Changes in headquarters and overseas regular meetings

This blog is to think about how to improve the cooperation between headquarters and overseas branch.

So-called cooperation, the most common form is meeting. Furthermore, meeting is not only a“Form”, but also has the same rich attributes and changes with external conditions and“Evolution”, which contains the lessons learned and the direction of progress, this blog collated the relevant notes and thinking.

Table 1: changes in regular meetings between headquarters and overseas divisions

The first column of Table 1: three phases

Three stages (as above: overseas stage, transition stage, headquarter stage), following the head office in China's overseas enterprises, gradually deepen the understanding of overseas, from the flat decentralization, gradually to the hierarchical centralization of power process.

The first row of Table 1: the broad categories of participants

Can be divided into vertical line leaders, horizontal line leaders, and head.

The second row of Table 1: Specific participant roles.

For example, the vertical line is the team unit responsible for a vertical business, usually with different metrics (for example, CS team’s metric are customer satisfaction and cost of service; marketing team’s metric are Roi and incremental orders).

Horizontal lines are roles that span multiple vertical lines. The two most common types are:

• those that are based on the overall market
• those that are based on a larger horizontal project.

The common denominator is that the indicator is the aggregate output after the integration of the vertical operational indicators.

As it expands overseas, the characteristics and processes of regular meetings changes under the following path:

1 Overseas leadership

In the early days of overseas expansion, when everything is unknown, such as customers, markets, and competitors, regular (usually weekly) meetings at this stage focus on reviewing data from the previous cycle, and listed by overseas colleagues“Encountered any quality problems”, the headquarters for acceptance and update.

In a word: overseas-led“Problem listening” conferences, listening to the quality of the problem, specifically for the experience and service of two categories.

The participants are mainly the overseas market leaders, and the headquarters of the docking personnel, as well as the overall decision-makers. The purpose of this arrangement is to give full play to the role of the head of decision-making in the absence of overseas demand entering the headquarters full scope for the time being, and to ensure that no matter the size, there is an opportunity to be heard.

The communication link is:

from oversea leaders

to -> headquarters docking person

to -> headquarters internal departments.

The number of people in the meeting at this time is about 20.

2 Transition between overseas and headquarters

As the overseas market enters the development track, the regular meeting also changes from the pure overseas leading, becomes both sides half.

Regular (usually weekly) meetings still have“Quality of experience and service issues encountered,” but the number of abstract projects is increasing. Instead of just listening to what is being said from abroad, the company has added headquarters to compile projects based on what is being said from abroad, and regularly share and collect feedback on the progress of its road-map.

As the situation overseas is no longer unfamiliar to the participants and compared to the initial period, headquarters departments have developed a number of concepts, started to have a stable representation at meetings, and shortened the link for collecting questions.

At this stage, the need for head presence is reduced due to the improvement of departmental self-drive, and head presence is only required in the event of conflict or when important information is available.

The communication link is:

from oversea leaders

to -> headquarters docking person and departments docking person

to -> headquarters docking person to gather road-map unified update.

At this time the number of meetings mainly added the department contacts, about 50-60 people.

3. Headquarters-led phase

When the work of overseas parts, integrated into the headquarters groups, forming a one-to-one correspondence, then regular meetings (usually biweekly meetings) enter into the third stage, headquarters-led.

Since the quality QA work has been aligned with the original processes of the headquarters teams, there is no need for a specific meeting agenda to list most issues. The quality QA issues at this stage are resolved outside of the meeting, skip or just make a status update during the meeting.

There has also been a significant change in the admissibility of issues, as the work has been deeply divided into groups, and the pressure on the middle distributors has become so heavy that it has naturally evolved to the point where overseas demands are directly reflected in the groups' docking persons.

This stage of the meeting does not actually need head present, only need to be in charge of the vertical and horizontal middle layer to ensure priority, head in a diving observation state.

The communication link is:

from oversea leaders

to -> department docking person

to -> the headquarters docking person only needs to pay attention to the progress.

Each department docking person communicates their respective headquarters road-map.

Interestingly, since this stage of the most clear reality into the overseas (one-to-many) , so the conference organizers from the headquarters docking person, become the overseas head.

That's the equivalent of having a bunch of copies of the structure of the early meetings, up to about 150 people.

Good Place to do it (lessons learned and the direction of progress)

• First, the primary purpose of regular meetings is to reduce the information cost of“Geographic distance” between headquarters and overseas divisions. Through the formation of a routine, periodic overseas feedback, continuous exchange of views with the vertical and horizontal head of headquarters, and head to provide leadership occasions.

