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2015-07-02 07:45:06
Heidi K. GardnerMark Mortensen
July 01, 2015
Professional service firms seeking to help companies navigate the demands of
globalization face a tough challenge because advisers with the specialized
expertise needed to address sophisticated issues are most often distributed
throughout the firm and around the globe. This makes collaboration difficult.
Global collaboration creates significant coordination costs: incompatible
schedules can lead to project delays, cross-cultural or linguistic
misunderstandings can create non-billable rework, and technology failures can
cause missed deadlines. No cross-border matter is truly routine because each
involves coordinating professionals with different assumptions and ways of
working.
Working at a distance is so complicated because it affects both the way we feel
and think. For one, it can promote us and them thinking that is, it can lead
us to group our colleagues into categories rather than see them as individuals.
This critical cognitive short-cut helps us to simplify our ever more complex
environment. But it also has bad consequences because we tend to view those in
our in group more positively, and those in our outgroup more negatively. That s
why the otherness of our distant colleagues is reinforced daily and on many
dimensions. Speaking via video conference with a colleague in a different
country, who speaks with an accent, exhibits different cultural values, and is
only available for two hours of your normal workday makes that person seem a
world apart.
If that weren t bad enough, working at a distance also limits the amount of
information we hold about our colleagues. When we work in the same office as
our co-workers, we can notice, interpret, incorporate, and leverage a vast
amount of information as we try to make sense of our daily experiences. If we
know someone s position in the office power hierarchy, the other projects
competing for their time and attention, or their underlying motivations, we are
better able to understand their actions. Much as we might want to deny it, even
information we might not think of as relevant personal lives, moods, or even
the weather play a role. We all know that having a commute tripled due to bad
weather or being sleep-deprived due to a sick child affects our day.
Unfortunately, barriers in the form of distance, time, culture, language, and
technology all stand in the way of communicating such information, creating
what Catherine Cramton coined the mutual knowledge problem. When interacting
with distant colleagues we lack a large percentage of the information we rely
on to collaborate effectively.
Just to make matters worse, these two problems reinforce each other. We don t
share as much information with our outgroup, but the less information we have
about them, the more we see them as them.
These outcomes are the exact opposite of what we aim for. But they happen so
naturally that we don t usually identify them in the moment, especially when
our teams are focused exclusively on results without regard for interpersonal
dynamics.
Despite the difficulties of global collaboration, however, there are a couple
ways to avoid the common pitfalls while delivering exceptional cross-border
service.
Focus on commonalities: The problem with us and them thinking is that we focus
on our differences over our similarities, but it s just as easy to reverse our
focus. Highlighting the things we have in common with our distant colleagues is
the best way to reduce the problem.
Foremost among commonalities should be your shared objective.
Remind your team of its shared and distributed goal. Have an open discussion
around the question: Why are we working across geographies? Remind the team why
you have chosen to collaborate with colleagues at another location whether it
is to better serve global clients, to provide a more complete solution, to
leverage dispersed knowledge, or a combination of the above and make sure
everyone holds the same goals.
Recognize your interdependence in reaching your objectives. Couple the
discussion above with: Why does my success depend on my distant colleagues?
Reinforce this day-to-day by looking for opportunities to remind your team of
their reliance on other locations.
If you don t have a ready answer to either question, you should rethink whether
the benefits of a global team outweigh the costs. But if you do have an answer,
that discussion will focus team members on common objective and
interdependence, turning us and them into we.
Symmetrize Information: Focusing on commonalities, however, will only get you
so far because every day the information asymmetries between locations serve as
a constant reminder of the differences between offices. Unfortunately, there is
no silver bullet. The only way to combat these asymmetries is to work hard to
counter them. Effective global collaborations have processes and procedures
designed into them that force information sharing across sites.
Schedule regular meetings and touchpoints to share task-related information. It
is important that these be regular, rather than on an as-needed basis, because
we often don t recognize when the knowledge we hold is needed by our distant
colleagues.
Take time to share the personal updates as well. Although it s tempting to
dismiss such activities as irrelevant or a waste of time especially when we
re under pressure they are vital. Remember that global work runs counter to
millions of years of evolution as social animals who leverage our knowledge of
others to effectively collaborate. To tackle the mutual knowledge problem
requires activities that often feel forced or artificial like scheduling time
for spontaneous interaction or investing in technologies to create a virtual
water cooler. These activities also create shared experiences that increase the
feeling of a shared we.
Equip the team with the right resources. Our natural tendency is to ask for
help from the people we know well, even if they re not ideal for the job. This
inclination is even stronger when performance pressure increases the
psychological risks for a piece of work. But spending the effort to get the
real experts on the team, rather than defaulting to those who are familiar but
less adept, will ultimately pay out. Ideally, think broader than just the pure
content expertise: the perfect contributor for a cross-border matter is one who
also has sufficient cultural intelligence to operate in a global team.
Give (and take) a virtual tour to provide context. The more you and your
distant teammates know about each other s environment, the better you will be
able to make sense of one another s behavior. At the start of a project, give
each person just a few minutes to share a bit of their context. Not name, rank,
and serial number, but elements of their environment that are most likely to
affect their ability to collaborate effectively.
Kai, a partner in the office of an international law firm shared a helpful
approach:
I started to work on a matter with a partner in New York and knew he and I
would be having a number of late night or early morning video conferences.
So I took five minutes to give him a rundown of my workspaces. It didn t take
long, but I focused on things that were most likely to interrupt future calls:
my co-counsel on a major tax litigation, my occasionally over-eager assistant,
and when working from my home office my dog. The interruptions were much
easier to deal with when they came up because he was expecting them.
Whether a quick pan of a webcam or a verbal walk through, the objective is to
help your distant colleagues understand the environment in which you are
working.
Effective global collaboration, as we all know, is very difficult. But if you
invest the time and effort to artificially foster the things that come for free
when we work face-to-face, then it s much easier to accomplish.
Heidi K. Gardner is a distinguished fellow at the Center on the Legal
Profession and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. She was previously on
the Organizational Behavior faculty at Harvard Business School.
Mark Mortensen is an associate professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD.
His work focuses on the changing nature of collaboration, particularly fluid,
interdependent, and global teams.