How to manage your first global project team

With a significant increase in global teams, it is becoming increasingly important for ambitious project professionals to think about how they would approach managing and leading projects across different countries.

Bear in mind that the underlying factors that contribute to a high-performing global team are the same as for a co-located team. The difference is that you have to work harder to create the clarity, cohesion and communication patterns that are the foundation of great teams.

When people aren’t located in the same place and don’t share the same culture, your primary role is to help them trust each other and unite around a common way of operating and communicating. More specifically, research shows that you can positively affect team performance by focusing on three communication dynamics:

Get team members to speak directly with one another.
Get everyone to contribute in roughly equal measure.
Encourage people to connect via phone or video call as a substitute for face-to-face. Excessive emailing and instant messaging won’t build a strong team.

Get personal

The best scenario may be to gather your core team in person when kicking off the project. If meeting face-to-face is off the table, don’t despair. Instead, create a series of two-hour online workshops where you get to know each other and have detailed discussions about what you expect from each other.

Aim to create a core team with a maximum of 10 members, as anything above 10 complicates communication flows. Make sure, however, that the remaining team members are kept informed and are involved in other sessions, so that you don’t create a team of A and B players.

Make sure those who attend switch on their cameras and don’t be afraid to get personal. The more talking points you create, the more likely people are to get in touch with each other afterwards.

When I ran a distributed team across five locations years ago, I asked all 30 team members to send me a headshot, a description of their hobbies and what their roles and responsibilities were on the project. I compiled it into a PowerPoint for everyone to see. It became a massive talking point and even the project sponsor felt more connected to the team as a result.

Create strong agreements

In the second or third online workshop, take inspiration from a ‘team charter’ template to help you define and agree how you will work together. I cannot stress enough how essential this discussion is in helping you create the right foundation for your team to thrive.

Collaborate around questions such as:

What are our common values?
What is each team member’s role?
How do we challenge decisions and give feedback given our various cultural backgrounds?
How do we gather and disseminate information inside and outside the team?
Which collaboration tools will we use?
How often will we have team meetings?
What are the best timings given our different time zones?

Your agreements must be fair for everyone. People in the Far East shouldn’t always have to stay up late. And those working in the Americas shouldn’t always have to get up super early.

Set a regular pace

Now that you have the foundation in place, create a regular heartbeat where you connect with the core team on a daily or weekly basis. Once in a while, strengthen the connection by having various team members share a photo and a story of something that’s important to them. It could be a holiday they’ve been on or something they did at the weekend.

With a global team, you have to make space for these discussions, as there are no physical watercooler conversations. And most importantly, circle back to what was agreed in the team charter. Your goal is to create a feedback culture where you can openly discuss what is working well, what is not and how you can further strengthen team collaboration.