Human Capital Briefs

It’s no longer unusual for teams within organizations to span different countries and cultures. While there are many benefits to this, one of the challenges for leaders of these global teams is navigating everyone’s vacation schedules.

Managing a distributed team can feel overwhelming as it requires you to navigate many different types of distance: geographic, temporal, cultural, linguistic, and configurational. Daunting as that may seem, there is good news in the form of a large and ever-increasing body of research and best practices on how to increase your odds of success.

The challenges inherent in presenting a business case for diversity management become further complex when there are more C-Suite executives involved. If you think it is hard to keep the CEO focused, imagine what it’s like to have the CEO and 10 of his or her direct report sitting around the table. There is a strong probability that your presentation will get derailed, probably more than once.

No matter where you live, the difference between how much CEOs are paid and how much the average worker takes home is, well, big. Probably even bigger than most people think.

It’s doubly difficult to command authority and lead a team for the first time in a new culture where the nuts and bolts of how to manage are completely different. What can new managers in foreign cultures do to ease what will inevitably be a challenging transition?

A message sent out by the company suddenly made Tesla’s long-term strategy clear to me. And that strategy is so stunning that it may revolutionize ground transportation and, if the company can pull it off, make Tesla one of the most valuable corporations in the world.

The lengthy New York Times story, detailing some apparently brutal features of the culture at Amazon, should be taken with many grains of salt. But even if the story is full of inaccuracies, and if we put the company’s alleged harshness to one side, Amazon’s approach offers indispensable guidance for companies both large and small when they are deciding how to make group decisions.

Working across organizational boundaries was a new way of thinking 25 years ago — one that was largely championed by Jack Welch. Fast forward to today, and we live in a different world. Our communications technologies have dramatically improved, and we have instantaneous access to massive amounts of information. Welch’s “boundaryless organization” should seemingly be the de facto reality for most companies.

No matter how highly you think of your organization, chances are its members—including you—are biased in ways that harm both you and others. The consequences of such insidious biases can be quite costly to an organization, from leading it to hire or promote the wrong candidates to investing in less innovative ideas just because of who proposed them to crossing ethical boundaries.

Recent polls in the U.S. show that over 70% of Americans believe transgender people should be protected from discrimination in the workplace. Perhaps all of this publicity creates an opening—a moment of opportunity—for the “real” work to get done: making the world a safe place for trans people to live, work, and succeed.