Wharton's Tips for Managing Global Teams

Awhile back, I wrote about the challenges of managing remote teams. If you read that post and thought about how difficult it would be to make a remote team work across various cities and three hour time differences, then imagine what's involved in running a global team.

The Knowledge@Wharton website recently published "Locals, Cosmopolitans and Other Keys to Creating Successful Global Teams," an article dealing with this very subject. According to Nancy Rothbard, a management professor at Wharton, "The challenges are really exacerbated in global teams where you have even greater potential barriers, especially when there are different cultural norms."

The article mentions a few strategies to help your global teams work effectively together:

• Make sure meetings are not only held at times convenient for headquarters. Rotate meeting times, so team members in certain countries don't always have to be the ones ready for middle-of-the-night conference calls.
• Confront cultural and communication differences early and directly in order to avoid future conflict.
• Compose your team of a mix of what Wharton management professor Martine Haas calls "locals," who are experts on the country they represent and "cosmopolitans," who speak several languages, have lived in many countries and can see the global significance of the team's actions.

Projects can be progressing 24 hours a day. You'll be doing software development in Silicon Valley and then the software testing is being done in India while those people [in California] are sleeping.

Globe image courtesy of Flickr user Minnesota Historical Society, CC 2.0