“Why did you not respond to my e-mails in a timely fashion?” asks a Japanese team member to his Argentine colleague, in a training video, “Worlds Apart: Building Effective Teams Globally,” by Enterprise Media. The Argentine replies, looking perplexed, that he did, since he responded “at his earliest convenience,” as requested in the e-mails. The Japanese person then explains, however, that in his culture, one’s “earliest convenience” means “as soon as possible.”
This anecdote highlights the complexity of communication challenges that face global teams. Simple communication misunderstandings can become larger problems and contribute to ineffectiveness. Global teams increasingly are becoming the mainstay of how global organizations accomplish tasks, and are quite possibly the building blocks, or “the sine quo non for global success,” according to authors Michael Marquardt and Lisa Horvath in their book, “Global Teams: How Top Multinationals Span Boundaries and Cultures with High-speed Teamwork.” Despite this, building effective global teams continues to be one of the key business and human resource (HR) challenges for any global organization.
The Quest for Effectiveness
In the quest for building team effectiveness, the guidance reflected in best practices, such as “the HP way,” and General Electric under Jack Welch’s leadership, now has moved from a project management approach to understanding the central importance of the team dimension. The intent here is not to review the progress on this development to date, but rather to suggest some considerations for building global teams that can be applied to the broader challenge of developing and retaining talent. Specifically, if global teams are essential to an organization’s global business success, then it should follow that the processes and results of global teamwork are just as integral to the talent strategy associated with the business. The issue of cultural and diversity interactions in global teams alone can be viewed as experiences relevant to the challenge of managing the ever-increasing diversity of the workforce. In essence, the lessons learned from building successful global teams can be relevant to global human resource strategies overall.
A recent Deloitte Research study, “It’s 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is? Why Acquisition and Retention Strategies Don’t Work,” offers a broader context for applying global team experiences. The study suggests a new paradigm for managing the retention of talented people. In the war for talent, the report maintains, organizations need to focus on deploying, developing, and connecting because these are the issues that employees most care about. With increased competition for quality talent, according to the study, it is those three qualities—rather than the processes that focus on metrics of “acquiring and retaining” people—that should drive the way people are managed. If organizations can focus on engaging and challenging their best employees, ultimately they will retain those employees.
The potential that teams in general—and global teams in particular—offer for engaging employees is, therefore, illuminating. In this context, the following four elements are suggested for special consideration in matters of organizing global teams:
- a demonstration or commitment to manage team processes to achieve high performance;
- careful decision-making in the selection of team members and leaders as it relates to the deployment of their skills and needs, including the effective use of expatriates and repatriates;
- demonstrated support acknowledging that teamwork is also a development opportunity; and
- facilitation of a process to allow commitment or engagement by the participants once a team is created. These matters can help ensure high performance by a global team. They also have wide-reaching implications for the related challenges of retaining and developing talent that global organizations now face.
Commit to Managing
The initial focus on building effective teams begins with the assumption of management responsibility. Global management often organizes and selects team members to represent various geographic and diverse business perspectives and experiences, all based on the common assumption that teams comprised of multi-ethnic, multicultural members are more effective than homogenous teams. In fact, this assumption derives from the business case for diversity in general, in that diversity results in greater creativity and innovation. This supposition, though basically correct, is incomplete, in that global teams (and diversity) are more effective, but only when properly managed.
Solely providing team members with the “same shirts” does not make for a successful team. According to Nancy J. Adler in her book, “International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior,” if groups of people are not managed with a sense of responsibility for the potential difficulties inherent in teamwork, research and experience continues to indicate that small diverse teams can be just as ineffective as their homogenous counterparts.
Therefore, just as with any construction, the depth of the foundation and the quality of the materials will determine how high and how strong the product will be. If team members—and even team leaders—are inexperienced with global skill sets, they should not be left to their own devices, which really means their own perspectives. Even when recognized as essential for global business success, the complexity of issues aside from individual and cultural differences, such as language, costs, and distances, can be overwhelming. It would behoove organizations to be committed to providing appropriate organizational support, tools, and training. This holds true as much for global teams as it would for organizations that depend on teamwork and collaboration as the framework for their enterprise-wide business processes.
Careful Selection and Deployment
Effective global team members and leaders need an arsenal of skills and competencies, especially cross-cultural ones. These skills are not easily acquired. As Morgan McCall and George Hollenbeck point out in their book, “Developing Global Executives,” “global leaders develop in the global arena.”
For most organizations, global leaders need opportunities either to gain skills in the first place or to use those that they have so they do not lose them. Consequently, organizations should look to and select their team leaders (and members) from appropriate high potentials and leadership development pools for this purpose. The global team experience can be, in and of itself, a “stretch” opportunity and challenge for the right individuals.
