noFUD – No Fear Uncertainty or Doubt

I don’t know when it happened.

Year 1: 2 people 2 countries 2  time zones.
Year 2: 11 people 4 countries 5 time zones.

Over the course of my team’s growth it became apparent that we needed to grow globally especially develop an offshore team to be cost competitive. So I went on a hiring spree ending up with a 10 person team spread over US, India, Israel and Australia. Managing a global team was always a desire and it came with a sucker punch of challenges built in. Apart from the usual scheduling,HR and team cohesiveness issues of working with a large team, some of the challenges were

- kudos emails in foreign languages

- sensitivity around organizational hierarchy

- crazy finance rules and labor laws

- hearing “yes” all the time is a red flag. The local teams almost always have a way to improve the process to suit their environments, don’t let them accept you unopposed

- discuss the wins and the losses

Things I learnt

- Inconvenience people in rotation. especially true for team calls

- Use instant communication. IM’s have made the world an easier place to manage

- Make friends with local legal and HR staff. They can help you out of situations that you don’t even realize you are in.

- LiveMeetings and video conferencing are critical. Video conferencing during meetings helped my team connect.

- A well stamped passport makes for happy teams. Visit them often.

- Value collaborative effort. It takes a lot for someone from Israel and India to collaborate of their own initiative. Encourage and reward it.

- Get your management to spend 1:1 time with them. Out of sight really is out of mind.

- Always have a local backup person they can turn too for immediate needs. Just in case you are scuba diving on a Sunday when a deal is waiting to get closed in Israel.

- Most importantly what worked for me was just letting the team know the problems and complexity involved. Since a manager always tries to hire people smarter then himself, more often then not, they come up with better solutions. The team is a self correcting mechanism.

- Spend time learning skills that your team will need to help you enable them. I realized that I am their advocate to the organization and need to spend time learning the do’s and dont’s to help propel my teams aspirations.

I’m still learning but definitely enjoying the challenge. Comments on your experiences/tips nurturing teams are welcome.

This entry was posted on November 1, 2007 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Business, Leadership. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.