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

Learning and development professionals will be aware of the Kirkpatrick model for evaluating the effectiveness of training. One of my colleagues, John Bland, forwarded this quote from the recent  Kirkpatrick Evaluation Summit

“Those of us as individuals, training departments, and corporate universities who do not quickly find the means of first creating value and then demonstrating our value to the business will be putting themselves in career jeopardy.

Never has this been more true than in the current economic situation. There is a strong tendency at the moment for people to sit on their hands and do nothing, waiting to see what 2009 will bring.

It reminded me of an ex-client who suspended all L&D activity in anticipation of a reorganization. They delivered nothing in 6 months whilst waiting for the reorganization to be announced. It was known that, after the reorganization, people would still need most if not all of the same skills and capabilities as they did before.

When the reorganization came they took the opportunity to radically slim down departments that were seen as non-core or unproductive - guess what happened to departments that had delivered nothing for 6 months?

Now the reality is that many learning and development functions are experiencing budget cuts or travel freezes. The question is what can we deliver that has value during this period.

Many existing budgets are allocated to traditional and relatively low value learning activity. We should be thinking about aligning our learning to the strategic imperatives of increased productivity and lower costs. We need to deliver faster and at lower cost and to maintain employee satisfaction during this difficult period.

• How are we helping employees to deliver more with less
• How will we make sure that people have the skills to continue to get things done without travel and other expenses.
• How can we deliver projects, teamwork and training remotely
• How can we drive out unnecessary and unproductive work

Running traditional training courses wont help much with this.

Waiting for training needs analysis summaries of appraisals won’t help either. The individuals and line managers completing these forms are not experts in L&D and they don’t know what is available - in a time of change L&D need to innovate and bring in new ideas relevant to the times

If HR and Learning and Development want to be strategically aligned and bring something valuable to the party we need to be much more radical and focused.

If we don’t, then expect to be treated as a cost centre alone - and that is not a good place to be in a downturn.

Find out about our save a day a week, speed and managing without travel programs.

Dec 08 2008

Many companies use virtual teams in order to promote communication, sharing of resources and “horizontal” activity across the traditional geographic and functional silos.

Breaking the silos with virtual teams

In the early stages it is common for financial reporting, local objectives and problems with alignment and legacy power structures to discourage people from working in virtual teams that cut across the traditional “silo” organizations.

When virtual teams are not as effective as companies hoped it is common to introduce dotted line, or even dual solid line reporting structures to allow the virtual team managers to exercise more control and power to counter the influence of the traditional silos. In project driven organizations the main power may eventually lie with the horizontal or project stream of activity.

In virtual teams we have “matrix working” even where we don’t yet have a formal matrix organization structure.

If we can find away to make virtual teams work effectively we may not need the formal matrix structure to support them.

Find out more about our virtual team training and skills for matrix working.

How well do virtual teams work in your organization?

Dec 04 2008

A matrix organization structure introduces, or at least recognizes, the real life complexity of our business environment. Geography, function, technology, business unit and technology (among others) are important, so why not recognize this reality in our matrix organizations structure.

However, a matrix organization structure also introduces a higher level of internal complexity and some additional people management challenges, so there must be significant advantages to a matrix organization structure that outweigh the matrix people management challenges.

Matrix organization structures were introduced in the airspace industry in the 50s to cope with complex projects. Since then many thousands of organizations, often prompted by the large strategy consultancies, have adopted the matrix organization structure to help deal with internal and external complexity.

At its simplest the matrix organization structure just reflects this external complexity in the internal structure. Companies realize that geography is important but so is function, and so is customer grouping, product and technology. Instead of choosing a dominant organizing principle we choose to reflect all of these important strands in our structure, we have solid lines to product group and function, dotted lines to geography etc…

In a sense then, a matrix organization structure is a recognition that we cannot choose which of these is more important, so we need a structure that allows them to be balanced and prioritized on a daily basis.

What this means is that, when we choose a matrix organization structure, we are deliberately trading some clarity in return for more flexibility.

The matrix organization structure itself, solves nothing, it is how people work together in the matrix organization that makes it succeed or fail - and often this is the neglected bit.

