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ISSUE 3: TEAM PRODUCTIVITY

 

 how to maximise the productivity of specific multi-cultural teams
 
OUR EXPERIENCE
Specific challenges include:
- Building trust across cultures and distances
- Agreeing ground rules for communicating
- Building international team leadership skills
- Handling key moments of "forming, storming and norming" within multi- cultural teams
- Facilitating the early stages of international teamwork

ONE CLIENT'S CHALLENGE
We are the leadership team in a division of a telecommunications company operating in several European countries. Our team is suffering from difficulties in personal commitment and alignment, owing to personalities as well as cultural factors. Levels of trust in the team are not as high they could be. We meet only twice a year and feel that some burning issues are buried in 'over polite behaviour'. How can we get to grips with the delicate issue of trust so as to increase our productivity?

THE TCO RESPONSE
With our partner, CultureWaves, we worked alongside the team using the International Team Trust Indicator (ITTI) tool to bring out the cultural and personality issues affecting the group. It emerged that there was a basic lack of understanding of each others' contexts which inhibited open sharing of information. Having identified the gaps in trust, actions were taken to close them. The group reused the ITTI survey 6 months later and by facilitating one of their subsequent team meetings, we could identify clear progress on these issues.


ANOTHER CLIENT'S CHALLENGE
We are a downstream division of a major energy company which needs to integrate several European subsidiaries which differ in their age, size and workforce characteristics. We need to bring these disparate businesses together into a seamless organization able to deliver a single product range for customers. Intercultural sensitivity is paramount. How can we use a learning initiative to help us to work towards this goal?

THE TCO RESPONSE
A 3-day workshop on Intercultural Team Management was held with all the country managers. This ensured commitment to the project, provided insight into the strategic issues and give instant credibility for the initiative across the division. We then ran 8 further editions - incorporating the team's outputs - for managers at head office. Back-office staff in the largest subsidiary were also provided with a 2-day programme on Intercultural Communication in their local language. In total over 140 people were involved in the project. Use of the psychometric questionnaire tool, The International Profiler, provided the organisation with information on personality types and team role preferences. Future development could then be designed to close identified skill gaps

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