25 Jul Top Ten List – Building an International Technology Team

I’ve been working with teams distributed across multiple continents for over 15 years.  It’s been a great learning experience connecting with diverse and talented people around the globe.  My experiences have included staff augmentation for IT projects, software prototype development, and creation of a software engineering team consisting of over 100 team members that reliably delivered high quality commercial software products.  Here is a succinct top ten list containing much of what I learned.  I hope it’s helpful for you.

1. One Team
   • Offshore, outsource, them, NO. Whether your international team is contracted or full time employees, embrace them as equal team members.  Remove the vernacular that alienates those individuals.  Yes, they are on a different continent, with a culture that is wonderfully unique but you must make all efforts to assure they are fully engrained with the team.  Every team member is an individual.
2. Consistent Communication
   • Over-communicate. The team is growing and changing so don’t assume what has been previously communicated is understood by all.  Vision, strategy, roadmap, priorities, goals, processes, etc…all need to be communicated frequently.  Mangers, Seniors and Freshers understand information differently.  Hold group sessions by functional group and level of seniority but most importantly have many 1:1 meetings.  Yes, they take time…but make an incredible difference.  Culture is built person to person!
3. Experienced International Leadership
   • Hire mangers on the international team with extensive experience working with global teams that have worked in or minimally with numerous countries. Preferably they have worked in the country of the corporate headquarters (ideally an expatriate) or they are a citizen of the country where the satellite site exists.  Relocating a top leader from the existing company for an extended period is best.
4. Career Growth Opportunity
   • Provide a clear career ladder with constant progression. Provide a formal mentorship program.  Pay for professional training as the business demands but not as an entitlement…but enable opportunity for self-training as the preferred approach.  Encourage team members to earn industry and technology certifications…and pay for them.   Avoid progression without attainment, it will demean the team members that are truly earning their worth.  Recognition, kudos, praise…give a lot!
5. Processes and Systems
   • Clearly define processes and business systems focused on transparency, frequent communication and constant visibility. Particularly for the startup, cloud and free or inexpensive systems such as those on Google Apps do the job.  Don’t run your core business processes in Excel and Email….they have a big enough role anyhow.  Everything from financial management, project management, document management, issue tracking, recruit management, and process definition can all be done in transaction systems.  This creates a company focused on process, automation and employee self-service.  Most importantly have a very stringent recruiting and onboarding process and adhere to it for both internal and contract team members.  Never skimp on talent!
6. Customer Success
   • There’s no higher gratification than meeting the needs or exceeding the expectations of clients. All team members should understand the goals and needs of the customers they are serving and the company should measure their success through customers achieving their goals.  The leadership team needs to put the processes in place that measure customer success and must assure that feedback (good or bad) is communicated to the individuals that participated.  A site visit from a customer is huge!
7. Frequent Site Visits
   • Leadership must visit the international teams frequently. Managers and leads at all levels should visit the global sites to build relationships, mentor team members, communication the vision and goals, and incorporate the feedback to improve the company strategy and execution.  Connections between people will create high team member retention and take the company further than the leadership can envision on their own.
8. Hierarchical Dissolution
   • The culture in many countries is very hierarchical in nature…from business to society and family. Those attributes of respect, conformance, and even obedience have a place but they can interfere with an international business.  For individual talents to be maximized, for the best ideas to come forward, and to avoid complacency…empower every person, create collaborative work spaces, foster a culture of creativity, open communication, equality.  Let every mind open fully and achieve greatness!

9. Managers are Individual Contributors
   • When starting a global team in a foreign country the managers need to be very experienced with high credibility. They need to have done the job of the people they are training.  As an example, a director of software engineering should still be designing and coding software so they can truly mentor the team at a detailed level.  The call center manager should still be fielding call escalations to lead by example and grow the team.  There’s no room for pure play managers at the start.

10. Celebrate
    • Have parties and celebrations frequently…offsite outings are a must. Most importantly celebrate company milestones, completion of client projects, attainment of client goals, team member achievements, and the holidays of the given country or culture.  Each site should have their own volunteers for an events committee where they can choose any number of celebrations from birthdays of the month to the Friday afternoon ice cream sundae smorgasbord.  I can’t end without mentioning that health focused activities and community volunteerism are great choices for team events or even a recurring focus.  Have fun…life is too short!

 
I have to admit that I did not execute all these ideas and concepts flawlessly in the past.  But, in our new startup I’m going to implement many of these ideas and continuously improve on them as well.  I hope this list has inspired you to improve your own international teams.

All the Best,
Pat Roche (Co-Founder, pat@TenPoint7.com)