Cultural Awareness: Five Phases of Team Building By Marc Servos
If you’re a new leader in Singapore, you may find that setting up a team overseas can have unique challenges. The increasing reality of market globalization requires today’s business leaders to adapt to working and interacting with others from diverse backgrounds. This involves staff members from these differing backgrounds having various work-style preferences and practices, which necessitates leaders and staff to develop a global mindset and be culturally competent. Cultural awareness comes into play when building a cohesive team. This can be a challenging task for business leaders, factors include not only developing a cross-cultural and multi-national team, but they also involve cross-functional and cross-organizational ones as well. In general, building a team comes in several phases.
Selecting Selection of team members is done in the first phase, appropriately known as selecting. Who to select involves a number of factors to consider. These include their professional and cultural backgrounds; possible communication 46 LIVING IN SINGAPORE
barriers (which can include technology and language barriers); varying levels of experience and expertise; any past experiences they had with one another; and time zone differences. After team selection, a means of communication needs to be chosen, such as by phone or online if the members are geographically dispersed.
Forming Once the team is selected, it goes through a forming phrase. This is when communication gets underway and expectations are addressed about how team members are aligned. Just before the introductory meeting, it is a good idea to take the cultural orientations assessment to ascertain their work-style preferences. After this and during the introductory meeting, highlights of their workstyle preferences can be addressed, including any gaps that could cause potential problems. The team leader should inform members that the results are neither positive nor negative, using inclusive and non-judgmental language. This should be conducted at least one week prior to the team kick-off, to smooth out any problems that may arise.