If they are not already among the pool participants, organizations should seek to place repatriates in team leadership and membership positions. Mobility surveys that include repatriation issues, such as the Policy and Practices Survey conducted by Cendant Mobility, Danbury, CT, and the Survey on Repatriation After an International Assignment, conducted by ORC Worldwide, New York, NY, continue to confirm that 20 percent to 25 percent of repatriates leave their organizations within 24 months of returning, primarily, they said, because their newly-honed global skills and experiences were undervalued and under-utilized by their organizations.
Selecting former assignees with first-hand experience working with cultural differences and a diverse workforce could help mitigate some of the struggles organizations face when trying to retain repatriates. Placing repatriates as team leaders, or even as team members, would be a direct application of the skills and knowledge acquired by these individuals during their foreign assignments. It also would contribute to the strategy of creating an organization that values international experience. And last, in situations where global teams are extremely visible within an organization, the role model influence of repatriates on potential assignees in the organization, as well as other talent seeking to develop their global skill sets, is strengthened.
Supporting the Development Opportunity
In addition to communicating the team’s tasks or objectives, management needs to communicate and demonstrate their expectations that influence the team’s experience to be developmental. This can be accomplished foremost be providing appropriate tools and resources, the most important of which would be cross-cultural training. As previously implied, a lack of awareness of cultural differences can lead to misunderstanding and conflicts, as well as exclusionary behaviors that affect a team’s performance. Bill Manfredi, chief talent officer for Young & Rubicam, New York, NY, reported to colleagues at a March 2005 British American Business Inc. HR roundtable meeting on global team-building that his organization mandates three days of facilitated cultural learning for each of its global teams, regardless of the backgrounds and experiences of the team members.
Cultural training allows for team members to understand their own cultural profile and the cultural profile of their team. This training facilitates understanding of potential areas of conflict, as well as convergence. Teams cannot ignore the fact that working as a multicultural unit will require negotiating key areas of differences that could impede their effectiveness.
For example, a training and development program to improve cross-cultural competence can expose the need for reconciling the amount of time spent on relationship-building as a cultural preference of some members, with the conflicting orientation of other members to focus on tasks and “getting down to business.” As evidenced by the Japanese and Argentine exchange, conflicting communication protocols can be identified beforehand through the cultural learning opportunity.
This is an especially critical issue for teams that need to meet the challenge of working across time zones or—as is often the case now—virtually. A managed and facilitated cultural learning platform or building block helps support the team-building process. It also aides in any further process discussions by the team, for example, about its charter and protocols for getting its business done.
Letting Teams Practice
Although team members are selected for their specific skills and experiences, as well as how those skills and experiences complement the other team members, the possible creative synergy in a team’s performance created by this diversity may take time to evolve. Given a task and deadline for output, a team can fail just in its haste. Differences are not resolvable if people do not get a chance to practice or work them out. If not managed internally, differences within the group can lead to ineffectiveness, despite a healthy respect and awareness of those differences. Certainly, if they are not addressed and resolved, they can lead to some of the commonly identified alternatives to team or group synergy, such as the “polite stand-off” behavior of some members, the feeling of being excluded by others, and subgroup domination.
Once given the tools and basic equipment, the process of practicing suggests that it sets the stage for team members to continuously learn and grow through the team experience. According to a Deloitte Research study, the time spent “working together on a task” becomes the situational basis where the most learning takes place (67 percent) versus the 10 percent who cited “when a colleague explains something personally.” Time working together also enables the team members to develop positive relationships that contribute to their being engaged in the task at hand. In their book, “The New Why Teams Don’t Work,” Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley expressed this point another way: “no team can be a team against its will … [and] teams achieve this ‘willing’ state only one way—by learning about one another and by caring.”
Through practice and the experience of working together, people acquire knowledge and ultimately greater insights. Only then are efficiency, creativity, productivity, and even requisite team behaviors within reach.
Global Teams
The experience within teams as a result of the cultural and personal exchange can contribute to what Marquardt and Horvath call “the power of global teams.” Power, they explain, derives from the transference of knowledge—acquired from both a structured and an experiential learning base—to specific global business practices requiring cultural competencies. Among these competencies for global organizations are a greater awareness of local customers, enhanced leadership skills, and an ability to form alliances.
On the other hand, as Adler frames it, if teams represent the organization in microcosm, then the power of global teams also derives from their potential as exemplars for the entire organization. Once constituted and managed, global teams can demonstrate the three dimensions of developing, deploying, and connecting to the whole organization. These dimensions are interrelated in the team experience as they could be throughout the broader organization. Meeting the challenge of building high-performing global teams may just be worth more than the immediate success of any team’s initial task. It may point the way for organizations to consider the new paradigm for developing and retaining talent.
James A. Wall is global managing director, human resources, for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, New York, NY. He can be reached at +1 212 492 4550 or e-mail jwall@deloitte.com.
Lynda Spielman, Ph.D., is director of deployment, multiculturalism and inclusion, for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, New York, NY. She can be reached at +1 212 492 4284 or e-mail lspielman@deloitte.com.