How Should You Manage a Global Team?

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Hal Weitzman: Managers increasingly find themselves working with colleagues around the world who come from different cultures, speak different languages, and face a different market environment. So what is the best way to manage a global team and how can leaders instill a sense of teamwork among employees scattered around the world?

Welcome to The Big Question, the video series from Chicago Booth Review. I’m Hal Weitzman, and with me to discuss the issue is an expert panel.

Reid Hastie is the Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science at Chicago Booth. Kristen Castillo is director of marketing, strategy, and execution at AbbVie Pharmaceuticals. Pedro Faria is founding partner of Tarpon Investments and former CEO of BRF, the Brazilian food company. And Chris Baker is senior vice president at Parexel, a biopharmaceutical-services provider.

Panel, welcome to The Big Question.

Reid Hastie, let me start with you. Let’s just talk about teamwork in general. What makes it so hard leading a team?

Reid Hastie: Well, first of all, you’ve already said it. Teamwork is harder than individual work.

Hal Weitzman: Is it just because hell is other people?

(Panelists laughing)

Reid Hastie: There’s just many more layers of conceptual and nonverbal and tacit skills, intellectual skills. There’s just a lot more subtasks to complete when you’re working with a team than when—

Hal Weitzman: And just define what you mean, sorry, what was that distinction? Tacit skills and intellectual skills, meaning?

Reid Hastie: I intellectualize because I’m a professor, but I think of there being two big categories of skills relevant to teamwork: explicit, conscious, deliberate skills, the kind of thing that you might be able to be taught in a class or by reading a really thoughtful book or listening to a colleague explain how they solved a problem. And then tacit skills that are more like athletic accomplishments, this sort of ability to convey a sense of humility or trustworthiness, or the ability to moderate your own emotional reactions, sense another person’s emotional reactions, and then in turn moderate their reactions—for example, when you’re giving them tough feedback or trying to encourage them to be motivated to perform a really tough task. The tacit side is obviously a lot tougher to teach in a classroom or to tell someone how to do, and most of us pick that up through a lifetime of what we call slow learning, tiny nudge-like learning experiences as we have good interactions with people and poor interactions with people.

Hal Weitzman: Could I crudely translate that into, kind of, IQ and EQ? Emotional intelligence?

Reid Hastie: That’s a common way to describe the difference. I think it’s more than just the emotional intelligence on that side and I think the kind of intelligence that is good at the deliberate kind of teamwork stuff isn’t the same thing measured by an IQ test. It’s a kind of practical, “how to manage people, “how to achieve objectives” kind of intelligence. That’s a little different than scoring high on the SAT test.

Hal Weitzman: And so those are some of the challenges. Is the international dimension, does it just aggravate all of that and just make it much more complex?

Reid Hastie: Well, I should be modest because I’ve never done international teamwork. I’m looking forward to hearing from the panel. I’ve had international collaborations, particularly strong and intense, with people in Japan and Germany, but it’s always been me and the other researcher. So it hasn’t really been a big team. Even there there have been additional subtleties in the relationships, but they worked out very well.

But with a team, there’s obviously four big differences. One: country-culture differences. Germans and Japanese and Americans trying to solve a management problem together.

Then there are company cultural differences. The branch of the company or the satellite consultant that we’re working with in India may not have the same experience within the company itself as we do and so the sort of day-to-day conventions and habits, even though we’re all in the same company, might be different, and different in ways that they’re less consistent. And then on top of that, of course, there are the country or the international differences. And the other two issues are critical.

They’re necessary conditions to effective teamwork. You have to have solved the electronic-media-communication problems. If those fail, everything falls apart. I’ve had endless stories from students in my MBA and executive education classes about the conference team-collaboration session that went wrong because the phones didn’t work or the Skype didn’t work or the something about the technicals didn’t work. And then the fourth condition is just the temporal asynchrony. And sometimes we’re lucky.

Hal Weitzman: The time difference.

Reid Hastie: Right, sometimes we’re lucky. We may be collaborating with a team in São Paulo and we’re in Chicago and then there isn’t that big an asynchrony, but often we’re trying to collaborate with a team that’s in India and France and Chicago, and that’s gonna require some brilliant time management.

Hal Weitzman: And not everyone can, just cannot convene at the same time sometimes.

