“I’m torn because my family is doing great here in the U.S., but I feel like my career progression is capped if I don’t get international experience,” a participant shared during her onboarding call before her Signature program. This leader was a VP at her company, which was global. Her potential to be considered as a successor to the SVP role she wanted hinged on whether or not she took an international assignment to learn the business overseas and show her ability to lead.
Our advice? “You are about to spend three days with peers who all have different experiences with making decisions just like this. Why don’t you utilize their wisdom to test out your thinking?”
Each Signature program boasts global participation, and what we have seen, time and again, is how ripe they are for learning, not just about leadership capabilities but also about different cultures and norms at work.
There are opportunities to learn from one another, like when a GM of manufacturing in Indiana met a GM of manufacturing in Italy, and they agreed to visit each other’s locations. These two leaders set up site visits for one another, with plant managers and senior executives included in the sessions, to see each other’s operations and share best practices.
There are also opportunities to learn about each other. When we run our Signature program in Asia, we hear a common theme among the leaders who spend many nights a week attending meetings at 9 or 10pm, local time (sometimes later!). Many are beholden to a U.S.-centric work environment that creates an unsustainable schedule for their work.
Part of the focus of every Signature program is the wellbeing habits of the participants and how to ensure they are creating energy for their work and their life instead of draining it. We talk about non-negotiables and how to manage their calendars for sustainability. But we also talk about how they can help their teams do this as well―one way is to create team norms for how they work together.
As you can imagine, it is quite eye-opening when another participant shares their challenges of working in a time zone in Asia, and the participants based in the U.S. realize what they’ve been requiring of their team members in other countries. We can’t eliminate off-hours meetings for global teams, but we can take intentional approaches to manage the frequency.
Whether you are the leader of a huge global team or you happen to work in a global company that requires off-hours meetings at times, inclusive leadership creates a more sustainable culture. Here are some of the ways we have seen leaders build more inclusive environments for those in other countries:
- Meeting times – We all know this one, but meeting late in the evening or early in the morning can be draining on our teams. We have seen many instances where teams are mostly concentrated within one time zone, with a couple of members in very different ones. Many times, teams aim to make it convenient for the majority, picking times that work for those team members most often, if not always. If you can’t choose times that are convenient for everyone, aim to accommodate time zones in an intentional rotation, with the most concentrated time zone making sacrifices some of the time as well. Demonstrating inclusive leadership may require you to get creative with your scheduling.
- Emails – One of the easiest ways to avoid awkward meeting times is to identify those meetings that don’t need to be meetings. Can you send an email instead?
- Recordings – A great alternative to meetings, one that also feels more connected than email chains, is recordings. Status updates, recorded by each team representative in under 5 minutes each, are a great way for the team to stay connected on what is happening in an asynchronous way. This makes “face time” more accessible for everyone and gives everyone a voice.
- Holidays – Acknowledge and celebrate the diversity within the team. First, make sure you know which cultural holidays and traditions your team members engage in. Then, encourage them to share information about their holidays to get to know more about one another and the countries and cultures where your business operates.
- Working hours – If you don’t already know the established working hours for each member of the team, this may be a good discussion. Some cultures differ in their working hour norms, with some starting and ending later in the day (think Spain, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, and many Latin American countries), while others tend to crave more flexibility for personal activities or time with their families at the end of the workday (think Western Europe and the Nordic countries). Also, every individual person will have a preference for this―the more you can schedule your touchpoints within the preferred times for each team member, the more valued they will feel.
- Meeting facilitation – It doesn’t matter when you meet, but how you meet is also important. We have found there are two key “watch-outs” for leaders with global teams. First, leaders may tend to take too much of the air time, making it hard for others to contribute. One of our participants timed herself on her next team call after her program and found she used 80% of the available air time! She became intentional about inclusive leadership, cutting down her airtime by using facilitation techniques to bring more voices into the conversation. Second, your team members in other time zones may be less likely to be on camera in the evenings, making it more difficult for them to participate effectively and to have their voices heard. In these cases, your role as the leader is to ensure you create opportunities for them to present or to interject their questions and ideas. (We have a lot more information on inclusive meeting facilitation approaches in our Leadership in Motion offering.)
These are just some ways we have seen leaders effectively manage global teams. Being intentional about the choices you make in these areas creates an inclusive environment for everyone working for and with you. This is what inclusive leadership looks like.
We have learned a ton from our global participants at each Signature program, but there is nothing like working in another country to truly understand their perspective. This is what our participant from the beginning of this story decided to do. She told us: “I was able to speak to almost a dozen different people during the program to understand their experiences with global roles and moving their families. I’ve decided to take the opportunity, and I’m so excited for my career AND for my family!”
As we always aim to do at Signature, tapping into the collective wisdom of others expands our perspectives, helping us make more informed choices so we can display what inclusive leadership looks like. Who can you tap into for a different viewpoint? If you are a Signature alumna, check out the People page of our Signature Collective platform to find someone who can help! If you are new to Signature Leaders, explore our Signature program offerings to find what will best suit you and your goals!
