Case study: Leadership and collaboration
Frank works in a firm in Austria that produces beautycare products. He recently accepted a position leading a new international marketing team responsible for Europe and the Middle East, with team members located mainly in three centres: Poland, Spain and the UK.
Until recently, the team members worked independently. They are all highly experienced and successful, and needed little direct management in the past. Frank, however, has been asked to build a crossborder organization that develops common campaigns for international brands, uses common documentation and processes, regularly shares best practices between countries and saves costs where possible. The team members report directly to their local CEO but have a “dotted line” reporting relationship to Frank.
A kickoff meeting was held at the beginning of the year, which seemed to go well, but by June, Frank is finding it very challenging to get team members to commit to the new way of working. No common campaigns have been developed; these are still developed independently, country by country, using local budgets with no crossborder cost savings.
Also, the teams continue to build their campaigns using different external and local suppliers and using different documents with different information stored on their local IT systems. This makes it impossible for Frank to compile standardized management reports.
Frank feels that the more experienced team members in the UK don’t accept his leadership. Some of them applied for his job and were rejected. Also, Frank is less experienced than they are, and has spent less time in the company. He suspects that they are acting against him in order to undermine his authority with other team members.
Frank also thinks that cultural differences are preventing collaboration. After receiving cancellations from the British and Spanish colleagues for a planned international meeting, Frank decides to write an email to clarify the objectives of the new marketing team, to define the team cooperation he expects and to reestablish his leadership.
The following comments are provided as food for thought. Different interpretations are, of course, possible.
How does Frank explain the failure of the Polish, Spanish and UK teams to follow his leadership approach and work more closely together?
Frank seems to think that national cultural differences are the problem. He also feels that negative motivations are driving the behaviour of some of the other people — jealousy or unwillingness to give him credibility.
What do you think of Frank’s explanation? What other factors could explain the team’s lack of support for cross-border collaboration?
Like many business professionals, Frank seems to blame national cultural difference for the problems. But this is often an error. There are usually other and more significant factors involved. A belief in the negative motivations of others is also common but again usually false.
Frank’s leadership challenge is to engage people in the different countries in a change process, to give them a clear sense of purpose for the change, and to inspire and enable them to achieve this change. Frank seems to be trying to achieve too much too fast. It could be that his timetable for change is too ambitious, or possibly too disruptive to the local operations. It may also be that he hasn’t explained the case for change clearly enough, so that the local teams don’t understand the value of coordinated campaigns and/or they fear that such campaigns may fail. Interestingly, they may be right. So, rather than acting negatively, they may be acting positively, in the interest of maintaining local sales with effective local campaigns.
Language skills may also be a problem. The Spanish and Polish colleagues may not have the necessary level of English — or the confidence — to work with fastspeaking native English speakers in Britain.
Finally, the key reporting line for the local team members is to their local CEO. If this person does not support the international cooperation and wants to maintain a focus on more local operations, it may be that the team members want to collaborate but cannot.
To what extent do you think Frank’s email is an effective way to resolve the situation?
Frank’s email is an escalation and creates an opportunity to confront the issue, and possibly to build understanding of the reasons why the team is not working as a team. But the email also contains clear signs of frustration, is almost disciplinary in tone and assumes “little cooperation”. So the email could be seen critically and discourage people from working with him. Many professionals would find the tone too hierarchical and disrespectful. However, others might say that it is necessary at times to be direct, to call out unacceptable behaviour and to remind people of their responsibility to execute the group strategy.
What could Frank do differently to encourage collaboration?
As an alternative to writing such an email, Frank could visit the various countries to meet the local teams and ask them how they feel about the new international structure, where they see its challenges, etc. In other words, he could begin by listening to people and trying to understand their motivations and opinions. He could then modify his leadership and communication style as necessary.