The Power of Global Teams

If you imagine leading an executive team, which the book is about, is extremely to start with because even leading one-to-one is difficult. Imagine that times eight. So, it's a difficult task, and then compounding this with the cultural dimension or several cultural dimensions if you have a global role and you deal with clients from South America to Asia. It's a real challenge that's incredibly interesting.

I think it's very stimulating, and it can produce fantastic results if you do it well, but it's also a challenge. So I saw a need to come up with a framework that reflects the complexity, but also does it in a very practical way, because whilst I enjoy thinking about psychology – I'm a psychologist by background – in a deep way, probably I'm also very aware that business leaders are under such pressure nowadays, particularly since the onset of the economic crisis, to produce results fast.

Boards are very impatient with the performance of chief executives and their teams – they want to see shifts in terms of companies' performance – so I thought it's very important to come up with a model that can be immediately implemented, and also in some ways have different levels in which you look at teams.

Rachel Salaman: So, who exactly is it aimed at, and what do you hope that they'll get out of it?

Elisabeth Marx: What is quite unique about this book, as well as not just that it looks at international or global teams, but also it looks at executive team – i.e., at the teams at the top of companies: the ones that are responsible for the ultimate business performance.

But, it's equally relevant obviously for business leaders of divisions, and it could be small companies or very, very large multinationals. It doesn't matter: it's aimed at those that have the responsibilities to produce the results. Now, of course, the framework you could use for any other levels, except sometimes the goals may not be as financially driven or as clear, but I think the key thing is to link up the team development with any specific goal.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned, the aim of the book is to show how to best develop an international team to serve global clients. What do people tend to get wrong when they try and do that?

Elisabeth Marx: Well, there are some patterns. You could say every team, when it has its difficulties, has some unique patterns, but there are some key things that are working. One is of course to look at where is the head of the team or the team leader in their own international capability, and you find that whilst someone may have a great international CV, if you look at their global leadership capability, it's not quite at the top or the optimal level. So, the question is how good are they as global leaders? Also, in their understanding of themselves to start with, and then in the understanding of the team or the team psychology or the team dynamics.

But, what you see in the more factual way in top teams at an international context is you have a lot of emotional fallout to start with, and that's always an indication that the team is definitely not working that well. So, from the slight frustration and irritation in response to different ways of thinking, the Europeans say, "Well, why don't the Americans do it like this? I don't understand – it doesn't make any sense."

So, there's a natural response we have of a slight irritation, and, of course, the question is, how we manage it? That – if it's not resolved effectively by the team leaders and also by the team themselves – can sometimes result in serious scapegoating, and quite a negative scenario where the team could become dysfunctional.

But, what we also see as a pattern is that teams get stuck cognitively – so they can't find a solution – they are not able to use collective problem-solving skills, and I think collective problem -solving is one of the key criteria of a highly effective team, whether it's in a monoculture or in an international context.

So that's a key question to ask: "How effective are we actually to solve problems as a team and come up with much better solutions?"

What we also find in teams that can go wrong is a short-term focus – a very tactical approach – without looking at how does the work that we deliver really impact the strategy, or the culture of the company, or the culture for the part of the business we are responsible for?

So, in summary, one of the key things I look at when I look at teams is first of all what is the team leader like or the psychology of the team leader, and then I look at some of the behavioral characteristics like I've mentioned, and then asking really key questions like, "What is the collective output?"and, "Do I have a diagnostic?"

As you may know from the book, there is a very straightforward top-team health check which really helps you very fast to pinpoint where some of the issues are, and then you can start thinking about how you tackle them.

Rachel Salaman: Can you talk a bit more about the health check? What does that entail?

Elisabeth Marx: Well, the health check is what it says: it's a short checklist that you can look at to ascertain where the key areas are that do not go very well in your team, and what should you consider doing.

It starts with business imperatives; so, for example, is there a change of strategy or is there more external international competition that the team needs to work on, or is the business engaging in a greater internationalization strategy?

