Arguably, the most challenging type of global team is the “offshored” team, which is set up by assigning work to a distant version of the head office for reasons of cost—but then running into severe problems with culture, execution, goal clarity, or other elements of team effectiveness. Many offshored activities are effectively shops within the same company, but people often do not think of offshored groups that way.
They categorize and treat them as external suppliers with inferior performance characteristics when problems arise. From a team perspective, successful offshoring depends on duplicating or replacing the things that make on-site teams work. However, the many different structures companies use to implement offshoring and the resulting variety of challenges to and from the global squad make setting up an effective offshored team a complex new paradigm that few companies do well.
How do you build effective teams in far-flung places? Some executives approach the problem by trying to replicate their winning formulas in new countries but are often disappointed by the results. An American executive who swears by the management team model—up to nine vice presidents who are each fully responsible for a division or product line—struggles in Finland, where the flatter employee structure, with increased virtual teaming, is the norm.
Applying the U.S. concept of “going the extra mile” to a Romanian call center (as the French manager learned) can make employees feel overwhelmed and underappreciated. The challenge of building effective international teams is to decide how global you should go in terms of people and approach and how much time and resources to invest.