Leading Multi-cultural Global Teams: Asia
By Pragati Verma (New York City)
Do you know that women in India are more likely to give up their career to take care of their elderly parents than to raise kids?
If you think you are ready to build and lead a team spread across the globe or perhaps already do, there are some inter-cultural issues to consider that can help you as you take up the challenge of working in, or working with a team, whose implicit norms are different from your own. Don’t leave the human resources department to be the only folks on top of the “do’s and the don’ts.”
As Shanker Ramamurthy, President of Global Growth & Operations, Thomson Reuters, explained recently at the WILL USA conference in NYC:
“We live in a VUCA (volatile, unstable, complex and ambiguous) world. As we manage workforce across vast distances, command and control organizational structures are giving way to collaboration and orchestration. These new ways of working need a shift in the traditional corporate structure and functioning.”
As companies scramble for new perspectives and disruptive thinking to wade through emerging markets leaders and top executives – both men and women, need a deep understanding of diverse cultural and gender norms in different parts of the world.
The commonalities
In most countries women take breaks for childcare ranging in length from the day of the birth or adoption to a year.
However, interestingly it is eldercare that becomes the bigger draw for women to leave and take time off in a country like India, where women seem more comfortable outsourcing childcare than elderly care. According to the latest report from Center for Innovation, 80 percent of the women in India take time off from work for eldercare compared to 75 percent for childcare. In sharp contrast, only 30 percent of women in the US off-ramp for eldercare compared to 74 percent for childcare. Several women in India also drop out to coach their teenaged kids for exams.
This can result in much fewer Indian women reaching the top levels in their firms than their US counterparts due to time off. “I thought I would never have female colleagues,” quips Sangita Singh, Global Head of Life Sciences and Healthcare at Wipro Technologies.
Singh, who has spearheaded several top management roles at India’s third largest software exporter and now plays an active role in grooming women leaders, goes on to say:
“Men and women in India are not always very comfortable in building close relationship. It’s important to build that comfort level to encourage sponsorship and mentoring opportunities between men and women. We need to work on such softer issues and not merely tweak a few HR policies.”
Several companies in India are now experimenting with disruptive ideas to ensure that women like Singh are not alone at the top.
Thomson Reuters decided to take a bigger step to understand the female talent pool and knew that engaging women in a country like India requires new ways of thinking, working and communicating.
When its senior executives discovered that a huge number of female employees in the Indian operations centers were dropping out of the workforce, they experimented with crowdsourcing – breaking a project into tiny tasks and farming those tasks out to the public. They farmed out some projects to female lawyers, who worked remotely for a few hours every day from the comfort of their home. The pilot, conducted in South Indian city of Hyderabad, was so successful that several other departments of the company are now planning to replicate it.
In a world, where managing diverse talent brings the biggest reward, leaders and senior executives must understand how to develop and motivate the people in their diverse and often global teams. Simply put, getting versed in how other cultures do business and live their life outside work could soon be your competitive edge.