Then we look at alignment with culture and strategy. So, does the team have the right skills to implement a strategy to start with? Is there agreement on strategy? Is the strategy specific enough? And so on.

Then we go into the level of team effectiveness and dynamics. So, what is the overall drive – the energy and the emotional level of the team? What does it feel like? Does it have a positive energy and is it positively inclined?

We look at the thinking style. Is the team open to different ways of thinking? Can it move away from a very ethnocentric, very black and white thinking into being flexible and dealing with ambiguity? And we also look at social behavior, so how good is the team at sharing information and knowledge? What is their internal and external networking? What's the trust-respect level? Do they push their own agenda? Are they individualistic or are they really looking at the team aim, or do we have too many domineering team members, quite frankly?

So it gives you very quickly a good understanding of what's the pattern, and then you can decide as a team leader or as a team, are these issues really stopping our work to become very effective?

Rachel Salaman: Now, you've identified three levels of team development that you go into in the book, and the first of these is governance. So, could you talk us through the framework for this, including how you see the role of governance generally?

Elisabeth Marx: Just very briefly in terms of the levels, the reason why I came up with this may be quite interesting to look at as well. I wanted to find a model that you can really pick and choose. Not every team needs to have the four, I would say the Rolls-Royce psychological analysis of not every team leader, and not every team is interested in doing this, but I also very firmly believe, and have shown, that you can do some very basic things, and that could start with getting good governance, which will have an effect on the team before you go to look at the other levels.

Governance you could call a basic hygiene or a good framework to run an international team, and that will start with are the common accountabilities, the roles and the responsibilities of the individual team members clear? Are the interdependencies of each other's work and the roles clear? Are we clear on the expectations of behavior? What is acceptable and not acceptable? How can we introduce a respectful way of communicating? What is the meeting agenda like? Do we have sufficient time to actually discuss particular strategic or any other issues, or is it completely tactical and a report level operation? What is the form of communication, particularly in international teams? What is the remote; the face-to-face? What works for individuals, and what is the relationship between sub-teams that may be operating with the whole team?

And, of course, a very important one is what is the decision-making process? What decisions are made in a team? What's outside in a team? What is the input of the team leader? How much consensus is there, and when does the team leader need to make the decision?

Those are some of the areas of what I would say is governance, and another that you could add is the question how is the team remunerated? If there is only an individual remuneration, I don't think we can expect a high level of teamwork, for example.

Rachel Salaman: So, governance is your first level that you go into in the book. The second one is skills, which you call the competencies. What are your main tips for picking people with the right skills?

Elisabeth Marx: This is a question you need about an hour to answer, quite frankly – but one of the key things to look at when you pick team members is whether your criteria are clear enough, because I've also done a lot of searches, and a lot of senior level searches; you will find that very often clients and companies are not specific enough of what they need.

So, for example, if they need to have a new chief executive or a new finance director, they very often look at replacements, so they look at "We want to have someone like we had before because that person worked very well,"but actually the key thing is to look strategically: "What does the company need at this point in time?"

You need to look future oriented – what does the company need to achieve? – and then work backwards, and to be very clear on the priority of the business competencies, and how does the role produce value in the organization in the future. So, a better analysis and looking at a framework of business competencies number one.

Then I think the question is what is the leadership style? So there comes the question about the personality and probably also having a better understanding of how people execute their roles of work, because some people have fantastic business competencies, but their cultural fit is not quite right, particularly at a senior level because their personality or their values are not in tune with the values of the organization, for example.

And so I very much advocate a structured interview approach around business competencies, and some of the companies are very good in having their framework, but make that future oriented, and this is supplemented very often with at least a personality assessment or some form of better understanding of the psychology of the leader or the team members.

Rachel Salaman: And finally, level three is dynamics. What control does anyone actually have over the dynamics of a team?

Elisabeth Marx: Well, that's an excellent question. There are some things that we can do, but of course: the dynamics evolve, dynamics change, and so dynamics cannot be completely prefabricated by a team leader, but one area is of course first of all the organization would do jolly well to choose the right team leader in whatever, and have someone who has very good leadership skills in a wider sense.

