Global Team in Silicon Valley

Someone recently asked me if I’d had experience managing engineering groups involving multiple cultures. In answering this question I realized there are really two situations – a distributed, global team, physically located in different locations and possibly time- zones, and a local team comprised of people born elsewhere. It’s obvious in the former situation that you have to factor in cultural nuances in order to successfully develop product together. Don’t minimize the fun (and challenges) of the latter situation as well.

In Silicon Valley I once had a team of 8 software developers with people originally born in 5 or 6 different countries and moving to California as adults. When making assignments I had to factor in not only who had the right technical background and skills, who was most interested (and thus most motivated) to tackle the particular work and who was available. I also considered which individuals would most successfully communicate well with each other. Although everyone’s ability to read and write English was very good there were varying levels of spoken fluency.

I communicated well directly with each person but I soon realized that person A had more trouble understanding the spoken English of person B than did person C, not an insurmountable problem and possibly one that many managers would choose to ignore. I found it useful to factor it in to project assignments. I myself have lived overseas, daily speaking a language that was not my native tongue. As such, I understand first-hand how much more relaxing it is to converse with someone who has little trouble understanding the words spoken by me and vice-versa. Obviously, with effort, two people fluent in the same language can and will communicate so the most important criteria for divvying up the work at hand are technical fit and availability. When possible it’s useful to optimize for communications skills as well.