Virtually Challenged

By Matt Buttell, Deputy Editor

With the current environment there are high levels of turbulence, high rates of change and even higher levels of complexity. But how can businesses manage this while still remaining competitive? For Terry Brake, the answer lies in leveraging global talent.

“In some ways, leadership today is more important than ever because of the challenges of working across distances and cutlures”
-Terry Brake

As an author and professional program developer, Terry Brake tells me that his biggest problem when he writes a book is putting too many ideas into it. “I get carried away,” he admits. “Very often business books are one idea stretched over 200 pages, whereas I tend to have 200 ideas stretched over the same amount of pages. So my biggest challenge right now is to go back and say, ‘Well, let’s dig deeper into this issue’.” And while Brake details several issues that he is now interested in exploring further, it is with his current work, the critically acclaimed book, ‘Where In The World Is My Team?’ that he explores one (or rather, as Brake acknowledges, a few) of the most important issues currently facing businesses in the modern world.

“I’ve been working with global virtual teams for about 15 years now,” explains Brake, who is also President of TMA World-Americas – a leading provider of global talent development solutions. “My main responsibilities within TMA World are around innovation and product development, and I’ve been working in the training area since back in 1983. Before that I was an education researcher in curriculum development over in London, then I came to the US and worked with a corporation over here, before joining a consultancy firm.” After this, Brake began writing about various topics of interest related to culture – based on things he had studied at the University of London – and, as the topic of globalization began to gain more prevalence in the business environment, Brake combined his cultural interest and the growing interest in globalization to move into writing about doing business across cultures.

“With TMA World, what I have been doing is very much within the innovative aspects of product development, particularly associated with the three main areas of global cultural diversity, global leadership and global teamwork,” notes Brake. “That takes me onto questions such as, ‘What are the mission-critical learning content areas in the current environment?’ and, ‘How can we package and deliver that content in ways that are both cost desirable and learning impactful, given the current circumstances and economic turbulence?’” But Brake hasn’t only been working with global virtual teams – at TMA World he is also part of one, which sets his findings up in good stead. “What struck me most about these teams was the challenges they face,” he comments. “I was able to reduce those challenges to three: team member isolation, team fragmentation of effort, and team member confusion when working across distances and cultures.” Starting there, Brake then tried to develop some of the antidotes that could be used to overcome such challenges, which is where the ‘Six Cs of Collaboration’ came from. Essentially the Six Cs are six performance zones that are critical in terms of global virtual team success. They are: Cooperation, Convergence, Coordination, Capability, Communication, and Cultural Intelligence. He notes: “What I found with many of the virtual team leaders was that they didn’t really have any kind of ‘scaffolding’ on which to think about how to get the best performance from their teams.” So now, as Brake explains, the thinking is that when setting up a team, leaders can think about those Six Cs and say, ‘Here I am, working in this virtual space, I’ve got this team that I’m forming and developing and what do I need to pay attention to so that this team is running as effectively as it can? How do I develop cooperation, etc., virtually, within this team?’

The Six Cs was developed to provide leaders with a ‘mental model’ for tying all of these success factors together and, subsequently, one of the things TMA World has done is develop two behavioral questionnaires based around the Six Cs program. “Now both the team leader and team members can rate themselves in relation to the Six Cs: What are their strengths? What are their developmental challenges as a team? Then,” says Brake, “they can strategize around building on those strengths as well as strengthening their developmental areas – it provides a way of the team looking at itself as a comprehensive unit.”

The leading role
The concept of leadership is clearly critical to Brake’s work, and within HR markets there is currently a huge focus on the relationship between the HR function and whether it needs to instigate itself further as a ‘leader’. “I think it’s potentially a huge area. It’s something I think some organizations haven’t really grappled with yet, in terms of when you think about our current environment,” says Brake, stressing that with such uncertainty in the marketplace the only way business can remain successful is through the exchange of knowledge and expertise. “It’s essential that we encourage innovation and leverage the talent we have within our global workforce,” he adds. It’s a fair point: while most organizations have talent all over the world, what is lacking is the ability to bring that talent together in cohesive units. “We’re in a tough economy, so we really need to be leveraging this,” Brake explains. “We need to get that talent working in collaborative relationships. That’s the engine of innovation for our future.”

