Managing across time zones
GC talks to in-house leaders about coping with a far-flung legal team.
Unless you manage a multinational team, you probably don’t know that at 1:30pm in London it is 7:00pm in Bangalore and 7:30am in Milwaukee. For a small, crucial window of time, this is the most convenient hour or so in which everyone can come together. Granted, there may be some members of the team video conferencing over breakfast while others are the last out of the office, but in heading a remote team there are laws of physics that no amount of budget or goodwill can undo. Balancing time zones and the needs of multinational companies remains an imperfect science, necessitating some inconvenience and the sharing out of the short straw to get the best result for the business.
It requires a two-fold approach: you must understand and work with the logistics, while managing the emotional temperature of your reports. It is about learning how to best cut through the technical difficulties of cross-border communication, while always being mindful of the abstract complexities of keeping a team feeling like a team, even when meeting in person is at best infrequent, and perhaps impossible.
