UK
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JapanHow do you manage a team across borders and time zones? Start by tearing up your old management rule book.
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| Erin Meyer |
Today's financial woes have forced many companies to pick members of project teams from across various global locations and have them communicate virtually - by phone, email and videoconferencing - thereby saving both time and money.
"I consider myself a seasoned and skilled team-leader. But it was an overwhelming challenge, learning how to manage people I would never meet face to face and to build team cohesion with a group of people who were so culturally diverse that they seemed to instinctively not trust one another."
There are more global virtual teams today than ever before - and their numbers are increasing rapidly. Recently INSEAD has been bombarded with requests to set up a programme showing executives the skills they'll need to meet this new management challenge. The latest research shows that these skills are not simply different from those needed for running co-located teams; they are often the exact opposite. Here are five principal ways they're very different.
1. You must lead differently
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"I learned quickly that the style of leadership I had learned while getting my MBA - empowering team members to set their own objectives and then encouraging them to work together, adjusting and adapting as necessary, was not a good approach to managing virtual teams did not work well on our virtual team."
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| Jose Santos |
While co-located teams often benefit most from a leader who acts as a facilitator, virtual teams need a manager who provides clearly-defined direction and removes all ambiguity from the process. Research by fellow INSEAD Professor José Santos demonstrates that highly-centralised supervision usually works best in globally distributed teams. A well-managed virtual team is therefore more of a hierarchy than a well-managed classic team. In addition, formalisation and accounting must be higher so that a well-managed virtual team is also more of a bureaucracy. When a team works together in the same office, you can have loose job descriptions, possibly even with two people sharing elements of the same role. Rules may be loose and team culture and habits may develop naturally. In virtual teams that just doesn't work. Team leaders have to formalise roles, responsibilities, and behaviours - starting with their own.
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| Roderick Swaab |
INSEAD Professor Roderick Swaab provides examples as to how this high degree of centralisation should be established. "It is important during the planning phase of the project that the leader establishes rules for seemingly trivial things such as response times", Swaab explains. "Should people respond to emails within four hours or 48 hours? Are people aware of each other's preferred communication media and did they agree which technologies they should use for different tasks?" This level of detail may be superfluous in a classic team but is critical to a global team's success.
2. You must make decisions differently
"James, Kathy, Laura, what do you think? Any other input? Those are all great ideas. Let's go with the idea from Kathy. James, please draft a project plan for the team to review next week."
In the US, managers are trained to solicit input from a team, choose a direction quickly and make adjustments as the project moves forward. It works, but then so do other methods. In Sweden, teams learn to make decisions through lengthy consensus-building, which can span many meetings but eventually leads to strong buy-in and rapid implementation. In France, the Descartes-inspired education system teaches that debate and confrontation are necessary elements of any decision-making process. And in Japan, decisions tend to be made in informal one-on-one discussions before a formal group meeting.
In my own research, I've found that one of the most difficult tasks for leaders of global teams is to recognise that their styles of decision-making may be deeply rooted in the cultures they come from. Global teams therefore need very explicit descriptions of how decisions will be made, and the best global team leader is one who is willing to try out different kinds of decision-making processes at different points in a project.
3. You must build trust differently
"What my team struggled with the most was learning to trust people that they had never met. This old adage that you only trust someone you can look in the eye proved to be a real problem for all of us. And looking into someone's Skype image just didn't cut it".
