So You Want to Be a Global Project Leader? Research with over 300 Global Teams in 230 Companies Reveals Four Principal Challenges Facing These Teams and Their Leaders, along with Steps They Can Take to Meet the Challenges
Gloria J. Barczak, Edward F. McDonough, Nicholas A. Athanassiou · Research-Technology Management · 2006
As companies move into the global arena, they find the process of developing and launching new products becoming progressively more complex as they attempt to meet both global and local customer needs and integrate design and development expertise scattered around the world. To cope with these demands, many firms are turning to global new product development (GNPD) teams. These GNPD teams are complex, often composed of individuals who are culturally, ethnically and functionally diverse and who work and live in different countries where the firm has operations of varying sizes and capabilities. This means that members often speak and think in a variety of languages, have different cultural values and rarely meet face-to-face. It is only by successfully working with such complexity that the teams are able to complete a joint, finite new product development task on time and within budget. Furthermore, the team's processes will vary depending on the nature of this task; a team working on code for a new software product faces different challenges from one that is constituted to establish the firm's global strategy for NPD. The inherent complexity of GNPD team characteristics adds extra challenge to the already difficult task of managing the team so that members work cooperatively and accomplish project goals. However, not all global teams can or should be treated the same way. In our research, for example, we encountered one global team in which several team members came from outside the corporation (e.g., vendors, strategic partners) and from different countries, yet, all were native speakers of the same language. In another team, all the members were from inside the corporation yet lived and worked in different countries and were native speakers of a number of different languages but had to communicate in the team's lingua franca, English. Such differences among global teams mandate a flexible portfolio of skills and attributes on the part of the global team leader that she/he can apply as the situation demands. So, what does it take to be an effective global project leader? These leaders need to initially identify the particular qualities of a specific global team such as: What is the mix of members who are employees of the corporation or of an outside entity? How large is the team? What is its distribution across a number of countries? What is the mix of different national cultures represented on the team? Are they from similar cultural clusters or not? What is the range of languages spoken natively by the team members? What are the different functions represented on the team? Once the leader has recognized and assessed the team's characteristics, she/he must marshal appropriate managerial skills and personal attributes to manage that team. In the following sections, we discuss four key challenges that global team leaders face, and the skills, attributes and actions that are required for them to successfully manage each challenge (See the Table, next page). The four challenges were identified in qualitative and quantitative research we have been doing over the past 10 years on global (and traditional) teams at various levels of the organization. Collectively, we have conducted research with over 300 teams, including project leaders and team members, in approximately 230 companies in a wide variety of industries spanning industrial durables, consumer durables and consumer packaged goods. This research has been undertaken in the U.S, Europe (including the United Kingdom) and Mexico. Challenge 1: Different Native Languages When team members are native speakers of different languages, communicating and understanding in the shared team language is a challenge. Although we often found that English was the shared team language, rarely was it the first, or native, language for team members from outside the United States. This meant that the level of understanding in English differed dramatically from member to member. …