Reid Hastie: That’s true, and it can be a differential strain on different parties and then they can make inferences about being disrespected, and so you can just see immediately the layers of what sounds like just a timing issue for the sort of climate and the performance of the whole team.

Hal Weitzman: So this is tricky. Kristen Castillo, has that been your experience and what’s sort of the biggest challenge for you?

Kristen Castillo: Yes, there’s definitely challenges, cultural challenges as you mentioned, time-difference challenges. You mentioned having conference calls with India, with Europe, with the US, and I have done that. You make it work. I have been on numerous conference calls at 2 or 3 in the morning. I think that’s one of the biggest things that you learn: to be very, very flexible when you’re working with global teams.

And my family understands that. I have had the conference call at 2 or 3 in the morning where my at-the-time four-year-old daughter comes sleepwalking into the room where I’m doing a conference call and you have to, you know, adjust a little bit. But at the end of the day, it’s a real give-and-take, I feel, with the cultural differences, with the language differences. We get something from our colleagues who are overseas and they get something from us. And when you keep that in mind, that it’s this give-and-take, it works much better.

Hal Weitzman: OK, but does that mean that you sort of meet them where they are or you both sort of come into the middle?

Kristen Castillo: We both meet in the middle. We both meet in the middle. There are times where I have spent every other week on the road going to meetings with my colleagues. I do like the face-to-face. Technology is wonderful, but especially when you’re new to a role, and you’re new to a team, and it’s global, you have to have that opportunity to build relationships and have that face-to-face, so I feel that’s important.

But at the same time, I’ve had my colleagues come to our home office here in Chicago so that we can work things out. And those weeks when they’re in Chicago—it’s called Chicago Week, but a lot of times we call it No Life Week because it’s just meeting after meeting after meeting, but you get so much accomplished.

Hal Weitzman: So at AbbVie, you make sure you bring people in to the mothership.

Kristen Castillo: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: And they understand the culture and everything else and that presumably strengthens the relationship you have after that.

Kristen Castillo: Absolutely, those are important.

Hal Weitzman: OK, thank you. Pedro Faria, what’s been your experience? What have you seen as the biggest challenges?

Pedro Faria: Yeah, I can say I’m very happy being part of this panel and I’m not sure I qualify as an expert in the field, but I was tasked a few years ago of running what was one of the few Brazilian multinationals. Having our home office in Brazil—not the ideal place to be because you are, first of all, Portuguese speaking. Not a lot of people speak Portuguese. And also we are in a time zone that, working here in the US, may not make a big difference, but most of our business was in the Middle East and Africa and Asia.

So it was kind of a very fun ride. And overall, I agree with Kris: it’s a lot of finding a compromise. I was doing my fair bit of conference calls at 2 in the morning. First there was resistance because, after all, we are the home office so we dictate the time zones, but I was, bit after bit, nudging in a way that we find ourselves in the middle. And surprisingly, people are people anywhere, and when you go back to the essential elements of a culture, everybody has a willingness to belong to a group. Everybody has this feeling of being on a mission or accomplishing something. And everybody has the overwhelming need of feeling safe, and making people safe goes a big way.

Hal Weitzman: I want to come back to that, actually, to ask about how you achieved that, that sense of mission when you’ve got people, as we said, spread out, different cultures or maybe absorbed from different companies.

But Chris Baker, let me bring you in. Have you had in your career a moment when, you know, you were just aware that these challenges were pretty steep, if not overwhelming? Can you tell us a story about that?

Chris Baker: Sure, when I was at Booth, I actually did a consulting project as a class, and it was 10 gentlemen and myself, and nine of them were Japanese, one was American, and myself. And so we ran a consulting project for a company that was thinking about expanding into Japan. And part of that was we went to Japan a number of times and it occurred to me one day as we were in Japan and all of the students were in this minivan traveling to the site, the person at the front was saying something and they gave an impression to them, the Japanese students, and then in the background, their attitude and perspective was completely different. And that was like such an aha moment for me that in the Japanese culture, they would never have conflict in that kind of manner. They would be polite. And how important it would be to then reach out one-on-one to find out what people are really thinking.