Both early, mid and 3rd stage meetings have played an active role in this sense, and as the phase progresses, more and more headquarters resources are involved in the meetings, the total amount of human and material resources that can be mobilized through meetings is constantly increasing.

• Second, in addition to geographic distance, breaking up the invisible black boxes of information that are created by teams working in a specific area is also a major focus of the conference.

Complex internal cost calculations, trade-offs between price advantage and service costs, and so on, can be pushed through quickly at this conference by having direct contact with the respective vertical leaders.

• Third, it is the growth of the team.

After years of regular meetings to break information monopolies and develop ideas from a local perspective, the accumulation of knowledge and the collision of ideas in this process will naturally be reflected in the overseas groups and the headquarters groups, over time the generation of specialized personnel proficient in overseas operations docking talent.

In terms of experience, these growth of team often appears in the headquarters and overseas QA quality problems docking person.

Something Bad (lessons learned and the direction of progress)

The first is vertical and horizontal.

After internationalization goes deep into each group, it is equivalent to completing a“Delegation” from overseas to headquarters, with equal powers and responsibilities, and after headquarters groups assume greater powers, this has resulted in greater responsibility, reflected in meetings where the topics have shifted from a single, coherent horizontal theme to a professionalized, vertically oriented group of headquarters plans to be shared.

It's not hard to see the implications of this process, in a word: jobs with a clear division of labor, more resources and more specialized solutions, and in a horizontal coordination position, getting through the plan is harder because there is no single interface.

The second is specific details of making things happen.

Because the regular meeting, can only discuss the direction of the outline, it is difficult to achieve detailed discussion, and the specific details of the design, and implementation of the direction of control, the participation of this meeting is limited. A new information black box has been formed in the small-scale discussions between various departments and overseas.

If there is disagreement in these black boxes, for example, that the priorities of headquarters do not always match the needs of overseas, or that there is resistance from cross-group horizontal coordination, such as when leadership coordination is required, at the later regular meetings, there will be the following questions:

• The first is that because a lot of quality QA issues are discussed in advance offline, and the answers are resolved before the meeting (not the problem) , there is less content available for regular meetings, and head has no way to coordinate.
• Secondly, because head’s representation is not permanent, if there are problems that require head to lead, which have more internal pressure, and because there is no certainty of getting advice from the decision-making level, it may lead to fewer and fewer people want to expose the problem, if the problem is exposed more slowly, it's not hard to understand why the solution is landing more slowly.
• The third is also a team growth problem, the meeting of the problem-solving dispersed to the groups, the speed of talent development will be affected. The overall situation is actually clear in overseas side , and from overseas side , after all, do not have enough information and resources. On the other hand, the headquarters with sufficient resources, there may be a one or two years do not appear to be a coherent, consistent advance of the horizontal pull project talent, resulting in the succession.

If we can see the problem clearly, we can reactivate some of the strengths of our early meetings in a targeted way, such as:

• Lower information barriers, 3rd stage regular meetings due to the reduction of reported problems link (go offline) , the problem has a resurgence. For example, a common guest misunderstanding, because the symptoms scattered in the various small events, small-scale will delay the upgrade;
• Strengthen leadership interventions to overcome the problem that the priorities and interests of vertical groups are not necessarily identical. For example, if all the vertical groups of indicators are easier to achieve in Asia, the European demand for comprehensive online enhancement may drag on for a year or two without sufficient resources;
• Pay attention to team accumulation, strengthen the emerging in the meeting, the various docking node talent attention and retention. The international talent identified in the early years through long-term practice at conferences can easily be lost in the process of“HQ” because it does not fit into the hierarchical culture, for example:

It is common to see one side is flexible acceleration, the pursuit of advancing work overseas style, and the other is based on division of labor, forced to assign less efficient way to the headquarters level style, it is easy to create a conflict of ideas.

We need to identify and protect potential overseas headquarter staff in a timely manner, avoiding hierarchical “Gresham's law” so that when the organizational structure becomes more international, the business is immediately understood, also understand the overseas expansion team preparation.

In my opinion, whether the organization has the conditions to enter the fourth stage of regular meetings -- that is, to mitigate the above management problems, to have the ability to deploy resources among the various groups at headquarters without losing consistency and continuity -- the core is still people, people's core is the environment and climate, and the status of meeting is a mirror, the evolution of the meeting, is the mirror of changing organization.

As this article is to sort out the situation and ideas set out as the goal, there is not much about the implementation details.

Thanks for reading.