5 Cultural Tips for Managing Global Teams

About Hugo Messer

Hugo Messer is a Dutch entrepreneur, distributed agile team specialist, and author. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Global, a software services provider, and ekipa.co., an agile coaching agency. He has been building and managing teams around the world for the past several years. His passion is to enable people that are spread across cultures, geography and time zones to cooperate. Whether it’s offshoring or nearshoring, he knows what it takes to make global cooperation work.

3 thoughts on “5 Cultural Tips for Managing Global Teams
  1. I could not agree more !

    Having been in charge of the whole EMEA region for a large American Company for several years I can testify that individual and cultural approach is crucial to gain excellence in cooperation.

    Europe is still hugely fragmented on various aspects : historical, cultural, social, economical, … not talking about the many languages and habits !

    While traveling from one country to another I always invested some time to somewhat ‘adapt’ the presentations content in a way that it would address the local audience the best way possible.

    Business truth in UK is surprisingly slightly different in Italy and even more different when you look to the Dubai side. None of them is better than the other, they’re just ‘different’.

    And targeting a successful business means taking all these slight differences seriously into consideration.

  2. Part of the hiring process should involve figuring out your employees’ communications styles. Learn how each member of your team handles conflict and make a note of their decision-making and work styles.Differences exist, but it’s important not to get hung up on them. Instead, focus on how each member’s responsibilities contribute to the major goals of your business.You can’t hope your problems away. They must be communicated with your team with the expectation that everyone is responsible for contributing to the solution.Establish guidelines for what language will be used for communication, and understand that one employee may not be as fluent as the next.

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