3.2 Global collaboration

While some of your team might be excited by the prospect of learning from colleagues overseas, others may see it as an unnecessary complication that will take up valuable time.

Gardner and Mortensen (2015) give the following advice about global collaboration in their online article, ‘Collaborating well in large global teams’:

• Focus on commonalities
  • Remind teams of shared goals – make it clear why you’re working globally, what each team brings to the project.
  • Recognise your interdependence – explain why success depends on the knowledge and experience of those in other locations.
• Symmetrise information
  • Hold regular virtual meetings to share information and personal experience.
  • Prioritise team members with the right knowledge and expertise, but also the cultural intelligence to work effectively with global colleagues.
  • Combine meetings with virtual tours of each other’s locations to set the context.

Being clear about the knowledge and experience that each team or individual contributes will help to demonstrate why this collaboration is valuable on a practical level, and if people are able to see each other in their own environments it can make the prospect of working with them seem less complex or daunting.

Some relevant awareness training on the cross-cultural context, referred to in Section 2.1 of Week 2, could also be valuable in reassuring any concerns.