WLP251 Leveraging Cultural Differences in Global Virtual Teams
Today we’re delighted to be speaking to Theresa Sigillito Hollema, who is an expert in global teams and cross cultural collaboration.
We wanted to talk to Theresa about her new book Virtual Teams Across Cultures: Create Successful Teams Around The World - which we recommended in our last newsletter (and if you missed that, don’t forget to sign up for the next one and you’ll receive our complimentary Leading through Visible Teamwork guide too).
04.02 Theresa Sigillito Hollema
Theresa Sigillito Hollema
As well as being an author, Theresa is a cultural consultant and team coach with Interact Global, working with virtual teams spanning cultures and borders, for many years.
Combining the two elements of virtual and cross-cultural collaboration creates additional complexity in any dynamic, but much depends on the degree of interdependence within the work itself. When we work closely, co-creating together, we really need to understand the cultural differences in how we communicate and connect, to avoid any misunderstandings or mistakes.
For example, different cultures might have different expectations of the purpose of online meetings - are they to collaborate, to make decisions, to deepen personal connections? If we start off with mismatched anticipation, we won’t do any of this effectively.
But the diversity that cross-cultural teams offer can be a huge advantage, when this is embraced and leveraged effectively, celebrating the differences and exploring them, rather than seeing them as a block. Letting the different perspectives surface and contribute to outcomes can be extremely powerful, but good leadership needs to acknowledge the power relationships within the team for genuine inclusivity, and make space for truly psychologically-safe expression - this is a vital part of cross cultural competence.
Theresa discussed the example of working with a team including colleagues in both Singapore and the US, with complex products and customer service needs that required deeply interdependent working and understanding. But because of their physical and cultural distance, they were working less interdependently than they needed to, functioning more like two separate teams.
Through getting to know each other’s cultures and their colleagues as individuals, they were able to deepen their connection and improve the way they communicated, as well as restructuring their teams and practices to facilitate the collaboration that was necessary, to create better outcomes for their customers. To facilitate such a transformation Interact Global had to propose quite detailed structures for conversations at first, prompting discovery and understanding to emerge about the other culture - especially given that we cannot travel and go and immerse ourselves in other cultures and meet face to face these days, as may have been the obvious way to create a single cohesive team in the past.
But by focusing on the things we do share, even if they manifest in different ways (like our goals, values, and so on), we can make those connections. Like so much in the world of virtual working, it requires making explicit that which we often take for granted or let remain unsaid, in the colocated space.
Sense of belonging in virtual teams
Feelings of belonging to a team are complex, because there is always a tension between our need to identify socially and ‘fit in’, while also knowing our unique attributes and individual role we play within the team. Our cultural identity impinges on both of these in different ways.
Teams have a history and memory, which Theresa describes as a transactive memory system - the shared history which holds us together as a team. Sharing to take place both formally and informally, to develop that asset of meaning between us. If we have cultural barriers which affect our communication styles this limits the richness of that memory system, and we have to help teams overcome those barriers and connect, so they know who to ask about things and where that experience and wisdom resides within their teams.
Virtual Not Distant’s Visible Teamwork framework addresses this through open conversations and visible working, to make the experiences and conversations of teams public within them, for real-time immersion and to create a shared knowledge base of developing experience. However, cultural differences will need to be taken into account when applying some of its principles.
It would be easy to assume that the 2020 remote revolution means we’re now at the same virtual distance from our colleagues we used to share an office with, as those in another continent - but as Theresa points out, this is not the case emotionally, and we still feel much closer to those with whom we share cultural reference points and history, than those we simply know less well. But we can use this new levelling of the playing field to work consciously with the ‘them vs us’ dynamic, and a fully remote team is easier to integrate than a hybrid one with different colocated clusters (for more discussion and definition of these types of remote teams, check out episode 175 with Mark Kilby).
One important difference to highlight between cultures, is an expectation of the kinds of conversation and information is expected to be public. Should performance feedback be open for everyone in the team to learn from, or is it deeply personal and private? What about the tools we use to share it, and the degree of synchronicity that is acceptable, in different cultures, for different kinds of communication? Pilar has noticed a big difference between the UK and Spain in this regard.
Theresa’s book will help everyone to understand cultural diversity in our shrinking world, but will also help each of us to learn about ourselves too - how our own cultural biases and intrinsic assumptions shape the way we see the world and everyone we meet.
Keep up with Theresa on Twitter and LinkedIn for more information about her work and her writing. And do check out our earlier episodes exploring some of the themes from this episode through the lens of Visible Teamwork. They are summarised and linked in a single big blog post here.
Finally, don’t forget to talk to us about our own in-house podcasting service and all the other ways we help teams and their managers make the most of working remotely, for a unique way of bridging those gaps of cultural understanding and belonging - amplifying our culture and connection, and away from the screen for once. We’re looking for organisations to help us build a case study, in case you’re interested...
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