And then there's the question of how does this leader put their teams together in terms of how switched on are they? In terms of the personalities, not just on the competencies which we very often concentrate on, and we look at the hard business skills, less so on is this person actually a good team player?

Organizations very often say they want to have a real team player, but then seem to miss out assessing whether the person is actually team player – either by not very good interviewing or the references concentrating very much how they operate as a team member, but I also think there is a question then of how you pull the team together, and looking at the governance framework, for example, to be extremely explicit and what your expectations are in terms of team behavior.

The rest – whether then people like each other; what is the chemistry – is quite frankly not predictable.

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Rachel Salaman: In this discussion so far, you've mentioned psychology a number of times, and your own background in psychology. Where does it fit into all this?

Elisabeth Marx: Well, psychology in a funny sort of way is at the heart of the model, even though it's a practical model, but I believe that if you don't understand yourself to at least a basic level it's very difficult to understand your team members, and it's also very difficult to understand international clients;, so a base level of understanding is clearly at the core of this approach. But I also believe that everybody can reach the base level of global leadership.

The other interesting aspect about psychology in this model is of course how we deal with diversity. So if you think about if you have a better psychological understanding where people are coming from, for example in terms of the variety of perspectives.

If you deal with an Asian client, they have a very approach to establishing relationships and what they value, towards, for example, northern European or US executives. So what the psychological approach does is really explains why we have different perspectives, and it also makes us be more astute about these different perspectives and helps us by being more aware of it to integrate a different perspective.

So the psychological approach – and you see this also when you do psychological assessments of the teams, which is one of the most interesting things actually one can do, because you can see the entire range – it's wonderful, because executive teams range so much in terms of their personalities, social styles, thinking styles, how they emotionally react. And when you see this, you will also understand why you get all these differences in the expectations and the behavior in the team, and it allows the team leader to react and then to integrate those differences. So what I say is the psychology really makes the diversity explicit, and that's a very neat thing, because it allows us then to positively use diversity to come up with better solutions.

Rachel Salaman: One of the terms you use in the book is "psychological androgyny."What does that mean, and how does that help leaders build a team knowing about that?

Elisabeth Marx: Well, psychological androgyny is interesting. It's a 1970s psychological concept actually, which was defined by Sandra Bem at the time, and her approach and thesis (on which she is supported by very good research) is to show that we all have masculine and feminine psychological traits, and actually, that people who are most adaptive in terms of well-being, but also in terms of being creative are individuals – whether men or women – who can integrate and have a very good expression of both masculine, i.e., let's say assertive, highly analytical and so on, and feminine, meaning being the creative and the more empathetic type of style; and this is an interesting concept to think about in the current scenario of international work, where the black and white analytical thinking is clearly not sufficient to come up with complex and changing solutions.

So, the thesis is that if we have both individual leaders and teams who have let's say a big range of psychological androgyny – i.e., both masculine and feminine attributes – they are clearly more likely to succeed. The best example is probably in the area of creativity and innovation, because it has been shown that teams that are composed of people with a lot of psychological androgyny are more innovative.

Of course, you could think about one individual who has shown this as a high profile one is Steve Jobs, because the integration of being a very hot businessman in one respect, and the creative interest he had and a wide interest from Buddhism to calligraphy to dancing when he was in his India time, shows that this whole range of interests or masculine and feminine traits or interests, has been very successful for him in terms of innovation.

Rachel Salaman: Is there something a person can change within themselves? Can they become more psychologically androgynous?

Elisabeth Marx: It's an excellent question. I think the assumption would be that we all have this to start with, but of course, it's culturally also determined in terms of what is acceptable. So, for example, it's been shown that if you combine let's say the hard sciences with some more creative – with music or reading novels or writing – you have a big cultural background: you're more likely to have both an analytic mind, the traditional rational, and the synthetic mind, which is the more creative, which allows synthesis, and therefore coming up with more creative or complex solutions; and the prediction is that we will need to move more into the synthetic thinking or synthesis, and integrating very disparate and diverse activities and thinking styles in order to be effective in a global landscape and also in order to be effective to deal with different cultures.

