I was in San Francisco recently for our US team meeting, and I walked passed a conference room that had been laid for a big event for the pharmaceutical industry, and there were hundreds of chairs laid out in rows.  A big stage at one end, a podium, and very little room to move around inside the room, so everything was packed in.

An impressive amount of effort had been put into branding, into pens, into posters, and the “set dressing”.  I guess about $50,000 had been spent on making the room look good, and I would estimate nothing had been spent on thinking about the “participant experience”.

The whole set up of that room said to participants, “Your job here is to shut up and listen”.  All the focus was on the front, there was no opportunity to talk to your peers, apart from the people to your immediate left and right.

It sounds crazy but we have all been to those meetings. This is probably the most common layout that you see for corporate meetings, and it carries a very strong hierarchical and passive message to the participants.

Often people are rewarded for sitting through boring PowerPoint presentations all day, by being allowed to go and do something interesting in the evening.

Our challenge is why not build fun, participation and interaction into the day, and make it relevant?  Very often the evening exercise are irrelevant to the learning points of the conference, and added in as an after thought – “let’s do some team building”, without really thinking about what we are trying to achieve.

So why not build participation in right from the start?  Get people interacting and moving?  Something as simple as the room layout sends a power message.  If instead of rows of chairs you have round tables then the message is “Here is an opportunity to interact with your colleagues”.

Build in more group work, people have an inexhaustible interest in discussing work issues with their peers, particularly people they don’t meet very often.  Give them a topic to focus on (better still let them choose one) and let people network, and learn from each other.
Particularly in large multi-site and global organisations, networking is a real challenge, it just doesn’t happen remotely, so concentrate on giving people the opportunity to do talk.

Minimise the amount of presentations.  Presentations tend to be someone telling you what they think is important – and it rarely is.  After a brief introduction, try and get group work going as quickly as possible.  Have break out rooms, white paper sessions where people can create content with experts, trade shows where people can meet in smaller groups with people they really want to talk to.  Let people opt in to topics they enjoy and not be forced to sit through topics that are not relevant to them.  Use lots of post its and networking areas where people can really talk together and get to know their colleagues.

Build in participation right from the start.  Don’t make it a by product of your meetings. Instead of spending your budget on banners and pens spend it on a great participant experience – nobody remember great meetings for the branding!

If you want further ideas on designing really participative and interactve meetings, have a look at our Podcast on the subject Dismal meetings, surprisingly useful coffee breaks , see more about our consulting and facilitation in this area or or give us a call.

Feb 05 2009

Found this interesting article on business technology trends.

“Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways. read the rest of the article here…

Feb 04 2009

Our Speed Lead book is now available in Spanish - translated as “Gerenciar con sentido Comun” - managing with common sense.

Gerenciar con sentido comun

Enjoy

Feb 03 2009

Virtual teams are now common.  But how about completely virtual team building? is it possible to build team spirit and a sense of community without getting together?

Now let’s be clear first of all.  We don’t think that remote or virtual team building is as good as getting face to face.  There is something about that intensive face to face interaction that allows you to build relationships and trust much more quickly.

The kind of team building events I have done with my team in the past include horse whispering (fabulous), stunt days (dramatic), circus school (painful), and the intensive shared experience of these type of team building events really can make a difference to a team.  But when costs are tight and travel restricted, some form of virtual team building to get the team kicked off is better than none.

We adapted a team building task we have run for many years where three distributed sub teams have to cooperate, compete, communicate and solve problems across cultural differences using technology. We delivered this to a remote and virtual team through web and telephone interaction.

What the virtual team building exercise lost in the lack of face to face interaction was to some extent replaced by the novelty of working with the technology.  We were able to use webex, Internet search, shared documents and other tools to really embed the use of technology.

Some small group physical presence in the different locations turned out to be important for the success of the task and the learning was impressive.  So virtual team building is definitely better than no team building.

If you can’t (or even if you can) get together face to face this year and you want to inject some fun, some relationship building, some leaning and team building into your virtual remote team meeting, why not give us a call.

Feb 03 2009

In our work on global account management we come across a lot of acronyms.

• GAM is a global account manager, but there is also
• IAM - International account manager
• SAM - Strategic account manager
• KAM - Key account manager
• PAM - Partner account manager

In each of these cases the account in question may have some combination of the need to work across complex organization structures, corporate cultures, distance, cultures, timezones etc… (the areas we specialize in)

As global account management (we will call it GAM) becomes more embedded in an organization it is common for the global accounts function to become more formalized and even to be established as its own business unit operating horizontally across the organization.

Despite this the acronym for Business Unit Manager is rarely used

Any other acronyms you use?

Feb 02 2009

Global account teams are common in large organizations. Often the best large or national account managers are moved into high profile global account management roles based on their ability to manage large national accounts.

But the move from NAM (National account manager) to IAM (International account manager) or GAM (Global account manager) is a significant step up in complexity.

Too often global account management or global account team training focuses on the sales elements of these roles and ignores the additional skills needed to deal with this new level of organizational complexity - both inside the global account team’s organization and inside their global customer.

It is, of course, vital for global account teams to create value with the client and to stimulate sales but establishing the  relationship necessary to do this can involve dealing with factors new to the inexperienced global account manager or global account team member.

In this series of posts we will look at some of the new skills needed by global account managers and their teams. In this post we look at managing corporate and national cultural differences.