This unity is likely to be only achieved through the use of technology, which has already vastly changed how we work in recent years. “The technological revolution is already upon us,” notes Brake, “and while new collaborative tools and Web 2.0 technology are already available, to enable those technologies to truly deliver we need to work very hard in this virtual space to develop a degree of trust, and a role I see for HR is as a huge contributor to the development of trust and collaboration.

“I remember when I was growing up in England and my father would walk six miles to his place of work, work there all day and then walk back home,” Brake reminisces, “But what we need to understand now is that when we talk about the ‘workplace’ its very often not really a place at all; it’s a virtual network space.” Rather than talk about the workplace anymore, Brake tends to talk about, what he calls, ‘work webs’, and his belief is that when working in these work webs, we have to think about how our working relationships are different: We need to think about how we organize and synchronize our work together; how we connect across cultures and communicate with one another; all of that, explains Brake, means we need to do some rethinking because old issues in the workplace suddenly have a new context. “For me,” he continues, “a lot of leadership success is about understanding the context in which you’re operating. It’s not just a case of being able to say, ‘I’m a leader because I have a vision and I have a strategy and can influence others to implement that strategy’. For me, its much more about the context in which a leader does that.”

In fact, while everything Brake reads about Web 2.0 excites him, he admits that he doesn’t fully buy into it. “Don’t get me wrong, I think that Web 2.0 is very valuable and there’s a lot of opportunity with social networking technologies in business and wikis and blogs,” he stresses. “But while it is invigorating and inspiring, there’s an unrealistic utopianism about how we’re all going to be collaborating freely and equally in this open-source world.

“In some ways,” he goes on, “leadership today is more important than ever because of the challenges of working across distances and cultures. Virtual  teams can’t succeed using a  command and control style, but they must receive clear guidance and be well facilitated. Leaders must do that otherwise these teams can easily drift off into virtual space.”

Brake also illustrates his point in another context, talking about the challenges associated with actually having to produce a project with concrete results whilst working across massive distances and spaces. “You can’t assume that that team is going to come together naturally in any meaningful,  cohesive way,” he says. “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen virtual teams who have been working together for three or more years and the results are just appalling, the relationships on these teams are appalling; and part of that is because the leaders have withdrawn from leading in the virtual context.  We can’t assume collaboration will emerge without leadership.”

This needs to change. Our current economic situation is already driving an increased virtualization within the workforce and there can be no doubt that we are already seeing a tremendous amount of virtual training already being implemented across the globe. What’s more this need is growing exponentially . “I’ve never seen such demand as I have recently, and we’re simply just going to need to do more work on competences for leading and working virtually,” says Brake.

“I remember a few years ago that if you looked at the adverts in back of The Economist you wouldn’t have found business school ads for international, global MBAs,” Brake anecdotes. “Then suddenly a revolution happened, and the magazine was full of these types of adverts. I can imagine a point in the not too distant future where the business school ads  will really be pushing hard on developing yourself as a virtual global leader. .

“We mustn’t get carried away though because there is often a huge lag between the technological capabilities that we have and the human uptake. Yes, I think this is a huge area for development, but perhaps the ‘workplace revolution’ tag is somewhat exaggerated: I think it is going to be more like an evolution than a revolution, but it’s one that is happening rapidly nonetheless.”

One final area that Brake thinks is very important for HR is the field of reward and recognition, and the fact that leaders  have yet to figure out how to reward and recognize work within collaborative virtual teams. “You know,” he laughs, “I like to think of ‘Where In The World Is My Team?’ as a fairly tactical book in terms of the ideas around making these teams function effectively, but in all seriousness we need to look at this at a more strategic level.” Brake is right; with greater emphasis on these issues, HR needs to find a way to handle global teams more strategically, rather than in the ad hoc functionality in which they current work. And while Brake  is still “just throwing ideas around,” this could in fact be the next topic Brake finds himself writing about – watch this space.