Question

Assume you are 45-year old American woman who is the project manager of a global cross-functional team for a U.S. multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in New York City. Your team is assigned to market globally a new drug for asthma. Your team is composed of a South African woman working in Johannesburg, a Korean man working in Seoul, an Indian man working in New Delhi, a Brazilian man working in Sao Paulo, and a Swiss woman working in Geneva. In the next year, the team members will physically meet three times in the worldwide headquarters in New York. Most of the communication between the team members will be electronic (emails, phone, conference calls, video conferencing…).

As the project manager of this global team, what communication challenges are you likely to face? How will you address these challenges to effectively manage your team?

Answer 1

As a team leader i will have the following communication challenegs

• Lack of social; interaction
• diverse multicultural teams as everyoe is from different culture ,language etc
• time zone differences as everyone belongs to different country with different time zone
• lack of trust initially

Overcoming challenegs

• By stetting communication norms , creating structure and guielines for the intraction of team about the meetings ,decision making process and method for expressing the agreements and disagreements.
• By clarifying the medium to be used for communication like emails,video conferencing , phone,internet chats , response requirement for time , prioitising issues
• By creating an distributing the agenda
• Making the virtual team to feel like a part of single team
• By regualrly focussing them for results in order to meetthe opbjective and make them bounded towards the achivement to be done
• By onbaording all the team members in a same way
• By celebrating the accomplishments

Have a good day !