In the modern workforce, teams are globally dispersed, virtual meetings are the norm, and a lack of cultural awareness can derail communication very easily. Developing a healthy and thriving one-team culture among your global teams can make all the difference for global innovation and growth.
Dennis Joseph, Head of Clinical Development at Haleon, Sachin Gaur, Global Head – Capability, Change, Org. and Leadership Development at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, Christian Hug, Group Vice President – DEI for International at Warner Bros. Discovery, and Keiko Sakurai, Director of Consulting – Japan at Aperian sat down with Mui Hwa Ng, APAC Director of Consulting at Aperian, to discuss how to enable cultural competence that creates team cohesion, impacts morale, and leads to growth. You can watch the recording and read through some of their helpful insights below.
Dennis: Leaders should raise awareness of cultural differences. Rather than ignore or treat them like the elephant in the room, leaders should explore with the team how these differences manifest themselves and show up in our day-to-day business. Through discussion, try to understand the differences and what’s driving certain behaviors.
I personally use the Globesmart® Profile, which has really helped our team discussions and understanding. Through that type of interaction, people gain insights and they’re better equipped to communicate more effectively and comfortably in a multicultural team. Another important leadership behavior is reinforcing equity of contribution. I’ve always worked in a type of company where all the ideas came from headquarters. But working globally, I like to reinforce the idea of showcasing contributions coming from every region to demonstrate business success from different sources.
Keiko: It’s very important for leaders to walk the talk and be role models. If leaders do not have cultural intelligence, they are likely to force others to conform to their own style, which is not the kind of one-team culture we want. It’s very important for leaders to be culturally intelligent.
Dennis: They need to be reflected in the company policies and public-facing statements, and it needs to go beyond that. Whilst companies have DEI policies or statements, they need to consider: what does it actually mean for the people on the ground? We need to see tools like recruitment practices where managers are trained and have very good support in terms of their hiring and interviewing skills. We also need to see reward and recognition practices actively in place that reward good one-team collaboration behaviors. These are the types of things that companies can put in place to really ingrain the culture that they’re looking to achieve. On top of that, another sustainability component is to have enduring goals. For example, I’ve been in companies where they will set DEI targets for gender or diversity.
Christian: If I had to give a very simple answer, I would say empower the people. Give the power to the people. We have what we call Business Resource Groups, or Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), as they’re often referred to, that help us really live that one-team culture with all the variety and the diversity and the richness that every organization, every system, has, and bring it to life.
I would also add: create a sense of curiosity for lifelong learning. We don’t just show up as a woman, we’re not just LGBT. We might be a woman and a caregiver. We might be LGBT and a caregiver, too. We have a lot more in common than not. And yet often we focus on the differences.
I also think a feedback culture is super important, where we give each other feedback on what is accepted and wanted and what is not. The ability to speak up and challenge things within the system is part of one-team culture. And that requires psychological safety, which is not something that happens overnight. That soil needs to be nurtured and curated.
Mui Hwa: Psychological safety is a big one because it lends to people feeling that it’s okay for me to learn and want to learn about people—that long-term curiosity that you talked about just now. One-team culture is not going to be without conflicts. But unless the conflicts are addressed openly and there’s a good positive and strong feedback loop, then those conflicts are never gonna be addressed because we have all these differences that come together. So that feedback culture becomes really important, but people need to feel safe to have that feedback—to listen and to share.
Christian: In teams, if you have fake harmony, that’s also not great. Right? You want teams to have an ability to challenge the status quo and who have healthy dialogue and healthy conflict and ways to address things when they’re not okay. Because if you just put a blanket over it and say we’re one team for the sake of harmony, it’s not going to help, sustainably, and it comes across as very fake. The ways you share disagreement is of paramount importance.
Sachin: The first one very clearly to me is to establish a burning platform as to why one-team culture is important for the organization. It really has to almost be a survival question. And that is true for any organization today. In a globalized world, not being able to operate as a single entity and keep aside our differences can really threaten the survival of commercial organizations.
Secondly, the value of operating as one team really should be demonstrated at the top, which should not be very difficult because C-suites tend to be very distributed in many ways. Their stories and behaviors need to be communicated to the wider audience.
The third piece really is about celebrating distributed teams. Today, there’s hardly a billion dollar organization that can say their success is only based in one single geography. Even commercial success within one geography is really distributed. So it’s very essential to acknowledge that, and then celebrate it.
