Two Global Facilitation Techniques

 

This month we are looking at Global PM on ProjectManagement.com. Among the potential problems experienced when managing teams that are based on different continents is simply being successful at facilitating meetings.

You may not even see the problems during the meeting. Yet the meeting ends, everyone seems to agree and when it comes for tasks to be completed, or deliverables being delivered, there are problems. They seem to come out of nowhere, or everywhere. You follow your facilitation best practices, but they do not give you the same results as when you deal with teams that are co-located with you.

 There are many reasons for this (in fact, I have many articles and blog posts on this site dealing with cultural and other differences between experienced and well-meaning co-workers), so what you need are techniques you can use to help make sure there no surprises.

Wait 3 to 5 seconds after you ask a question or ask for comments.

Whenever you are in a meeting, listen for this situation: The leader or someone will ask "Are there any questions?" When this happens, count the number of seconds before the leader says something like, "OK, then, we can move on."

Typically, this will be about one second. That's way too fast, especially for a global meeting. How many times have you heard someone say, "Hey, sorry, but I want to go back to a previous topic"? They were victimized by the lack of response time.

Do not make that mistake. Wait three to five seconds. Count it out to make sure. It may seem like a lifetime, especially if you have had too much espresso, but wait.

Let us count the reasons why you should wait…

1. Some personalities require more time to formulate questions in mind
2. Language barrier
3. Multi-tasking
4. Fear of answering slowing response
5. Embarrassment / shyness
6. Lack of confidence
7. Lack of comfort in role
8. Getting approval to ask question from someone
9. Getting help wording question properly
10. Side conversation or chat interfering with attention
11. Delay due to concern over whether question is polite
12. Time delay in transmission lines

If you have additional reasons, please comment to this post. Maybe you have stories about bad communication in meetings with global participants.

Avoid blaming an individual directly or indirectly during a meeting.

A person may be the immediate noticeable target, but rarely the root cause that should be the target of an effective response. And when you blame an individual in a meeting where participants are from multiple geographic zones, it creates an environment of fear and confusion that is not sustainably productive to provide you with the results you need.

Among the many and varied reasons why blaming an individual is the wrong approach are

1. The individual worker thought what was done was correct and had no information otherwise
2. According to the culture of the team, there was no communication problem
3. The worker followed the practice expected in the business location where the worker was based
4. The worker valued politeness over another criterion which was very different than your preference, but was expected in the worker's geographical zone
5. Project scheduling did not properly consider religious holidays required of the worker's geographic location.

A better approach for a globally-sensitive leader is to focus attention on where in the process or interactions things went wrong and work in a positive collaborative manner to resolve the problem and avoid it in the future. You should explain that the objective is for everyone to come out looking successful.

In related cultural conversations, you can explain that politeness should be interpreted as helping everyone on the project be successful even if it means having to be open and honest. Give yourself as an example.

This technique, while time-consuming is actually a powerful global team-building activity. It sets the stage for your workforce to resolve their own intra-team problems - without you!