The Challenge of Managing Global Teams

One unique management challenge you have to learn to handle when working in an international business, is managing global teams over multiple time zones, particularly with respect to team meetings, which are usually held virtually. Having worked in multinational businesses for 30 years, I’ve picked up a few tips and techniques for working with and leading global teams and thought it might prove helpful to share some of the things I’ve learnt along the way and some of the stories behind how I learned these lessons. Parts of this article were previously posted on LinkedIn as individual mini-articles. This consolidated version contains additional material.

Be Aware of the Different Time Zones Involved

If your team spread covers less than 8 hours of time zones, then you don’t really have a big issue with scheduling virtual project meetings. The real challenge begins with more than 8 hour spreads and the most challenging situation is when your project team truly spans the globe, because there is no hiding from the fact that someone, somewhere, will be losing out when you schedule a meeting time.

1. In the businesses I have worked, the full global spread has been the norm for me, so I have lived this problem every week for many, many years. The most convenient geography is for those based in Europe, because you will be right in the middle of the time zone spread and can attend meetings midday. The challenge comes for those at the extremes. I was regularly pulling together teams with people in US East Coast and Adelaide, Australia, and sometimes even US West Coast. That’s over 18 hours of time zones to schedule around. Some of the most challenging calls I have ever arranged have been when I was in Hawaii (GMT -10), trying to get my head around everyone’s time zone around the world. That can be a mind bending experience. And don’t assume that just because you are flying every other week, having to deal with constant time zone jumps, that all your team members are as well. For those team members that don’t normally travel internationally, the time zone issue does not naturally enter their heads. 
2. Another challenge you discover when scheduling virtual international meetings is those peculiar parts of the world that have half hour time zones, like Adelaide (GMT+9:30) and India (GMT+5:30). Yes, your Outlook scheduling tool adjusts everything automatically, but you still have to understand what effect your meeting timing has on the individuals involved. If you live international travel with your job day in and day out, it is the first thing that enters your head.
3. I have read advice that suggests sharing the burden of international meeting timings by cycling regular meetings between morning, afternoon and evening calls. Whilst this sounds a good idea, my experience is that people actually prefer routine and a regular schedule for meetings, rather than keep chopping and changing. My Adelaide colleagues were used to having all their calls late at night because that’s the only way they could get to talk to their US colleagues, so they were already working a schedule that naturally fit late night calls. Also, some people are naturally early birds and some are naturally night owls, and learning about your team really helps to work around their preferences in this way.
4. If you work in a truly global business, there is no getting around that you will be taking calls at odd times. And therefore it is understood that meeting times will occasionally be inconvenient for some people, such that they cannot attend, such as in the middle of the night. I have had people stay up all night to take some calls (I’ve done it myself), but how different is this to getting up at 3am to get to the airport for an early flight? Is that acceptable? The challenges of meeting scheduling can only be resolved so far, whether someone chooses to attend at inconvenient times becomes a matter of personal choice. Flexibility is the key, there is certainly no need or expectation for people to work 24/7, and so in international business, flexibility in employees’ working days is becoming normality.

Be Aware of Public Holidays

One thing I have learnt in scheduling global team calls and physical meetings is that it always seems to be a public holiday somewhere in the world. You can look up these holidays through various means online as a first line of action, though these can be affected by local and regional variations in some countries, but ultimately check with your team members when scheduling.

1. I always feel bad about one big meeting I held in Singapore when I had one of my team from the US over. The meeting was on July fourth, and being a Brit it just never entered my head that July fourth is ‘the 4th of July’, the big US Independence Day holiday! But equally, there were other public holidays and business commitments for other attendees in the surrounding weeks, so we just had to go ahead. I owe that guy to this day. 
2. Another experience I had in a different business was the first time I travelled to our big factory in India. I had arranged with the General Manager to visit on a date in the autumn which was convenient to my diary. I booked the flights and hotel, I travelled over and arrived at the factory, only to discover that this particular day was Diwali, a major public holiday and the single biggest religious festival for Hindus, and that the GM had got all the employees to come into work that day because I was visiting. How bad did I feel? He should have told me, I could have easily changed my visit date. But because of his culture he felt my visit was too important, and because of my cultural naivety at that time, I didn’t think to check things like public holidays. Big lesson learnt.

Have Face to Face Meetings

Don’t keep all your team interactions in the virtual world. Team building and bonding, creating shared experiences and getting to know each other on an informal basis are vital to enhancing team performance and this is only really going to happen if you get people face to face occasionally. There are also some subjects just too complex and subtle to try to have a meaningful virtual discussion, particularly strategic ones.

