The importance of conversation
April 5, 2024
The Importance of conversation
The company had been leveraging the global platform for quite a while. New lines of businesses kept adding teams to leverage the offshore platform. For the teams that were setting up, their individual challenges were new to them with continuous learnings. This anecdote is from a time when a new line of business started looking at setting up a team on the platform. The responsibilities of leading that offshore team went to a bright young manager Praveen (name changed). Praveen had been very successful in delivery management but did not have the experience of setting up a new team on his own. Several challenges lay ahead; understanding the needs of the business, figuring out the team design, recruiting the right people, transitioning the work, setting up the relationship with the team on the enterprise side, most of whom have had little or no global sourcing experience.
Praveen reached out to me to seek advice on how to make this opportunity a success. He was quite confident about dealing with most of the challenges, as he had encountered them in the past. What worried him was this last part….
How to set up an effective working relationship with Harry (name changed), who was the leader on the enterprise side, who was more experienced and senior in the organization than Praveen.
I left him with a simple advice which I had received from someone almost 10 years earlier, when I was in a similar situation. Call Harry daily and talk to him for 15 minutes. Even if you don’t have any work-related items to discuss, check about the weather. But make sure you talk regularly. Praveen thanked me but left with a cynical look on his face.
I forgot about this till I had a chance meeting with Harry after three months and enquired how his global team is doing. His response was polite but not very positive. I dug deeper and asked about his relationship with Praveen, and it was met with a very neutral answer. At that point, he opened up and asked for my advice. And I repeated exactly what I had told Praveen.
Another three or four months later, I bumped into Harry again, and could see a big smile on his face. His team on the global platform was set and performing well. He was noticing his planned benefits starting to creep in. But more importantly, he had found a trusted and capable direct report in Praveen.
It seemed Harry had taken my advice and established daily connects with Praveen. After a couple of months, the frequency was reduced to three times a week. Praveen was now included in Harry’s leadership team and attended all the strategic and operational meetings of the line of business.
A small and easy investment of time transformed the performance of the entire team. Communication is often taken for granted and email may be assumed to be effective, but there is no undermining the importance of a conversation. As one of the gurus of global sourcing used to say…. “The three secrets for effectively operating a global platform are Conversation, Conversation and More Conversation!”
