Leading Projects Across Multiple Offices
What a nightmare this is, dealing with different times zones, work styles, understandings, offers, commitments and varying degrees of time consciousness. Big projects bring big headaches with them, especially when the client wants something done in a hurry, across multiple markets. In a global world of business these types of challenges are only going to increase. The hard bits are when you have to rely on others for vital information.
The client has a formula which suits their situation. If you are dealing with procurement officers they want to get it all down to a one size fits all spread sheet. The fact that you are being asked to fit the square peg in the round hole is of no interest to them. They want to gauge comparisons of cost across all the potential suppliers participating in the beauty parade. This has the effect of warping some of the information from certain markets.
Even in the same organisation, not everyone offers exactly the same thing across all markets. These regional or market variations become a nightmare when you are trying to frog march them into the designated spread sheet cells. Nevertheless, you have to do it, because there are no other options and the client isn’t helpful around catering to your organisational differences.
Actually, like in politics, they say that the people from your own political party are usually the bigger problem, than the opposition parties. Getting cooperation across countries gets tricky, because the buy in to the project can differ quite a bit. Maybe the size of their part of the deal isn’t that major. They see this as a mild annoyance, rather than an opportunity to build a relationship with the client. Usually we are fairly scanty in our explanation of what they need to do. We are super busy, with a hard stop timeline looming, so we forget to give them the big picture and we just ask for pricing etc.
We are usually communicating across time zones, so there is always that loss of time as a result. We have to wait twelve hours for a reply or sometimes much longer. The key person is away on holidays and purposely incommunicado. Their subordinates don’t make a move without authorisation from the big boss, so you are easily stymied and lose time as a result. As the deadline gets closer panic starts to reign supreme, because you have to make the client deadline to stay in the race for consideration for the prize. Late entries leave a bad impression with the buyers, especially if your competitors are obviously much better organised and coordinated.
There is also the matter of getting the right information. You attach updates of the slide deck that will be used, in the presentation to the buyer, so that everyone can see what they are required to do. Now you think that this makes it quite obvious for them, until you start getting piecemeal information back, that doesn’t provide the data you need. Some people don’t even open the slide deck and read it. With such a tight deadline, how can that be you ask?
What do we need to do instead? Firstly be highly proactive and use phone, email and social media messaging to make contact with the key players and get them to agree to participate. We also want them to designate who will be the counterparty in their organisation for you to work with. Often the big boss is just too busy to help with the level of detail you want. All you need from them is their agreement to participate and then often it is better to start interacting with someone else in the team, someone closer to the action.
Start with explaining the WHY in some detail, so that everyone has better context on what this is about and the level of importance to be attached to it. Here is a critical point – be very detailed and specific in telling them what they have to do. Checklists are great for this. Just babbling away in an email can sometimes mean they forget to provide certain key data, giving your only three pieces out of the four you need. When you look back as to why that happened , it is often the case that you were not demanding and specific enough, about telling them what they had to do.
Check in regularly to get a progress report. The worst thing is when you imagine something is happening and in fact it isn’t. This is when you run out of time completely and you have to move heaven and earth to get it done. The wear and tear on everyone is tremendous.
Expect mistakes and miscommunication. When we are dealing with representatives from various countries, the common language may be English, but the levels of English can differ considerably. This is why you have to spell it out, so that there is as little room for misinterpretation as possible. Asking for feedback may be blocked, because they don’t feel fully capable of explaining what they think in English. Sometimes you have to just harvest what data you need and use your own common sense to bring things to fruition. Better to make the deadline and ask for forgiveness later than miss the client deadline.
Begin by anticipating this will be a nightmare and start from that basis. Expect non-completion of tasks, insufficient data supply, mistakes, no answers to your emails and ridiculously tight deadlines set by the client to selfishly suit their situation. Now you are ready to rumble!
Remember, if you would like any questions you have, answered live by me, then just put in the email header “I am based in…and am interested in joining your live Leadership Q&A” and send that email to me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com. I am planning to do a Zoom meeting with everyone and we will record it for those who can’t make it. Tell me your location because I may do a couple of versions, to best suit your time zone.