And that translates now all the time because we’re expanding. We have a large team in Japan. It’s really important for us as a clinical research organization. And so what I’ve done is I go there and I meet the people. I have dinner with them. I have a beer with them. I spend a lot of time with them building up that trust so that when we have these conference calls, you can ask them at the right time in the right way and you’ll get the honest answer. You have to understand that culture and that really helped.

Hal Weitzman: So the most basic thing, it sounds like, is just to meet people, and once you’ve met them at least once, then there’s some kind of relationship that you can build on using technology?

Chris Baker: You have to build that trust. You also have to understand that on a conference call, it’s really against certain cultures to speak up and speak against the idea. And so if you really want their opinion, you have to ask them in a different manner.

Hal Weitzman: OK, can you give us a tiny example of that?

Chris Baker: Sure, so we just had a project in China and we had these global conference calls trying to elicit feedback as what the issue is. How can we increase and how can we make this process better? We had a group of about 100 people on the line doing a WebEx and we weren’t getting any kind

of feedback that was meaningful. So we changed that and did smaller groups, you know,

two, three at a time, and had the manager speak to them and get feedback because it was part of the culture to be able to get that in a smaller group, to solicit the right kind of feedback.

Hal Weitzman: That puts in mind some of your work, Reid Hastie, about—and other psychologists—about what’s the optimal size for a group because sometimes you think of these, everyone in the company is on a conference. There’s hundreds of people. Maybe only three or four actually say anything. Is that the wrong way of thinking about it, that everyone is sort of like cc’ing everyone in the company on an email that says thanks or similar? Is there a better way of doing it by, as Chris Baker said, by breaking it down into smaller groups that actually function more as teams? What is that magic number?

Reid Hastie: The magic number is 4.7. (Hal laughs) That sounds like a joke.

Hal Weitzman: [inaudible]

Reid Hastie: That sounds like a joke, but there was a famous and revered management consultant named Richard Ackman, who decided he would answer the question of the optimal size of all groups and he concluded 4.7. He was a delightful, wonderful person, but I actually think he was serious about that number, which is kind of crazy, I think.

Obviously, the optimal size is gonna depend on the task and whether the group should be broken down into subgroups that then work in a coordinated manner or a hierarchical manner. Depends on the overall task, the objectives that are to be accomplished.

As a general principle, groups are too large. There are arguments for that because often younger, less-experienced members of the company or members of the team are on the team in order to get inculturated, in order to learn the conventions and the culture of the company and learn how to do the task. So because the teams aren’t just optimizing execution but they’re also bringing in and training people, that’s one really justifiable argument for oversize teams.

But anyway, in general, if you’re looking at team composition, you should ask yourself or tell yourself, “This one is probably too large if I just am aiming for efficiency.” I guess I’ve answered the question.

Hal Weitzman: OK, I mean, Kristen Castillo, has that been your experience? It seems generally too large?

Kristen Castillo: Yes, yes. I mean, the way I try to approach it is making sure you have the right people in the room, not everybody in the room. So it’s important to have those subject matter experts. So if we’re going in and meeting with a team in a different country, we want to make sure we have the right people there. Maybe it’s a brand manager, maybe it’s a pricing and reimbursement specialist, maybe it’s a medical affairs colleague, but having the right people there who are empowered to speak on behalf of the team has worked very well.

Hal Weitzman: OK, and Pedro Faria, how would you balance that then getting people to contribute while making sure that you have the people who actually have something to contribute and therefore you might fall into the trap of listening to the same people over and over again and coming to the same consensus, which might not be correct? How would you balance that, bringing new people in, new perspectives, versus depending on the people who always talk?

Pedro Faria: Yeah, so I think it’s a balancing act. I really like your comments, professor, because many times over, my conscious choice was to have too many people in the room because I wanted to make sure in the context of a globally expanding firm that everybody was heard and everybody was listening to the same, quote, unquote, source of truth.

Whereas, when you want to really get effective probably, smaller teams will be better, but, I think with an adequate dose of diverse perspectives. And so I’ve always enjoyed putting teams, which didn’t make sense perhaps at the starting point, but over time, they would become stronger. So there was a bit of the balancing act, not always going in the right way.

Hal Weitzman: Reid Hastie?

Reid Hastie: Let me just interject a footnote to my first comment. One argument for having larger teams is training and bringing new people into the team and into the company.

