The New Management Challenge:
Eliminating Distance

By Charles Gancel and Alison Perlo.

We can all think of at least one team where everyone in it is of the same culture, speaks the same language and is located in the same place, and yet the people still don't work effectively together as a team. Just imagine then the additional complexities and challenges when members of the team are thousands of miles apart, in different time zones, speaking various languages and belonging to very different cultures (national and often corporate as well). The only thing tying them together are sound waves and the objectives to which they have all committed. And often hastily at that. This is the new management challenge: eliminating distance. While modern technology has done wonders to 'bring people together', there are still limits. The last obstacle is still bringing 'people' together.

Take an international OEM sales team for a multinational group. The leader of the team is in Brussels. The members are in the USA, Hong Kong and Australia. As it is too costly to bring them together to the same physical location more than once or twice per year, the team leader organizes a phone conference. In Brussels it is two in the afternoon. Jean has just come back from lunch and makes the call from his office with his feet up on the desk and feeling a bit sleepy. In Florida it is 8 in the morning. Kevin is stuck in a traffic jam and, annoyed, makes the call from his cell phone amongst the blasting of horns and the static on the line. In Hong Kong it is 8 in the evening that same day. Canh is staying late at the office, again, to make the call and is not thrilled about it. He knows his wife won't be either. In Australia it is 11 p.m. Michael is making the call from his home and can only whisper into the phone as his three young children are asleep in the adjoining rooms.

So technically speaking this team is together; however the members are in a very different psychological space and time. Their concentration level, fatigue, receptiveness and so on are quite different. How can they then understand the same thing? They hang up the phone convinced to be in synch and only discover much later, often too late...

Working in "virtual teams" is the natural result of three factors: the development of large multinational organizations, the optimization of costs and structures (matrix organizations) and the explosion of communication technologies. Managers today must operate on an 'world scale' on specific international projects, while quite often maintaining local responsibilities and remaining in local teams. They see information channels get blurry, decision making processes become obscure, loyalties multiplied and great internal complexity (or should we say confusion...). While the basic tenets of teamwork and team leadership remain true, a remote and often intercultural team cannot be organized and led in the same way traditional co-located ones could. There are specific practices that are necessary to allow this kind of team to reinforce its spirit, motivation, effectiveness and consistency across time, culture, technology and distance in order to operate more effectively and be productive faster within a complex and international organization.

In the following article we will present Inter Cultural Management Associate's Remote Team Development Model. This model identifies the areas that are particularly key for a remote teams success. It was developed through work over the past 15 years with international remote teams in American and European Fortune 500 companies. We have identified best practices for each of the items. Our work at ICM consists not only in helping launch a team successfully, but also in providing on-going support and review for the team and the team leader. In this brief article, however, we will concentrate our comments more specifically on a team project's launch phase, the period in which the team needs to form its technical and human connections to support the members throughout the project, as its importance is often greatly underestimated.

Trust through accurate leadership

The first challenge a remote team faces is trust. Trust is key, as the leader must feel confident when a member reports on a local situation and what he is doing about it that this information is accurate. The leader cannot spend her life on a plane going to see with her own eyes. A team member who does not accurately present the situation cannot survive a long time, nor can the team. It is the team leader, during the launch of the team, who must ensure that the level of commitment of each team member and the degree of mutual trust is high enough for the team to be able to function efficiently once everyone is scattered. In order to do so, the team leader must work on 5 different areas with the team.

1. Understanding the context of each team member

Each team member is working in a specific context, different from that of the others. The subsidiary in Florida is not the same as the one in Moscow; the General Manager in Singapore has a very different personality from the one in Paris. The headquarters has its own specific challenges...

Each team member is dealing with very different local constraints. The first thing a remote team leader needs to do is to understand and recognize these differences to effectively support each team member in his/her given context.

Often a team leader will communicate not only with his or her team members, but also with their local bosses. It is essential to convince them of the importance of this 'Group' project which is often experienced locally as an intrusion or a theft of resources (who pays the plane ticket?). As the team leader often has no hierarchical authority over the local bosses of the team members, he or she must develop extensive negotiation skills.

2. Define and promote the identity of the team

Because the team is not located with everyone under the same roof, because the team members don't take up a table at the company restaurant or often reserve a meeting room, a virtual team can easily go unnoticed, have no image. It is essential to promote its mission, objectives and results, not only within the team but also throughout the organization. "We have promoted our team in our company by developing a real internal marketing plan: posters, newsletter, web page and so on," says one team leader. Building the identity of the team is essential as it will help build a feeling of belonging amongst the team members that will stay with them even when they are far from one another. Promotion is crucial as it will help build a feeling of recognition and support (for Human Resource systems, one of the biggest difficulties is in evaluating performance for remote teams and providing recognition).

3. Develop relations and agree on practices

The quality of relations established in the launch phase is key for the endurance of the team as well as for mutual trust. Getting to know one another, sharing strong and even emotional experiences, help to build a relationship that the people can draw on when they are far apart. This 'emotional glue' is priceless. As one of our clients says, "it is much harder to hang up on someone you've played football with". Similarly, establishing a code of conduct with principles of behavior that takes into account the cultures of the various individuals, goes a very long way to avoiding misunderstandings that can lead to ill feelings. How people relate to time, commitment, leadership, information sharing and so on vary tremendously from one culture to another. Creating a common language where everyone has a shared understanding of what words mean (for example, is an objective something to reach at all costs, or more a far away target to aim at but not necessarily reach?) at the beginning of a project will create greater efficiency and limit conflicts.

4. Processes and systems: agree on ways of working together

You cannot improvise at a distance. You cannot 'manage by walking around', or get everyone together quickly around 11 a.m. for a little readjustment the way a co-located team leader can. As such, the way the team will work together must be anticipated, discussed (taking into account the local constraints of the team members as well as the characteristics of the project) and written once the team has taken them on. It is much easier to get team members to comply with what they helped create and agreed upon in the beginning than to rules that were simply imposed. This contract that each member will sign can serve as the spinal column for the project and the team. The more each member lives up to what he or she promised, the more the mutual trust in the team will increase.

5. Optimize communication technologies

Fax, telephone, videoconferences, Internet, Intranet, and so on. These tools are both a source of effectiveness and of confusion. Who has not opened up his or her Email after being away for a few days to find 420 messages waiting; and for many of which you don't know why you were put in copy. The poor use of technologies turn the tools against the users, and vice versa. As one manager told us, "now that our company has videoconferencing equipment, we use it for everything. Even when a fax would be more effective!" The team must think about its choices in communication technologies and set rules for their use.

In conclusion, what truly distinguishes the development of virtual teams from those of co-located teams is the necessity to do everything at once and from the beginning: the team must form, build its identity, establish relationships amongst the members, set team norms and performance criteria as well as determine how everyone will work together. A co-located team has the luxury of being able to do these things over time. The virtual team needs to build strong foundations in just days while the team is physically together during the launch. Otherwise, it becomes extremely difficult to build team identify, for example, when everyone is spread throughout the world. Afterwards, it is up to the team leader to make sure that all the team members follow through with what they promised. The team leader needs to develop Culture Bridging Skills(, competencies that will help him or her to operate across distances, time and culture and to build bridges between the various team members to maximize effectiveness.

Charles Gancel
Cgancel@icmassociates.com

Alison Perlo
Aperlo@gateway.net

Inter Cultural Management Associates (ICM) is a Paris-based consulting firm which since 1983 has helped managers and organizations work effectively across cultural orders, be they national, corporate or functional.

Inter Cultural Management Associates

2, rue de l'Eglise ­ 92200 Neuilly sur Seine

icm@icmassociates.com