In our previous posts, we declared that forging a shared purpose and identity across multinational teams, paired with clarity of communication — via multilingualism — and accountability via authenticity are essential to finding success as a global leader and achieving unprecedented management results.
Once we take ownership of the fact that we — members of a global team — are accountable to understand and build relationships with the multinational leaders we work beside to produce management results, the question becomes: How?
Forging an Authentic Partnership
Know this: you must go. You must literally go and engage others in their natural environment.
For example, two members of a global team — again, in Europe and Asia — would be well-served by investing the sweat equity to get on a plane and spend time beside their counterpart; working in earnest to get a sense of the unique cultural and environmental factors that affect their decision-making processes.
By investing in needed face time, leaders will create experiences for each other wherein they will need to compromise, take charge, and maintain accountability for any number of variables faced by a global brand.
In practice, we’ve witnessed global teams elect to hold quarterly meetings in different parts of the world; an effective tactic that prevents the team from adopting, or being forced to assimilate to, the parent company’s national identity.
Maintaining Cohesiveness
While there’s no replacement for rubbing elbows with members of your global leadership team, recent advancements in high-end technology have closely replicated the experience of being in the same room together.
Telepresence — especially in tandem with robotics technologies that allow for team members to roam an international office without scheduling meetings — is an incredible way to be present at multiple locations around the globe in a single day and advance management results. For organizations that have the means to employ these tools, we highly recommend doing so weekly.
However, regardless of the tools or tactics you rely on, members of global teams must create shared leadership experiences. To succeed on a global level, they must become one voice and enroll in one, multi-faceted view for how they seek to take their enterprise into the future.