Another really good argument for it is to make the solution that the team comes up with acceptable, and that’s exactly what Pedro’s pointing to. And that’s, I consider, one of the subtasks that a good team and a good team leader solves. How do you get your solution accepted, especially when it’s not going to be a unanimous solution, either within the team or within the stakeholders who are affected by your solution?

Kristen Castillo: I find that to be very important, actually, too, because especially where I sit in the headquarters, and we, from a global perspective, will come up with a strategy for the rest of the world, but you can’t just sit in the home office and come up with a strategy and expect people to adopt it. You really do have to make sure that you do have that buy-in and that you get the input.

There’s certain countries, certain affiliates that we work with that it may be as more of a partnership, more of a give-and-take. They tell us what they need, and we try to figure out how we can help them. And then there are other countries, maybe smaller countries that aren’t as more resourced where we’re able to provide them with a lot of assistance and help and guidance.

To your point, you absolutely have to make sure you get that buy-in. You can’t just be setting the strategy in the home officeand expecting people to adopt it.

Hal Weitzman: And that must be more challenging if you’ve entered the market by buying a company that’s already been successful there and has its own strategy, and you then come in and say you have to . . . So my next question, Chris Baker, would be, I mean, how important is it to have a single strategy that is directed from the home office, and this is what we’ll do, and everybody falls in line, versus sort of a more . . . loose approach, where we set a vision, but the individual geographies or teams have the opportunity to implement it in the way that they know best?

Chris Baker: Yeah, that’s a great, great question. So when I was at Pfizer, I had a senior leadership position in South Africa for a number of years, and we lived there. And I saw that because I had come from the home office and I had this kind of command control, like, the home office says it, and then we implement it. But then when I was there, I realized there really are regional and situational differences.

So for South Africa, for example, the way that we really went about it was the key opinion leaders. It was a different strategy. It was a really key one for Lipitor when we launched it a number of years ago. And so that was a key. There was less advertising. People didn’t have TVs. The market was really different than the US. So we took that local strategy and we made it customized to the region and we focused on the key opinion leaders and those relationships of top doctors, and then we used that to roll it out and ended up with one of the highest market shares of the product in the world. So it was a good example in learning of you take a local strategy and you customize it for a country level.

Hal Weitzman: Similarly, I’m interested in how do you sort of create a culture? That’s always a problem, isn’t it? One company takes over another. The other company, which may have been very successful in its own right, which is why it’s been acquired, the employees there may feel a sense of loyalty to the old brand or the old way of doing things. And they say that most mergers and acquisitions fail and one of the ways they fail is the failure of integrating and instilling a culture.

At the same time, if you’re working at a big multinational, the people in the head office may have a very, let’s say, US- or Brazil-centric view of the world. How do you get the people in the home office to broaden their, so they think more globally, particularly, presumably you haven’t got a budget to fly everyone around the world all the time. So there are people who may have never left home office. How do you get them to think?

Pedro, I’m interested in what the Brazil experience was like. People in Brazil, how do you get them to think about, you know, the Middle East?

Pedro Faria: Yeah, that’s great. So maybe I can share a story here. Perhaps one of the most challenging projects I ever worked with was actually launching a manufacturing facility in Abu Dhabi. If you happen to know the place, there aren’t a lot of Emiratis around, so basically we ended up with a team comprising 22 different nationalities.

And I think the language problem was daunting, but then that took us to the essential parts of what our message was. And our message was a mission of feeding the world, of providing high-quality food. So one of the ways that we could symbolize that was we took immediate steps to have sort of a big upgrade in the food, in the canteen that the workers were working because we wanted to make sure that everybody understood food matters a lot. Safety was very important. So we also took early on a lot of the programs steering toward safety at work. I’m very proud to say that that facility has been operating since its launch in 2014 with zero accidents because that message of “We want you to be safe” percolated across so many different nationalities.

So I think when we essentialize certain aspects like safety, like a sense of purpose and mission, I think you accomplish far more than I would say a straight command and control, this is home office saying do this or do that. That I think is very ineffective.

Hal Weitzman: And that’s a great example, but it’s quite, it’s an example that’s based on a good benefit for them. What about something more challenging like culture, where you’re saying, “This is how we work, and now you’re a part of this organization. This is how you must work as well.” And that might clash with the way that they are used to doing things. If you think of typically like a startup being bought by a big company. There’s often a culture clash there.