1. Chances are that some or many of the people in the team know each other through other projects or other business activities, which is a good start, but ultimately, at some point, you are all going to need to get on an airplane. For big important subjects, particularly global senior management teams, with activities that will run continuously, I tend to get people together face to face twice a year, with virtual sessions in between. For big global projects, which will have a beginning and an end, I will certainly have a face to face kick off meeting, but beyond that I will judge the frequency of the need for face to face meetings as the project progresses.
2. When scheduling face to face meetings, you need to appreciate that international travel can be a very tiring experience for people. I have travelled internationally for 40-60% of my time for the last 20+ years, so I know the physical challenges and the personal commitment involved. I loved the travel, there is no denying it is a great feeling walking down the road and pinching yourself, saying ‘I’m in Buenos Aires, I’m in Shanghai, I’m in Singapore’. International business travel gives you a lot of life enhancing opportunities, but it can also be a life destroying opportunity given that you will be away from your spouse and family, so a delicate balance is required. As my career grew, so did the international travel. I would be regularly circumnavigating the globe and away from home for weeks at a time. I remember one particularly crazy trip, when I was living in China at the time, where I flew from China to Europe for 2 days of meetings, then back to Asia to Bangkok for 4 days, then back to Europe for 4 days, then back to China. You need a lot of stamina for such trips. The worst trips were, when based in Europe, I would spend one week in Asia, followed immediately by 1 week in the US, the time zone jumps were crippling and I would regularly fall ill whilst in the US. Several years ago, after one particular 6 week tour of duty around the world, I had people start asking me if I was okay. I had lost a lot of weight and was looking pretty unhealthy. It turns out I had reached the point of physical exhaustion due to such a long period of poor sleep, and all those endless business dinners. I learnt a valuable lesson from that episode.
3. The number one thing I have learnt about international travel is that the single most important resource is sleep. Without enough quality sleep you cannot perform, you cannot deliver effectively the job that you travelled there to do in the first place. So schedule meeting starts to allow a little lie in time for people to catch up on jet lag, 9 or 9:30 instead of 8:30am. Some people deal with jet lag much worse than others. I remember one senior colleague who wouldn’t turn up for overseas meetings until midday because he just couldn’t handle the fatigue. Eventually he had to leave the business, and settled for a job without international travel. Otherwise it would have destroyed his health.

Run Virtual Meetings as Effectively as Possible

On the surface, running a virtual meeting over Skype, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts or other virtual meeting platform, or even over speaker phone, should be little different to running a face to face meeting, you still need an agenda, you still need action planning, you still need time keeping, etc. Meeting frequency will be set by the pace of the project. But there are three aspects of virtual meetings that require specialist focus compared to face to face meetings;

1. Involve everyone – when running face to face meetings it is important to try to get everyone involved, especially the naturally quieter members of the team. This is a much more challenging thing to achieve when your meeting is run over Skype. When running a meeting in English, if you have team members who have English as their second (or sometimes third) language, then the challenges for them of keeping up with the conversation face to face are amplified significantly when the meeting is virtual, and these people in particular can go silent. It is important to talk during these meetings in a slow, methodical tone, and avoid colloquialisms. Meetings which have a mixture of face to face people, plus others calling in on speaker phone are particularly challenging, as those in the room naturally take over the conversation and speed up their speech when they get enthusiastic about a topic. So you need to pay extra attention to stopping occasionally and asking for a contribution from those on the other end of the phone. How different team members choose to contribute and interact can also be a cultural thing, so watch out for this behaviour. Video conferencing is always a better alternative to phone calls because at least there is a partial visual presence of the person in the room, but only if you can reliably action the IT, otherwise the connection issues can bring down your meeting.
2. Reliable communications – schedule the meeting agenda to expect some IT down time, because there are always connection issues to deal with. The more people dialling in, and the more countries involved, the more the bandwidth will be challenged. Even recently I have had to close down more than one Skype meeting because of this and get everyone to dial into a telephone conference number, so always have a telephone conference account as a backup to use in emergencies.
3. Use appropriate IT tools – virtual meetings can be enhanced with collaboration software to facilitate things like remote brainstorming and document sharing in real time, of which there are many products on the market, and they are always getting better. The challenge with introducing new software is that there will always be a period of learning required when it is clumsy to use for the team, and if you introduce too many new software tools, too often, then people just get confused. Frequently, new software is just not used to its full potential, and the team end up only using the most basic functions of collaboration software. You really need to consider picking one or two and doing offline training on these tools, otherwise the clumsiness that ensues will quickly give them a bad name within the team and they will start to hinder the meeting flow instead of helping. This is an area that I am confident we will see some great strides in over the next few years. The difference between video conferencing today versus even 10 years ago is enormous, so I am sure we will see the same with these software collaboration tools.

I hope you find some of these tips useful. If you have any additional tips and experiences to share, please drop me a line, I’d love to hear of more ways to improve in this challenging area of management.

The author, Dr Andy Wynn, is Managing Director of TTIP Consulting, and has over 30 years of experience in leading the profitable growth of emerging technologies in a variety of industrial and high tech sectors. He was previously Chief Technology Officer of the largest Division of Morgan Advanced Materials plc, the global manufacturer of advanced materials and industrial engineering solutions. He is author of the recent book ‘Transforming Technology into Profit - A guide to leading new ideas through the complexities of the corporate world and transforming them into successful new products’, available on Amazon.