leader’s number one priority.” This number one competency is a servant’s heart. This and other leadership characteristics are shared by the leaders described by Winston and Patterson and Spears.
Subject: Cosmopolitan Leader and list of the competencies necessary for a cosmopolitan leader 
Wed Apr 23, 2014 1:12 am
It's just my own opinion 
<3
I want it