A global account team has to be adept at diagnosing and working within the corporate culture of the client which will itself be influenced by their dominant national culture. At the same time account teams have to operate within their own corporate culture. This “cultural chameleon” role can be challenging.

Someone once said “I will sell to you in your language, but I will buy from you in my own language” which sums up the power in the sales and purchasing relationship. But language is only a small part of the capability.

Your own cultural profile can lead to  “selling preference” style and also some potential blind spots.

We worked with a global account team from a Japanese company who were attempting to build a relationship with a large US organization. The Japanese company was making great efforts to build relationships through corporate hospitality, visits etc.. (which worked well in the Asian markets they were more familiar with) and making very little progress. Unfortunately we discovered that the US company had a policy of not accepting hospitality and their preferred way of buying was blind Internet auction!

These gaps between cultures are often much less obvious than this, but differences in the way organizations manage deadlines, contracts, status, relationships and many other factors can make a huge difference to the quality of the relationships and cause major problems if misunderstood.

We use our “culture abacus” as a tool to help global account teams diagnose their own and their clients corporate and national cultures to create a “gap analysis” of critical areas to focus on. This also helps the account teams explain the differences systematically withing their own organizations (which can sometimes be an even greater challenge)

We then use a framework called the “5 choices” to generate options on what we can do about the differences - much of this depends on the relative power of the parties involved.

Experienced global account managers eventually work out these skills for themselves but the learning curve can be slow and mistakes with your most critical customers can be costly - having a systematic tool kit for mapping cultural differences and understanding and manging their implications for the global account relationship can help.

Listen to our pdcast on Global Account Management

If you want to turn the ability of your global account teams to manage corporate and national cultural differences into a greater source of competitive advantage then contact us now

Jan 22 2009

Participants on our remote and virtual teams training often ask how big should virtual teams be for maximum effectiveness.

At one level the answer to team size is “as big as it needs to be to deliver its purpose”. If you have a complex global team on a major project then you may need 20 or (many) more people. But we also know that the right team size size for a team in terms of effective human dynamics, decision making and maintenance of relationships is much smaller than that.

• Studies in business schools have found that an effective face to face syndicate team size is no more than 4-6 people.
• A recent Times article found that a group of 8 was the worst number of people for making decisions and that voting rather than consensus was essential for groups of 20 or more.

Both of these studies focused on the right team size for face to face groups.

In our book Speed Lead we identify two factors that drive down effective team size in complex organizations

1. Interdependence - if we really need to communicate and coordinate intensively (true or what we call “spaghetti” team work) then we can only maintain a limited number of connections. (a team size of 6 people creates 15 interconnections, 20 people create 190  interconnections). Star group (hub and spoke) structures can be organized to work well with larger numbers of people
2. working through technology - conference calls and other technologies limit effective contribution and discussion. If you ever attended a conference calls of 20 people you will know it soon descends into a series of monologues.

Because of this we recommend an effective team size of 4-6 for real spaghetti teamwork. If you need 20 people for a global team or project try to cluster them into several smaller sub-teams based on common objectives, geography, interdependence etc…

The average team size from our speed survey is 12 and people tell us they are part of 5 teams. This means that people are managing an average of 330 interdependent relationships. This would allow abut 7 minutes per week per relationship!

This reinforces our view that most “teams” are not really engaged in interdependent spaghetti team work but are actually groups of individuals engaged in largely independent tasks with a small amount of teamwork.

For more about how to build effective matrix, remote and virtual teams, please contact us.

Jan 15 2009

Our latest podcast in the “Life in a Matrix” podcast series is on Cross cultural skills development. You can listen to it on our sister blog here or download and subscribe at iTunes (search on “Life in a Matrix” under podcasts)

The podcast focuses on new developments in cross cultural training which is becoming more embedded at deeper levels in large organizations and which needs to be much more practical and applied now that working across national and corporate cultures is “business as usual” for many organizations.

Find out more about or approach to cross cultural training.

Jan 13 2009

Have a great Christmas and New Year

Dec 22 2008

A matrix organization chart needs to reflect the complexity of 2 or more dimensions on a simple chart. In many cases this leads to matrix organization charts only going down to departmental rather than individual levels and most of the representations of a this type of organization chart are not intuitive and clear.

We realized that one of the problems in drawing matrix organization charts was that we were carrying old-fashioned assumptions about what an organization chart should look like. In the past, the focus was often to use the organization chart to show grading levels so people at the same level of the organization would appear at the same horizontal level on the chart.

In a matrix organization chart it is fitting that we change this assumption – after all a matrix organization structure undermines traditional hierarchy,

If we let go of this assumption (if you want to you can show grades with a letter in the chart box) we can make matrix organization charts much simpler by moving people with dual line reporting down a level on the chart.

Matrix Organization Chart 1

This matrix organization chart shows 3 direct reports and 2 who have dual reporting into their functional heads for HR & Finance.

If you need to add another level of reporting to the matrix chart this approach can also help.

Matrix Organization Chart 2

I hope you find our approach to drawing matrix organization charts helpful

If you have come across any other simple ways of illustrating a matrix organization chart, or have ideas for improving the chart above, please let me know.

Listen to our podcast on matrix management

Find out more about our matrix organization consulting

Dec 16 2008