Rachel Salaman: Now, you've written a lot about culture shock in the past, and it plays a part in the book too. Can you tell us about the culture shock triangle which you outline in the book?

Elisabeth Marx: I developed the culture shock triangle quite a while ago when I looked at expatriates, and again originally, the words "culture shock"were created by an anthropologist called Oberg in the 1960s. And what he found was that expatriates reacted very often emotionally with culture shock symptoms like being very anxious or irritated, feeling helpless and becoming quite depressed.

So I looked a little bit more carefully at this, and I thought, "Well, it's actually a psychological concept."So I in a way transferred his idea into a complete psychological concept, and that's at the heart of developing global leaders and developing global teams.

And what I propose is that if we want to be effective in dealing with international clients or international teams – whether we're working from a home basis or travel around – we need to understand how we deal with the otherness – i.e., meeting people from different countries or wider different cultures, whether it is a South American going into Asia, or an Asian coming to Europe, we will have a shock and we get this shock because we see that our normal ways of understanding and behaving do not work.

Now imagine that you are an extremely successful CEO in your home country, and you go somewhere else and you have been successful for the last 20 years in running organizations, and you do the same thing and it doesn't work at all – you are in shock because you've got to question yourself, and the questioning of yourself is a painful thing, because you've got to look in the mirror and think, "What do I need to do differently?"

So, to answer your question about the culture shock triangle, it refers to three levels in which you need to address your culture shock, and shows methods or ways in how to deal with that culture shock effectively.

One is the emotional side: to be aware and to learn how to manage the stress of international business, because it is stressful: we are confronted to change and understand things. It's quite demanding, but also exciting.

Then you look at the level of thinking: we have to move away from stereotyping. Not all Germans are like this, or not all British are like this, but we have to develop what I would say is an internationally effective solution, so that means we need to be able to deal with the paradoxes and diversity and integrate it, and keep things quite flexible in how we deal with the ambiguity of international business.

So that's the cognitive level, and then of course we have the behavioral or the social skills level, and that means are we just behaving always in one way that is effective in our culture, or can we develop what I call a larger repertoire of social skills? It's like learning a new language essentially, and I think there are pragmatic ways in which to address this, and some of them are also outlined in a previous book which was on culture shock on individuals and also within the team.

But I think if you look at these three psychological levels – even in a relatively fast and not very in-depth way – it allows you to understand yourself, your international team, and also your international clients much better.

Rachel Salaman: One of those three elements was emotions, and in the book you talk about the "universality of emotions."What do you mean by that, and how does it help leaders in their team building?

Elisabeth Marx: One of the questions that always arises when we look at cross-cultural differences – and we're talking a lot of about diversity, but of course they are also common human traits and that's very important, because even if we are very different in our backgrounds, in our view of things, we have communality as human beings. And a psychologist called Paul Ekman showed us a long time ago that we have a universality of basic emotions, and those are emotions that are present in all of us, whether we are from Papua New Guinea or whether we work in Wall Street, New York, and those are happiness, fear, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise.

So, what we can expect as a team leader – these things are happening in the team, those are emotional reactions that will bind us together, and also we can recognize the facial expressions of these emotions in very different cultures.

So we know that we have certain reactions to certain events. However, sometimes the expressions of emotions are not as clear. So we've seen this very much in experiments– for example, with Asian-Japanese students, I think in the U.S. – so when they watch a frightening movie on their own they showed a facial expression of fear; when they see the movie in company they don't show the expression of fear.

This is very interesting. So as a team leader we can assume they are very similar emotions, but of course, we need to know something about what is culturally acceptable in the expression of emotions in the presence of others and in a team.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk a bit more about boards now, and in the book you talk about the internationalization of boards. What trends are you seeing in this area, and what are the implications?

