A Glimpse Into The World of Managing Global Teams
One challenge of managing global teams is the need to move resources quickly. Competitive factors are a compelling motivator to find alternative work arrangements so that work processes and procedures can mirror the accelerated rate by which the world now operates.
Organizations are aware that their social leadership global marketplace is increasingly multicultural and diverse. Never before have people been exposed to colleagues and customers from so many different cultures with an inherently different worldview. Trade is dynamic and reflects the easy flow of goods and services, with competitive issues reverberating in a dizzying pattern across our globe. Hand in hand with business interests creating new links is the relatively new practice of offshoring, where core and non-core functions are outsourced far from headquarters to take advantage of low labor costs, the availability of highly educated workers and the stabilization of technology.
Greater diversity in the workforce is a byproduct of virtual teams, since professionals with different backgrounds, cultures, styles and languages ‘work at the same table’. Leaders who are managing global teams are challenged to create a smooth operation in spite of the many differences at play. Given that possibilities for misunderstanding and cultural blunders are magnified in such situations, those charged with managing global teams would do well to expand their own tools and techniques to deal with diverse teams.
Leaders managing global teams must be flexible and be able to adapt to this diverse workforce and global consumers. Doing so requires an understanding of the historical, political and economic references of people. Leaders must understand differences in worldviews, communication styles, ethics and etiquette of the people they deal with, both internally and externally. And they have to do all that while managing their own tasks and responsibilities.
Take a look at the ‘Day in the Life of a Leader Managing Global Teams’ below. Does this sound like you?
| 6:00 AM | Participate in a conference call with colleagues in Frankfurt and Kuala Lumpur. |
| 7:00 AM | Check emails before leaving the house to see if any issues came up regarding the experiments being conducted in Frankfurt. |
| 7:30 AM | Drive to the lab, and listen to voicemail on the car phone. Leave voicemail messages for those I need to speak with and ask them to call my cell phone after 2:30 PST. |
| 8:00 AM | Check in with people in the lab; review tasks for the day. |
| 9:00 AM | Have a weekly two-hour meeting to review status on current projects via teleconference with Frankfurt facility. Need to decide whether to run certain experiments in new facility in Kuala Lumpur or continue them at New Jersey headquarters. |
| 11:00 AM | Email senior direct report to review the progress of research on modifying and optimizing a procedure for encouraging cell growth. |
| 11:15 AM | Check in with programmers and researchers who will use the new system to update and compare statistical analysis completed in Edison, Kuala Lumpur and Frankfurt facilities. |
| 12:00 PM | Grab lunch while preparing for a teleconference on ongoing work with IT to establish a lab information management (LIMs) system across all facilities. |
| 1:00 PM | Check emails. |
| 1:30 PM | Attend a cross-functional meeting with reps of other departments to coordinate scheduling and resource allocation of the group, ensure that the work load was properly staffed, and that work moved from one facility to another smoothly (e.g., flow cytometry sample number, time of delivery, and overall through-put). |
| 2:30 PM | Take phone calls from colleagues in other facilities. |
| 3:30 PM | Troubleshoot issues noted from these phone calls. |
| 4:30 PM | Attend Marketing presentation on newest clinical trials of Drug X. |
| 5:00 PM | Check emails. Approve orders, check inventory levels of biological materials and discuss quality issues related to these materials. |
| 5:30 PM | Call lab in London which specializes in a pro-stat data program which IT is considering. |
| 6:00 PM | Meet with head of Frankfurt lab who is in town to attend Biotech industry’s major annual conference on the latest cancer research. |
| 6:30 PM | Go to dinner with group who will attend this conference. |
| 7:30 PM | Commute home. |
| 8:30 PM | Read journal articles and keep up with literature. Email peer group in different facilities. |
| 9:00 PM | Prepare for Conference Call with Frankfurt and Kuala Lumpur to discuss progress on new magnetic separation schemes to harvest desirable kinds of immune cells. |
| 10:00 PM | Relax! No, wait – there is a scheduled call with an overseas vendor this evening and you need to check your email for messages so tomorrow morning runs smoothly. |
Does this sound like you? If yes, the good news is that you are not alone. Unfortunately, the bad news is that you are faced with challenges of managing global teams. It means that you need to have a tremendous ability to multi-task in this ever changing global world.