So if you add on the real culture in terms of geography—

Pedro Faria: I’ve done my few acquisitions, mergers, etc., and I’ve found my experience to make me learn toward a lot less command and control, a lot more freedom.

We acquired a company in Thailand. I was very interested to learn about Thai culture and the different aspects of Brazil and Thailand, which are completely worlds apart. And we figured out that we’re never gonna learn exactly the cultural aspects of working and operating in Thailand. So basically we gave a lot of power and autonomy to the Thai team. We made them part of the global team so our head of quality assurance came from Thailand, and I think doing those kinds of things have proven to my experience to be more effective than dictating an entire playbook and saying, “From now on, this is how you’re gonna operate.”

Hal Weitzman: OK, you’re nodding, Kristen.

Kristen Castillo: Yes, I mean that autonomy and empowerment I feel is critical. I mean, even if the overarching strategy is set in headquarters, there has to be this openness to the fact that nobody knows the business like the people who have feet on the street. And so you have to have that leeway to let people make their own decisions and customize and be empowered to do that. And I think even day-to-day working amongst teams, that empowerment is important because you’re not there because of the time differences and so you have to be able to empower people to make really good decisions.

Hal Weitzman: Does that apply to working practices, Chris Baker? I mean, if you have, is there a problem if, in the US, people work you know, let’s say standard 9–5 hours.

Chris Baker: Right.

Hal Weitzman: And elsewhere you’re expecting people to work those hours, but also to be available at 2 in the morning for a conference call?

Chris Baker: Right, I know at Parexel, we have a very decentralized, very global organization, which has a benefit of following the sun. So you really get some economies of those so you can, you now, accelerate the timeline. The downside is: I’m in LA and often talk to people in China or India, which is a vast time difference. They’re so used to dealing with US headquarters that many of them don’t start the day until 10 because they have to work later, and I think that that’s absolutely reasonable, and you have to accommodate that if you want to be able to get the best talent and take care of them.

Hal Weitzman: When we’re thinking about people who are in international offices, they can feel very isolated. There’s a sense the head office is sort of where things happen. If you’re not there, you haven’t had a chance to visit recently, you’re out in the sticks. You sort of get ignored. How do you make sure there’s some inclusivity and, you know, that people feel that they really are part of the company?

Pedro, do you want to take that?

Pedro Faria: Yeah, so in my experience, I figured out that it’s not enough just to send people from home office to a local office, because typically what these people will impersonate is, OK, I’m the instant knowledge provider who just parachuted here and will be here for two days or three days and tell you what you need to do.

So I found that the other way around has been a lot more effective, bringing people from other offices to spend amounts of time in Brazil. When it comes down to best practices, making sure that if the best practice is out in Thailand, say quality assurance, that we go there and we talk specifically about quality, but always making sure that this dilemma of “I come from home office. I have a different perspective than you” is not something that is poisonous to the culture.

Hal Weitzman: OK, any thoughts on that?

Chris Baker: No, I completely agree and I think respect is a big part of it, bringing them in. Something I learned when we lived in South Africa was the best practice of how well they got to know people, not just at work, but really spend a little time, get to know the person. And I think as you get to know people, spend time with them, care about them, show them respect, then that really helps foster that communication.

Kristen Castillo: It does, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we on the global side end up traveling a lot and you spend a lot of time with people and they almost become family to you because they’re away from their families. You’re away from your family and you just automatically do build this respect amongst one another and realize that everybody has things going on. And having, again, that flexibility, making sure that you’re accessible for them when they need you is important.

Hal Weitzman: It sounds like human contact is very important to you. Has technology made that less important, the face-to-face contact, or has it not changed anything, just easier to keep in touch?

Kristen Castillo: Definitely makes it easier for sure. Like the telepresence and all of that has been great. We use that all the time. It definitely helps. I will say at the beginning of any type of relationship, even if it’s a new manager in a country or something, having some type of at least initial face-to-face, I’ve found, and it doesn’t have to be me flying out to meet with somebody. I mean, it could be, “Hey, we’re both at the same meeting in a central location.” In my case, maybe it’s a medical congress or maybe it’s a national marketing or sales meeting where we can connect, just grab a quick coffee or something like that, just really helps to build that connection. But for sure, technology helps a lot.

