Communicating across teams in international projects

Con­tinu­ing on from my earlier posts on dir­ec­tions of com­mu­nic­a­tion, which began with com­mu­nic­at­ing down and com­mu­nic­a­tion up, the third and gen­er­ally most com­mon dir­ec­tion of com­mu­nic­a­tion in any pro­ject, inter­na­tional, local or domestic vir­tual team, is peer to peer, which I am refer­ring to here as com­mu­nic­at­ing across.

This level of com­mu­nic­a­tion will be between sim­ilar level per­son­nel within the pro­ject frame­work and will typ­ic­ally cover the major­ity of all com­mu­nic­a­tion. In a tra­di­tional co-located pro­ject team this would include things such as one-on-one dis­cus­sions with col­leagues, team meet­ings, exchange of inform­a­tion between teams within the pro­ject etc, in vir­tual teams and inter­na­tional teams these exact same trans­fers of inform­a­tion and dis­cus­sions need to take place, but are made more com­plex by time, dis­tance, cul­tural dif­fer­ences and any other of the myriad of com­plic­at­ing factors that influ­ence human communications.

Per­haps the first thing to acknow­ledge here is that this com­mu­nic­a­tion is essen­tial to the suc­cess of the pro­ject, but will not be as intu­it­ive or as easy as hav­ing the pro­ject team in the same office, it must be planned and struc­tured to be suc­cess­ful, and the major­ity of the plan­ning must be done by the indi­vidu­als doing the com­mu­nic­a­tion, not imposed on them from above by their man­agers. It is human nature to com­mu­nic­ate easi­est with those you see around you, com­mu­nic­a­tion by elec­tronic media has only been with us for the last cen­tury and man­kind, being very visual com­mu­nic­at­ors, has really not well adap­ted to this yet, so it will not be easy and will take work to com­mu­nic­ate to your non face to face colleagues.

Modes of com­mu­nic­a­tion involved will typ­ic­ally be email, tele­phone, video con­fer­ence if avail­able, fax, though this is becom­ing less com­mon with the easy of access and deploy­ment of email, text mes­saging, Blogs or any other con­veni­ent mech­an­ism, they all have their own part to play in the dis­tri­bu­tion of inform­a­tion and the main­ten­ance of the lines of communication.

Regard­less of the mech­an­ism for any com­mu­nic­a­tion, the mes­sage must be accur­ate, appro­pri­ately delivered, make lin­guistic sense to all parties and be cul­tur­ally sens­ible and sens­it­ive, by which I mean it must not offend any­one on the pro­ject to the point where they dis­en­gage from the pro­ject or react in a hos­tile or dis­rupt­ive way, so, for don’t expect your inter­na­tional col­league to par­ti­cip­ate in a phone hook up on a national or reli­gious hol­i­day any­more that you would expect to do so yourself.

Take care in the lan­guage used in your con­ver­sa­tions to main­tain an even and bal­anced level of respect between parties, do not imply, either overtly or cov­ertly that you are in a pos­i­tion of author­ity over your inter­na­tional col­league if this is not actu­ally the case, they may not react to this in the meet­ing but you can guar­an­tee they will change their beha­viour in some way as time pro­gresses, either to become defens­ive, assert­ive them­selves or start to make vari­ous internal polit­ical moves that will be det­ri­mental and dis­tract­ive to the pro­ject tasks.

In pro­jects where there are mul­tiple lan­guages involved, main­tain a simple level of vocab­u­lary that all parties can under­stand, and where more com­plex words and terms are required, explain them, maybe even estab­lish a pro­ject dic­tion­ary or a pro­ject wiki to allow every­one to look things up where neces­sary, and if you are keep­ing minutes, con­sider pro­du­cing them in mul­tiple pro­ject lan­guages, this can be executed rel­at­ively simply through the use of many of the on line and com­mer­cial trans­la­tion tools, they may not be per­fect but they are usu­ally good enough for the mes­sage to be clearly understood.

More than any­thing else, treat your inter­na­tional col­leagues as you would like to be treated your­self, with respect, dig­nity and under­stand­ing, if you are unsure of some­thing being dis­cussed, either ask the ques­tion in the dis­cus­sion, or in a sep­ar­ate con­ver­sa­tion, try not to make assump­tions or jump to con­clu­sions over per­ceived slights or com­ments and even if you do feel a little offen­ded in a dis­cus­sion, attempt where pos­sible not to react, the chances are it is a mis­un­der­stand­ing not an inten­tional offence.

Copy­right secured by Digiprove © 2010 Francis Norman

Related Posts:

• Tips for sur­vival in the deep end of inter­na­tional pro­ject communications
• Mer­its of face to face meet­ings in a vir­tual teams project
• Do you need a com­mu­nic­a­tions coach?

Tagged as: intercultural communication, international communications, virtual teams