Going form NA-based IT to global across 4 continents, CIO Dennis Hodges leverages cultural diversity for a stronger IT team.

In the book How Google Works, authors Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg discuss a different approach to leadership. My summary of their approach is this: have so many “smart creative” individuals reporting to you so you are not able to micromanage them.

I subscribe to their concept, but would like to take it even further. When you add a globally dispersed leadership structure into the mix, you really change the dynamics of the game.

When Inteva Products, where I have served as CIO for nearly nine years, acquired a division of another company, we doubled our revenue, and more than tripled the size of the IT staff. The company we acquired was spread across a number of countries and gave us the opportunity to increase our global presence significantly. We particularly grew in Eastern Europe and India – locations where we had no real presence before the acquisition.

I saw two major challenges as the IT leader: First, how do we chart a new course for a blended organization with a number of disparate systems without decimating and demoralizing the team? Second, how do we build the leadership structure to leverage the global “smart creatives” that are out there?

Keeping the IT Team Intact

Prior to the acquisition, we had a very nimble organization with a best in class IT spend as a percent of revenue, and we were determined to keep the systems that had put us in this position. In retrospect, that was the right decision. We’ve been able to grow significantly without changing our cost structure.

That plan did have some immediate impact to the human capital side. A number of IT staff from the acquired company were experts in systems that would be going away, and understandably, they were concerned that there would be no place for them in the organization. Significant efforts were made to reassure people that understanding how the business ran was more important than the systems it ran on. This involved meeting face to face with all the individuals supporting the soon to be replaced systems, which took six to nine months.

"The diverse mindsets in place today within my leadership team inspire the whole group to look at things in completely new ways."

Most of the people to be impacted were actually part of the business analysts team, and I am happy to report that the original team is largely intact – with a better than average attrition rate over the past five years. We did have some staff that saw better futures for themselves on the old systems, and they have gone on to other endeavors.

Developing the Global “Smart Creative” Environment

Defining the systems that would be in place ended up being the easy part. The bigger issue has been building a high performance team that contributes to the organization and feels empowered globally. Doing that in an organization that had never before enabled global structures has had its moments. Now throw all the different time zones into the mix and you end up with some interesting challenges.

Previously, my leadership team and I were all based in the same location. This was very easy to manage and simplified relationship building since all of us were from the same geographical region. We didn’t have to look at the clock to know whether to call someone – everyone was in the same time zone.

That really changes after you start operating in eighteen countries! The integration of the acquired company immediately changed my reporting dynamics. I now had a number of direct reports in Europe. The workday changed – you can’t expect everyone to show up for a 9:00am meeting in Detroit when it’s 10:00 pm in Yokohama. While we in the US tend to think of Europe as a single entity, there are very different cultures in play when you have staff from France, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic working alongside each other.

This opportunity has expanded my thinking about leveraging the diversity within our organization to benefit our IT staff and the company as a whole. So, how does that fit in with the globally “smart creative” mindset?

First, with the acquisition, I’ve had to build a team with more people reporting to me than I can lasso. That’s the management idea behind the smart creative. I have experienced that this concept is leveraged exponentially when you are dealing with a globally distributed team. The diverse mindsets in place today within my leadership team inspire the whole group to look at things in completely new ways.

Why is this valuable? In the new economy, you truly need a global leadership team if you want to unleash all of the potential that is available to you and your enterprise. We can’t come into a market with a foreign mindset and succeed. This is true for business in general, but is also relevant for IT.

What can you learn from this? Develop the smart creatives; they will bring tremendous enthusiasm when they are encouraged. The best leaders are surrounded by bright people who feel empowered to make a difference

Mining the Strengths of Cultural Diversity

We’re expanding on this theme by adding even more cultural diversity at the table. Utilizing traditional back office locations in new, more strategic ways has fostered a view within the working staff that there are opportunities for personal career growth from any location. This has really had a positive impact on the enthusiasm level in the group.

Working across many different cultures will introduce some interesting challenges and growth opportunities for you and your leadership team. You have to learn to separate comment from culture. Having a great-grandmother who was Dutch really helped me with our team in The Netherlands. If you want a blunt, honest assessment of something, just ask a Dutchman. What is one person’s rudeness may just be another’s cultural norm.

Remember, everyone everywhere wants to feel empowered and appreciated. That’s true from Beijing to Bangalore to Boston. While we may not see everything the same way, we all have basic motivational drives that are similar. If we can continue to encourage and accept this paradigm, we will be miles ahead of our competition.

As a student of history and global management, this opportunity has been a real education for me. There are few chances in one’s life to experience something operating as a microcosm of how things could be in the larger environment. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

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