management training – Success Across Cultures

As a virtual manager, how do you monitor your virtual team from afar?

Last week, we talked about challenges that managers face dealing with global virtual teams, specifically in a cross-cultural context.

But some challenges have to do with the environment itself.

While the virtual environment comes with significant advantages, you might face difficulties as a manager with communication, task management, accountability, etc.

Communication

From virtual meetings to chat tool procedures, you have the tools at the ready for quality communication on your virtual team, even if it isn’t in-person.

But as a manager of a virtual team, you shouldn’t assume that everyone is familiar with the program your using or chat procedures.

As a manager you should:

Instruct your team about how and when to use communication tools, whether a phone call, a chat, or an email
Collaborate as a team over virtual meetings to work together and solve any issues on the project
Clearly deliver the team’s expectations and aims
Encourage remote team bonding to nurture relationships amongst team members

Task Management

Managing a team virtually is very different than in an office environment.

You can still check in on progress, but you can’t step into your colleague’s office and visually see where they’re at in a group project.

Ensuring that each member of the team is on task and in sync to complete the project by deadline might therefore seem like an impossible task.

But don’t worry; the virtual world has software to assist in monitoring progress from your laptop.

Teamwork, Wrike, monday.com, ProjectManager, Mavenlink by Kantata – all of these project management tools will allow you to track the progress of each team member…without having to badger them every single day.

Productivity & Accountability

While the above tools can help you hold your team accountable, it’s still difficult to know whether they’re truly being productive or not…or if they’re scrolling through Facebook all day long.

Some of your employees may be new to virtual work; others may have a million distractions in their remote working environment.

As a team lead, teaching your team how to remove the distractions and work independently is essential to keeping them productive.

Some ways to keep your team accountable and productive:

Communicate your work targets regularly and ensure they’re met by each team member
Recommend website blockers, timers, and noise cancellation software to keep team members on track
Teach effective time management methods, like the Pomodoro Technique, to improve focus

All of these tools, along with an emphasis on communication and task management, will help you create a virtual environment that’s engaged, task-oriented, and collaborative.

Management trainings often cut out the cross-cultural nature of leadership expectations, hierarchies, and values and norms.

So, when you’re put into a cross-cultural leadership position, you’re a fish out of water, and you don’t have much to guide you.

Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”

In Maslow’s theory, human motivation is pretty straight forward.

His “hierarchy of needs” is taught across many business administration curriculums and has been since its inception in the early ’40s.

It was in 1943 that researcher Abraham Maslow identified basic human needs and categorized them in a pyramid.

At the bottom are the most basic physiological needs:

Food
Shelter
Safety

When a person’s most basic human needs are satisfied, their more complex emotional and psychological needs rise to the top:

Love/belonging
Esteem
Self-fulfillment/actualization

Think about these needs. Do you feel them in this order and manner?

What A Man Can Be

Maslow once wrote:

“What a man can be, he must be.”

This explains the pyramid in a nutshell: if we can achieve something greater than simply meeting our physiological needs, we will seek it out.

The hierarchy of needs may seem instinctive to the Western mind, so much so that Western managers apply this basic model to motivate their teams and incentivize success.

Self-fulfillment would then be the highest motivation, manifesting itself in power and personal career development.

However, as it turns out, this hierarchy of needs hasn’t stood the cross-cultural test.

Security, Social Needs, & Quality of Life

Let’s take a look at Greece and Japan.

Self-actualization in these countries is undercut by security needs.

According to research done within IBM World Trade Corporation:

“At the country level, higher mean stress turned out to be associated with stronger rule orientation and greater employment stability…When [the mean level of anxiety] is higher, people feel more stressed, but at the same time they try to cope with their anxiety by searching for security.”

Both Japan and Greece had high Uncertainty Avoidance Indexes, which indicate higher stress and anxiety levels.

This is why life-long job security supersedes climbing the corporate ladder or seeking out challenging work in these countries and may be another reason Japanese companies keep on workers even though they may be subpar or their positions could be made redundant.

On the other hand, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark place a lot of emphasis on quality of life, thus building a career takes a back burner to social needs.

Hofstede Disagrees

As Geert Hofstede duly notes:

“My interpretation is that this tells us more about Maslow than about the other countries’ managers. Maslow categorized and ordered his human needs according to the U.S. middle-class culture pattern in which he was embedded himself – he could not have done otherwise.”

This can be said about many studies that unintentionally (or intentionally) discount cross-cultural differences.

Cross-cultural values and norms are not much considered when identifying “human needs.”

Instead, every human is painted with one brush; the brush of whichever culture is doing the research.

Tag: management training

The Virtual World: Management Challenges Faced By Global Virtual Team Leads