At a more detailed level the advantages that most organizations seek through using a matrix organization structure include

• improved ability to access resources across the old functional and geographic silos.
• better coordination on shared technologies across the organization (such as IT)
• Faster decentralized decisions
• improved access to a diverse range of skills and perspectives.
• improved global or regional projects
• broader and more multiskilled people development
• increased communication and coordination across the business
• reflects the needs of global or regional customers

As we can see, most of these are about improving the way people work together and breaking down traditional barriers to cooperation.

The idea of the matrix organization structure is to enable faster response and adaptation to a complex world. The matrix structure can deliver this, provided people have the skills to make the matrix work.

In our experience working with clients most of them do not communicate the benefits of their matrix organization structure clearly enough, all people see are the challenges and not the benefits that make a matrix structure worthwhile.

Why did your company introduce a matrix organization structure?

Listen to our podcast on matrix management

Nov 28 2008

Leadership training has changed little in the last 30 years. If you search for leadership training programs at the web sites of the world’s leading business schools you will see approaches that are very similar to the leadership programs offered in the 70s and 80s. Just because it worked then does not mean it works today.

It may have worked in the 70s!

However, the practice of leadership has changed hugely. We operate in multiple locations, across timezones, with highly diverse groups of employees and in much more complex and fast moving organizations.

This gap between the new reality of our environment and the old-fashioned skills we teach on our leadership training programs not only means that a lot of leadership training is a poor investment, it may even make things worse by promoting out of date solutions to today’s real leadership challenges.

After 15 years training leaders of ever more complex teams in over 300 of the world’s leading companies in 40 countries and delivering over 100,000 participant days of training we have reached some startling conclusions with major implications for leadership training and development.

Successful companies grow, and as they grow, they become more complex and it takes more time and effort to get things done. Eventually complexity undermines what made the company successful in the first place; the old, entrepreneurial spirit breaks down, bureaucracy increases and progress slows.

Four key leadership training myths are getting in the way of us developing the leadership skills and leadership training programs we need in this new more complex leadership environment.

1. “It’s all about teamwork” - Even great companies are struggling with an epidemic of cooperation – Managers spend 20% of their time in unnecessary meetings. Everyone feels the need to be involved in everything and teams are the answer. Team working is no longer a technique but a corporate value. Yet teams often do not work and are expensive and difficult to run. But still our leadership training tends to assume that teamwork is the answer to any problem.
2. “Communication is the answer” - Lack of communication is a problem of the past – the challenge now is how to disconnect from the mass of trivia and see the few really important messages. The average FTSE Company pays its people to write, send, read and delete over 240,000,000 pointless emails per year. Yet still we leave our old-fashioned leadership training programs with the assumption that more communication will make things better
3. “We need to be in control” - Decentralized control and information in manufacturing have given us a quality revolution over the last 15 years. Management control in other areas however, has become more centralized and this is causing a damaging cycle of micromanagement and low expectations of people at work. Yet still our leadership training programs promote unrealistic expectations of leaders who know all the answers and over-manage their people.

Most leadership training programs still carry these inaccurate assumptions from a much simpler leadership past. Leaders are working harder and harder to apply out of date skills to more complex, multi-site, virtual, cross-cultural and matrixed organizations. The answer is not working harder with the old skills but implementing faster and simpler ways of working.

Find out more about our book “Speed Lead – faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies”,

Our Speed Lead leadership training offers some challenging but practical alternatives in all of these areas.

See how your organization compares for unnecessary cooperation and communication at our free “Speed Survey”

Nov 20 2008

Many of our clients are currently taking a hard look at their travel budgets - driven by a desire to reduce costs, time and carbon emissions. Cutting the travel budget is a time honoured way of reducing costs in the short term but can undermine effectiveness in the long term.

We have been focusing on the people management skills of managing without travel in our remote and virtual teams training for nearly 15 years and have developed some practical alternative to regular face to face contact. We also offer specific managing without travel training programs based on your corporate objectives.

Now we can also offer managing without travel - without travel. Using podcasts, webinars, conference calls and other remotely delivered methods we can take your people through a methodology for reducing travel whilst still getting things done.

As an example please listen to our latest managing without travel podcast at our sister site “Life in a Matrix”

If your travel budgets are going to be tight during the downturn but you still need to get things done please contact us to find out more about managing without travel.

Nov 17 2008