Chris Baker: I think it helps the cadence. I mean, if you think about a decade ago, it was with cell phones or phone lines, and sometimes the communication was difficult to understand. So now having slide decks, telepresence, an ongoing cadence really helps, and then you buoy that up with face-to-face meetings, and it really helps round it out.

Hal Weitzman: OK, I want to ask finally for some advice for someone who suddenly finds themselves managing a global team. Just something quick, a practical thing. Reid, what would you say?

Reid Hastie: Well, my advice is gonna be secondhand, and I’ll probably just second everything you guys say. Another factor that derives from global teamwork is that solving all of the other essential problems for teamwork that you have when you try to work with a team of people that you are near to and on the base with and share a culture with are made a little bit tougher.

And so things like establishing the objectives for the team project, establishing a positive climate of safety, I think Pedro said, but humility, trust, and respect are kind of the standard mantra terms as sort of soft but incredibly critical psychological context. Motivating people, that’s harder at a distance. Just the coordination, communication process, independent of the additional problems because of the networked communication. Making the solution acceptable, that’s tougher. And giving performance feedback and training people and coaching them.

All of those things which are essential to any team in any context get even tougher to do at a distance. I think my one piece of advice is to, if you’re leading a team or managing a team, is to put an incredible amount of extra energy into the beginning, and that’s what you’ve been talking about, having initial face-to-face, having a little bit of socializing as well as business, getting people aligned with the project goals, being flexible about adopting the central culture versus the peripheral culture. All of those things are critical, but doing them right at the beginning, getting off on the right foot, that’s essential. And so the place where the hugest differential investment should occur for global teamwork, I think, is at the beginning.

Hal Weitzman: OK, great, Kristen Castillo, quick piece of advice?

Kristen Castillo: Absolutely, so when you decide to take on a global role or join a global organization, you are gonna make certain sacrifices, and it has to be something that you’re ready and willing to take on. It’s certainly not for everybody. It has its challenges.

Hal Weitzman: Sounds like one of the sacrifices is the ability to be asleep at 2 in the morning.

Kristen Castillo: Exactly, I don’t need a lot of sleep anyways. But it’s incredibly rewarding as well. And I will say, especially with my type of work, working in health care, it’s so incredibly rewarding to be able to go out and meet with my colleagues in other countries where we’re trying to solve problems about how we can provide health care to patients who are in need and all have those same goals. Now, we may get to them a little bit differently. There may be different regulations and policies within the country that make us do things differently, but we all have the same goal at the end of the day and it’s very very, it’s a wonderful role to be in.

Hal Weitzman: Pedro Faria?

Pedro Faria: Yeah, I think this topic has been very interesting, listening from a different perspective. I think your notes are great, professor. It’s all about maybe this intermediating, removing some nodes of the network that can create a lot of resistance. So I would be shying away from the home-office leader who says, “OK, I know all.” I want to learn from you. I’ve seen other instances in which you have a regional officer saying “OK, we are a group of great people, a great team, despite what the home office is saying.” So you need to be upfront and attack that. A lot of that happens in the beginning. And over time, trust gets built. People feel safe. They have a shared sense of purpose or mission and then they can perform at their best despite cultural differences, time zones, and things of that nature.

Hal Weitzman: OK, Chris Baker?

Chris Baker: Very similar to Kristen, being in health care, you draw the top talent, so it’s key to know how you can communicate through that lens of their culture. I mean, a good example is the story of the general manager who went to Italy and tried to build consensus and the feedback was they fired him because he can’t make a decision. That same general manager would have done really great in another country that needed to build consensus.

So you really need to understand the culture of the country and know that you want to retain that talent. They’re all trying their best. We’re all trying to do the right thing, to really deliver the results to help patients, and you have to understand how to communicate through that lens of what their culture is, but they’re all trying their best and you want to keep them so they’re working very hard. We have people in India and China and all over the world and they’re working every day so we have to respect them and know how we can bring out the best in them.

Hal Weitzman: Well, I am gonna have to make an executive decision and draw this group discussion to a close. My thanks to our panel: Reid Hastie, Kristen Castillo, Pedro Faria, and Chris Baker.

For more research, analysis, and commentary, visit us online at review.chicagobooth.edu. And join us again next time for another The Big Question. Goodbye.

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