How do you deal with a team which has multi-nationality members, members from different countries with different backgrounds ?

Managing a virtual project team with multiple cultural backgrounds could be a huge challenge. Imagine this is the project team: the project sponsor and senior management are from US, product design and business analysis team are from UK, hardware building team is based in China while software development from India. The support call centre team is located in Philippine. The customer is from Japan and lastly the Project Manager is based in Australia. Just to list some of the challenges:- expectations of the stakeholders could be very different- time difference to call upon a team meeting- language barrier- cultural and functional diversities- issues in local legislation and rules - gender perception- building common trust - getting consensusTo manage such a team with the challenges ahead, we need to build high degree of trust with clear common goals and objectives. The leadership of the Project Manager plays an important role as well. Last but not least, strong management support and commitment is the key to manage the diversity.

To get everyone on same platform one needs to clearly specify the task and goal. Understand from them their core competence area and assign them work accordingly. communicate, motivate and make them comfortable at work. Clash is inevitable yet it can be amicably resolved one at a time. 

This is something that I currently have experience of, I have Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino and Americans reporting into me. The trick is to understand basic International Leadership principles and how each culture and each individual within the culture and their particular preference with regards to communication. However, this is the easy part. The more challenging part is when you have for example an extrinsically motivated US/European low context culture driving a high context Asian culture in which the individual is intrinsically motivated to complete a task in which may lack alignment. This is when you are likely to deal with conflict due to the lack of understanding of the people in your team and their motivators and drivers. Additionally, solid foundations in the likes of personality profiling such as MBTI is a very useful tool to understand your direct reports further and critical for anyone managing a multicultural, multi-site team. The other thing is that always edge on the side of caution and if you're unsure ask because cultural perception can be quite tricky. Additionally, in many International Leadership courses culture is referred to as "software of the mind". Therefore, like software it forever changes and needs updating to be active and work effectively with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Even within the same cultures you have diversity of personality so it's not that straight forward even when you're working with a culture different from your own. Leadership, is about humility and continued learning and inspiring the team to succeed for your vision and thats what stakeholders need to buy into, especially when dealing with virtual teams. Understand the tools but more importantly understand your direct reports on a personal and professional level.

We need to respect the Nature and Culture of everybody and maintain transparency