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Managing multicultural project teams
Project management consultant Stephen Weatherley takes a look at what makes multicultural project teams tick?

Over the last few years, there has been a change in the way many major industrial capital projects are executed. The growth and development of rapid worldwide electronic communications has led to many projects being designed and developed in locations many thousands of miles away from the actual construction sites. In addition, there has been a trend by owner-operators to develop and establish such projects in partnership with other companies as joint ventures, often collaborating with local companies in the territory where the assets will be built. This has led to the rise of multicultural project teams, widely separated by geography with team members from different cultures and backgrounds working together to achieve a common objective.

Project management has developed greatly over the last 20 years, with a much greater understanding of the key factors that lead to project success. Project performance has been widely measured and benchmarked by various organisations, and the results have clearly shown that best project performance is achieved when the entire project team is fully integrated and aligned with project objectives. This is difficult enough to achieve where the team is situated in the same office located close to the construction site. But it is much more difficult for multicultural global projects that have a range of diverse companies involved, are widely separated geographically and that have very different organisational and regional cultures.

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Experience shows that, despite the many difficulties, these projects can be very successful. It is possible to get project teams from very different companies and diverse cultures to work together effectively. The task is to understand the secret of success so that more projects of this type can be delivered to the benefit of the project sponsors in a way that properly rewards the many companies and organisations involved in that delivery.

Any project where people bring different assumptions about working norms (either in product development or team behavior) is a multicultural project. Even when all project participants are from one country, the project manager (PM) may still have to deal with multiple cultures and those cultures’ expectations and behaviors.

Some of the team differences are strictly cultural, while others stem from varied management styles and strategies, but all these differences will eventually show up during the project. Some project managers try to manage those differences by mandating common practices and techniques across the project. Instead of trying to get everyone to work in lock step, I’ve found it useful to get people to agree to major milestones and what they mean and to use complementary practices to achieve project success.

Complementary practices are those techniques and agreements that help each team get their jobs done. For example, one team might perform nightly builds and smoke tests. Another team might do weekly builds and full regression tests. These practices are complementary–they are not the same–but the practices work to achieve the same result: easy integration of multiple teams’ work. Each team determines what makes the most sense for them to do, as long as they meet their agreed-upon deliverables.

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Multicultural projects are challenging and fun. It’s hard work and takes focus on the people issues. When the projects succeed, you have made something more than the sum of the parts.

Advantages of Multicultural Diversity
In general, multicultural teams are more effective in solving project tasks that require creativity and innovation.

This is because globalized work teams:

Generate more and better ideas.
Are less likely to go along with status quo thinking, also known as Group Think.
Enhance creativity which leads to better decisions as well as more effective and productive performance.

Multicultural Project Team

Forty years ago, many work teams were homogeneous groups of employees who, like a group of German bankers, shared similar backgrounds.

Today, most project teams are multicultural groups with two or more members from each culture. Each multicultural group has its own unique beliefs, norms, values and observable behaviours.

Multicultural project teams can be highly effective or ineffective.