Challenges of Managing a Multicultural Team
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Managing multicultural teams in multinational companies poses challenges due to cultural differences and distance, making communication and team bonding crucial. Remote leaders must maintain presence and support through regular interactions and feedback, while recognizing individual performances to foster motivation. In conflict situations, understanding cultural nuances and making timely decisions are essential for effective teamwork and successful outcomes.
Challenges of Managing a Multicultural Team
- 1. Challenges of Managing a Multicultural Team
- 2. Multinational companies demand multicultural teams, leaders have to manage different teams in different places, with different culture. They have to succeed to have their teams committed and motivated to achieve a common goal. Cultural differences could be a trap, if not managed adequately. Multicultural Teams
- 3. Distance Matters Face to face meetings, cafeteria talk, lunch time is not a constant to remote leaders and multi regional/ multi cultural teams. It makes more difficult to create a bond, which lead to teamwork.
- 4. Communication Clear communication regarding corporate values, roles and responsibilities, objectives and best practices are crucial to give the direction to the team. Although formal communication, via emails, business meetings, video conference are instruments to guarantee understanding of the above, we cannot forget that informal communication is essential to keep cohesiveness. Remote leaders should take advantage of formal meeting to keep track of people’s “state of mind”, client relationship status, work environment, even social and economic country situation. These subjects directly affect team performance.
- 5. Independent Sources of Feedback It also helps to have alternative sources of information regarding team and individuals’ performance, attitude and behavior. Sometimes team or individual performance could be misinterpreted as a cultural difference, then a trustable local source and 360 performance evaluation can help to identify the difference.
- 6. Be Present and supportive A remote leader should be present. Although it seems contradictory, the team should fell the leader presence, though weekly meetings, when he/she shares business news and follows team’s issues and deliverables. When there is a new team member, daily talk is also recommended to guarantee adequate handover and integration. These actions do not substitute a local presence, then regular visits are important to have the face to face factor, teams have to fell supported and sure the leader will be always “there” to support and track their performance.
- 7. Recognition Use the best performances as examples to be followed. It will help in two different ways, the individual will fell recognized and it will give the example to be followed by other teams. It also be useful if the leader can leverage an individual expertise to other teams, through a regional responsibility based on his/her domain area, when best practices can be shared or specific support is locally demanded.
- 8. Managing Conflicts • Adaptation – Understand and adapt to cultural changes to figure out how to take them in your advantage • Structural Intervention – once understood the cultural differences, take the appropriate speech/ actions and share roles & responsibilities based on their knowledge and cultural behavior. • Managerial Intervention – Be the decision maker, when cultural decision making process don’t match among teams. A decision making process could be endless due to different thinking, then you need to stablish productive norms • Exit Strategy – When there is no agreement about a matter which jeopardize operations or product delivery, sometimes the best action is to remove one or both members. Source: J.Brett, K.Behfar and M.C. Kern “Managing Multicultural Teams”, HBR, Nov 2006
- 9. Conclusion There is no recipe to guarantee a successful multicultural teamwork. The successful leaders on this task, usually understand and respect cultural differences and take in his/her advantage the alternative ways of thinking. However, when there is no time to reach an agreement and decision has to be taken, the leader should be responsible for the decision and actions to guarantee delivery. Also here Darwin’s law works, you have to adapt to survive.
- 10. Other Sources • Neely, Tsedal. “Global Teams that Work”, HBR, Oct 2015 • Meyer, Erin. “Managing Multicultural Teams”, HR Magazine, Nov 2014 Images Sources • PAGE 1 http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-international-flag-cubes-image8331300 • PAGE 2 http://managerialdynamics.com/images/iStock_0team00004490817XSmall.jpg • PAGE 3 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kt5AXWTf4Ww/UJFsoXeFutI/AAAAAAAAATs/Weq0DTxiQDA/s1600/Sem+t%C3%ADtulo.png • PAGE 4 http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/strategic-communication-vs-communication • PAGE 5 http://tonyzambito.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/listening.jpg • PAGE 6 • PAGE 7 • PAGE 8 • PAGE 9