Elisabeth Marx: I think we are seeing worldwide you have clear trends towards greater internationalization, but you also have clear geographical differences in terms of how far this internationalization of boards has already been attempted.

Let's say, so for example, within Europe, the U.K. shows a very high trend towards international board directors; we have boards that are extremely international. Within Europe, other countries, for example Switzerland, have very international boards.

I think the U.S. is only really starting now to understand that they probably need to get some non-U.S. board directors on their board. Asia seems to be changing quite slowly as well, if I just generalize, and have more interest to get either U.S. or European board directors.

And of course within Europe, which is probably a bit further advanced than other regions in the world, we see a very high demand particularly for board directors from the emerging markets, so whether that is from Asia or from South America. And that is I think a very good trend, because if you look at international businesses, I think the boards really need to reflect the internationalization of one's business, and we need to have people with very different perspectives and knowledge of very different markets to help companies, and to help the executive team to perform effectively.

Rachel Salaman: And yet in the book you say that diversity at the top of a company will not automatically result in better company performance.

Elisabeth Marx: Diversity is an incredibly interesting concept, because what is shown in research – for example, diversity of a team – is phenomenally good when you have a complex situation. If you have a non-complex situation – i.e., a really simple business – diversity is not particularly good, because you don't need a different perspective, and so in a way you get a distraction through this diversity.

However, as we know the world has become more and more complex, faster, more ambiguous basically, and business becomes more challenging, so there is clearly a need in most businesses for diversity, and it's been shown that diverse teams produce superior solutions, and we would assume the same on boards, so a superior solution to non-diverse teams.

But diversity, even in those contexts, does not automatically result in superior business performance. Diversity has one big problem, which is what you want is cognitive or thinking diversity, but very often this diversity also results in effective problems – in emotional problems. In other words, what you want as a team leader or as a chairman of a board, the key question is how can you facilitate a diversity of thinking whilst keeping the potential emotional conflict that could arise – so people being widely different in their opinions and perspectives – so that demands very good leadership skills of the leader to understand how to resolve conflict and how to encourage the cognitive or the thinking conflict whilst reducing the potential emotional conflict that could arise.

So that depends on what is the climate of discussing conflicts, and so some experts in this area say the key question is for effective teams or boards, how good is their conflict resolution?

Rachel Salaman: So let's say I'm a mid-level manager working for a multinational company and I'm based in the regional office in Ohio in the U.S. What should I be thinking about if I'm picking a new team member for a global team in my office?

Elisabeth Marx: There are some key characteristics everyone could check in an interview. One of them is how has the person in the past dealt with changes? How much change has the person experienced, whether it's between companies, has the person moved in the U.S.? If they haven't had any international experiences, what changes have they been involved in within companies? And also about their personal interests and how wide they are. I think that's a good indication.

A very important one is how does the person deal with ambiguity. It's been found again and again that if someone likes to have a real structured environment, likes to work in a predictable way, then they are usually not as good to work with unpredictable situations and ambiguity, which you have when you start working in a global team.

And a very important aspect is how do people deal with stress or pressure. Some people are extremely sensitive, and that's sometimes hard to ascertain. Are the very sensitive are going to get easily irritated, or are they robust and can deal with pressure and everything that's thrown at them in terms of unpredictability very well?

Then I think it's also useful to look at what's the communication style and what's the interpersonal style: are they able to establish relationships very well? Are they socially oriented (which always helps in international work)? Do they enjoy and find it exciting to meet new people and people who are widely different, or do they just want to work with or meet the same type of people – and of course, people more conservative in their thinking – or are they quite excited by unconventional or more innovative things, and are they quite strategic?

Those are questions to ask. So I think a combination of those which you can really ascertain, and there is more of this in the book. You can easily then delineate some questions which should help you to make a much better of international team members.

Rachel Salaman: Dr Elisabeth Marx was talking to me in London. The name of Elisabeth's book again is "The Power of Global Teams: Driving Growth and Innovation in a Fast-Changing World."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.