Keiko: I do a lot of training and team-building workshops, and based on what attendees say, there are four major hurdles: cultural differences, geographic distance, language barriers, and time differences. These differences make it very difficult for global teams to align on shared goals, build trust, and communicate effectively, which are fundamental for one-team collaboration. It’s just more difficult for globally dispersed team members to collaborate as one team, especially in the areas of decision-making and meeting management.
I often hear comments from our clients, like:
It’s difficult for team members to share these feelings directly with each other for fear of damaging relationships, but these frustrations accumulate day to day. These negative feelings can erode trust, and create a fake one-team culture—people don’t trust each other, they just behave like a unified team because their manager says so.
My recommendation is to have a dialogue together with people from different regions to enhance mutual understanding. This can be done in a team meeting—in-person is great, but if it is not possible, you can have this discussion remotely.
This dialogue for mutual understanding can surface the challenges to creating one-team culture, it can serve to rebuild trust, and it becomes a foundation for creating rules of engagement to operate effectively as one team. Before we surface those frustrations, we cannot really create the rules. First, we need to let them share what they’re experiencing, have a dialogue with each other in a psychologically safe space, and then create the rules of engagement for how we should operate in this one team.
Keiko: We are good at collaborating within our own team, right? But when it comes to collaborating across different functions, entities, countries, and regions, it does require different skill sets, like cultural agility and being able to communicate using different styles.
Sachin: Asian cultures are group-oriented cultures. We all have multiple group identities. And I feel that that is the reason why we need this more, because, yes, one-team culture, but—which team? It’s very important to understand that if you have multiple group identities, you need this more, not less. Thousand-year history we have across the continent can make it very difficult to work with each other. I’m not going into specifics, but there are multiple examples of this. It’s important to think about the one team as in one team within the organization.
Also, cooperation is not collaboration. These two words are so frequently interchangeably used, but to collaborate versus to cooperate, these are two different things and we need to move from one to the other. For that, you need to build the cultural scaffolding that enables that shift. That, again, is the whole one-team culture.
Christian: English often isn’t the native tongue for a lot of people in Asia, and when you’re creating that one-team spirit, how can you make sure that you have people who are door openers for people that do not speak English as their native tongue? I’m thinking of late night conference calls, as global organizations often have team members in Asia always biting the bullet of late-night calls. We also know that when taking late-night calls and you’ve already worked eight hours or more in the day, you’re not probably performing at your best. And in addition to that, you’re from a less individualistic culture where you don’t push yourself in the forefront so much in meetings, but how does that resonate with the one-team spirit when you might come across as not being an active contributor? There’s a lot of thought that needs to be put in for Western-headquartered organizations to create a level, equal playing field for all team members.
Sachin: The real question to think about is: is a learning program the right vehicle to drive something like this? And I’m not saying that it isn’t, but maybe you can bring in a resource-rich platform for your employees to engage with and align with each other, creating a common taxonomy and a common perspective on what similarity and dissimilarity looks like.
The way we are doing this at our organization—27,000 people globally—we are trying to democratize Aperian® for all our people. We are making sure that there is user adoption, user education, and the ability for individuals to use the features of the platform both at an individual level and at a team level. We’re seeing a lot of traction in terms of people now organically going to their Profiles and saying, “I need to prepare before I have a conversation with somebody from another culture.”
Keiko: These are common questions I hear in my work: What does one-team culture look like? Should it be more like the Japanese culture because our company headquarters is in Japan? Or should it be more U.S.-style because that’s our biggest market? Should we communicate more directly because many of us are in Germany and the U.S., or should we be more thorough and detail-oriented because the headquarters are in Japan?
These are questions that all team members need to discuss because one-team culture does not necessarily look like Japanese culture or German culture or U.S. culture. But we need to discuss what it should look like. If you are in a culture where you feel like you’re a minority and there’s a dominant culture, my advice is: when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do. Adjust your style to their style so you can build trust and connection. After you establish credibility and trust, you can start to use your own style. It’s a balance between adjusting your style—in the beginning, especially—and then asserting your style after you start establishing credibility.
Want to hear more from these panelists? Check out the full on-demand recording. Contact the Aperian team or start a free trial of Aperian to see how our learning platform and training solutions can help you foster a healthy one-team culture at your organization.
The panelists’ views, opinions, and statements are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of Aperian.
