Introduction
Leading global teams is the core of this class, and why I took the class. I think this dialogue is important for global, as well as domestic account leadership. Developing team leadership and learning about the best practices, research and development are important to keeping your skills marketable in a global society. Pico Iyer stated in his TED talk “Where is Home?’ that 220 Million people currently travel across borders for their companies, and it is the 5th largest nation, today (P. Iyer, TED Talks June 2013).
The Global leadership book by Mendenhall et al. (2013) is the main resource that I used. I chose to focus the leading global team's section of the book because I currently have a domestic account team that is geographically disbursed. Our method of communication is conference calls monthly and Skype meetings weekly depending on the need and comfort level of the team member. I travel to each area often and spend a few days or up to a week at a time with them in their market. The research is vast and in different stages of understanding best practices for the development of global teams. The variables are so many with multiple cultures, goals, structures and constraints that there is no cookie-cutter approach to developing a global team. There is a history of behaviors and procedures that worked and some that didn’t. I researched the videos from multiple leaders from the perspective of coaching, training and development and interpersonal communications.
Learning about best practices in leadership globally will help me to be a better leader domestically and expand to international teams as I develop my skills and a successful domestic team. Understanding the variety of competencies needed in global leadership is introduced in the first quantitative study by Yeung and Ready (1995), quoted in Mendenhall et al. (2013), this is the starting point to evaluating a person’s ability to lead a global team. The c...