You Say Tomato: Leading a Global Team (and Still Sleeping at Night)

You always hear “think global, act local”, but how do you translate this into action? And how do you make sure the guy in Singapore doesn’t always get stuck with the 11 pm conference call? What do you need to consider when you are leading a global team spread across many countries?

I started out thinking consistency was critical. One thing I learned as I grew a team of customer-facing reps to 4x its size in seven countries is how important it can be to adjust for regional differences, whether they are cultural, market-driven or scale-driven. Sensitivity to these nuances can drive the difference between success and failure. One big takeaway? Listen hard.

“You say tomato…”: Cultural differences, both in how people like to do business, and in how team dynamics work, are vivid. Communication norms vary widely. For example, in Japan, as I learned, an inside sales rep calling a prospective customer on the phone will often bow when speaking to a senior person, no matter that the customer cannot see him. This same approach also governs how someone prospects for new business; a hard sell is not the best approach anywhere, but even less so in Japan. It also impacts the degree to which you will hear someone flatly disagree with someone else in Japan; listening for nuances is important, or you may miss critical unspoken issues.

Another aspect of communication relates to group dynamics. When I hosted an Asia Pacific video conference call for team members from both Singapore and Sydney, the call was typically dominated by questions and comments from the Aussies. I learned over the years that in Singapore, the best way to get feedback and perspectives from team members is through skip-level one-on-one calls or even better, meetings in person when I visited.

Hiring practices and cycles can differ widely. In Europe, notice periods when hiring are long, and employee-friendly regulations can make parting company with any employee an extended process. In Japan, hiring tends to happen right after the biannual bonus cycles. Direct hiring in Japan is in its infancy, and while this is changing, most hiring occurs through an agency, even at relatively junior levels. It is important to be aware of these factors, as it affects the rapidity with which one can hire or promote to meet demand, both key aspects to manage in growth companies.

Size matters…and so do market differences: You can, and should, design processes based on the common functions performed across all teams, irrespective of country. Clearly it is optimal to take best-in-class learning from all teams and share across regions. There are, however, certain elements that you will need to modify based on the market, either due to sub-scale team size or due to market differences. For example, a team of five people in a market that is new to the company may need a very different compensation structure than a team of a hundred people in an established market where the brand and the sales trends are better known.

Uncertainty in emerging markets due to unknown market dynamics could drive a different approach to everything from segmentation to marketing to messaging. In a load-balancing experiment, we had a top Aussie sales rep follow up on sales leads from Singapore and India. It became rapidly evident that the different level of awareness of each market (and of the prospective buyers) made the experiment a failure, as the “pitch” needed to be very different.

Some things ARE the same everywhere: People are people, and at the most fundamental level, what motivates them and drives excellence is the same everywhere. We instituted Top Performer lunches in the US, with top performers being taken to lunch every month by a senior executive. The European management team was very doubtful that this approach would work in their region. The sentiment was that this was “too American” an approach. We decided to give it a try, and, lo and behold, these lunches soon became a very popular and sought-after institution. The desire for recognition is universal.

I also learned that the passion and energy, and the core competencies required to be successful in the same job function are fundamentally the same everywhere, though the way this passion is displayed may manifest itself differently based on cultural norms. In every market, I was energized by the enthusiasm and commitment of top performers, no matter where I was.

Time-zone travails: How do you create unity with a team in diverse geographies without a common time-zone when they are all working? How to even survive the urgent issues that arise in time zones that span from 8 hours ahead to 12 hours ahead of one’s own time zone? I cannot pretend to have discovered an easy solution to this one. I managed it by clearing out email at 9 pm (to pick up urgent issues from Asia Pacific) and 7 am (to cover most of Europe’s daytime email), and doing calls from home when urgently needed.

It is important for the whole management team to feel that discussion and decision-making is shared across geographies. However, practically and humanely speaking, there is no way to have Japan, India, Singapore, Australia, Europe and the US on the same call at the same time. We handled it by having two staff meetings. Not the most efficient, but the most inclusive for sure, with outcomes that were more reflective of the needs across regions, with more buy-in and hence better adoption.

Bringing people together: As the leader of a global team, it is vital that every member of the team gets to hear your leadership message and how their work is impacting the company. While you cannot be everywhere at once, hosting regular calls with the full team to share performance, innovation and to celebrate is instrumental in creating cohesion and a mission-driven approach across the globe.

For a global team to truly feel like One Team, it is critical to bring the members together at some level to network, share and spark the team spirit. We found that, at a minimum, an annual management offsite created the personal and professional relationships necessary for the managers to get to know each other. Based on that foundation, they started to share, posting pictures of new babies and of new ideas and experiments alike. Virtual online and phone/video-conference calls created the continuity and frequency needed to cement the bonds established in person.

Sometimes it is cost-prohibitive to bring individual employees together in person. The creation of mentoring relationships and best-practice sharing calls between people in different markets can also work to drive relationships and networking across regions. For example, we found that Latin America and parts of Asia were similar in terms of market awareness of our product, hence sharing of success tactics between reps was very beneficial. Similarly, the roll-out of spiffs and contests across regions or countries built a shared focus and awareness.

Globalization is a tricky business; there is always tension between universal consistency and the need to reflect regional differences. Each functional role will vary, as will different markets, depending on the life-stage of the company and the product. One thing that I do know: despite the travel and the occasional dinner-time calls, the learning I gained from leading a rapidly growing global team is invaluable, and I would not have missed it for anything.

Originally published on LinkedIn