Engaging Your Global Team – New Technology Solutions

By Mike Kanazawa, Guest Author

One of the new and unsolved leadership challenges of today is how to keep a global team focused, aligned and engaged on a common strategic direction and set of priorities. There are many innovations and new approaches to meet this challenge. We’ve captured a few examples of what leading companies are doing, but would love to hear your best examples and ideas as well.

As markets and the talent pool continue to expand on a global scale, it is more common that you may have direct reports on your team in multiple time zones and countries. We all know that it is important to keep our teams focused, aligned and engaged. It’s hard enough to do that on a continuous basis when everyone works just down the hall from each other, much less spread around in different geographies. It is increasingly expensive to get dispersed teams together physically, takes a big commitment of time and at most can only be done once per quarter or so.

Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) is leading the way and providing a positive example. Using Cisco’s growing portfolio of integrated communications solutions, Coca Cola is learning how to communicate better using technologies to connect more than 30,000 employes.

In 2007, Esat Sezer, CIO at CCE, worked with Cisco to establish a communications solution that allowed the company to to engage all employees in a corporate transformation, sharing the global leadership agenda, strategic business priorities, vision and values using visual, collaborative and consistent messages using a live broadcast and unified communications solution.

One year ago, in working with a global company, we held our first ever executive working session with people on three continents. There were two major locations in the U.S. and Europe linked by video conferencing and two individuals joining from various locations by web conferencing software in Africa and South America. Our working sessions are highly interactive and typically contain small group “tablework” sessions to tap into the wisdom of the group. These exercises are most effective when people from different work groups have the opportunity to work in cross-functional tablework teams. In this case, we carefully planned the breakout work to be conducted by small teams in each of the major work locations, but also mixed those teams with others by using WebEx for the tablework and carefully designed work modules.

Amazingly, very little was lost in the outcome of the work. Designing and facilitating the meeting took additional planning and design, but our client wanted to prove that you could hold a high-engagement working meeting across geographies and time zones using technology. And for me, I wanted to know that the ideas in our book, BIG Ideas to BIG Results on how to rapidly transform organizations would translate into an online and virtual world and that is what we found. In addition to conducting major working sessions, there is also a need to keep global team members feeling connected as one team on a day-to-day basis.

In the case of collaborative work in developing breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, it is necessary to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd,” even if that crowd is highly distributed. Collective and ongoing conversations to generate innovative ideas typically are limited to people working physically together or to sporadic brainstorming meetings.

Again, there are interesting new technology solutions available. BrightIdea is a software company that provides Innovation Pipeline Management solutions that enable web-based tools for better engagement and collaboration of all employees and even customers as well who may be anywhere in the world. One of their solutions is somewhat of a mix of a wiki, blog, and popularity rating site that allows people to post new growth ideas, to shape them, vote on them and in the end for well thought out and prioritized ideas to work their way to the top of the list. Cisco is using BrightIdea to run their I-Prize program where they are leveraging employees, customers and other entrepreneurs in generating and vetting new business ideas.

The ability to engage global teams of employees is becoming a necessary skill to serving as an executive leader. Unless you have an unlimited travel budget, you’ll need to find ways to keep people engaged and sharing innovative ideas to get the best from them by leveraging technologies.

Please share your best stories and ideas of new tools that you’ve found helpful in this new leadership challenge. As I write this, I’m realizing that I should talk with Mark Greely of BrightIdea about hosting a site to generate ideas on how to better engage global workers so that we can all learn the value of his solution and for all of us to learn more about how to leverage technologies.