Question Week Two LED Mar (Due 6 Mar)

Week Two Discussions March 2023

200 Word

1) Read the week 2 lecture content and answer the following questions:

How do we understand team culture?

How do we accept and incorporate the many differences being brought to the potential success of the team?

Do you think people and organizations can ever become gender and color-blind? Discuss.

2) Managing multicultural teams

After reading the article, attempt any one of the following:

Discuss the four interventions suggested for handling conflict. Which intervention is the most practical? The most definitive?

Discuss the situations listed as “representative problems” and the conditions that might occur that complicate the team’s agenda. When would a team leader decide to use an adaptive strategy compared to an exit strategy?

Discuss how the case study stories helped you understand the basic concepts of effective team leadership.

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PERSPECTIVES

Teams in all kinds of

nonbusiness settings—from

stock car racing to wedding

planning to hostage

negotiating—rely on flawless

preparation and execution.

Here’s how they consistently

achieve the highest

standards.

When Failure Isn’t an
Option

Perspectives from Michael R. Hillman,

Philippe Dongier, Robert P. Murgallis, Mary Khosh,

Elizabeth K. Allen, and Ray Evernham

Reprint R0507C

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http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/relay.jhtml?name=itemdetail&referral=4320&id=R0507C

Teams in all kinds of nonbusiness settings—from stock car racing to

wedding planning to hostage negotiating—rely on flawless preparation

and execution. Here’s how they consistently achieve the highest

standards.

PERSPECTIVES

When Failure Isn’t an
Option

Perspectives from Michael R. Hillman,

Philippe Dongier, Robert P. Murgallis, Mary Khosh,

Elizabeth K. Allen, and Ray Evernham

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Some teams, by the very nature of their work,
must consistently perform at the highest lev-
els. How do you—as a team leader, as a super-
visor, as a trainer, or as an outside coach—en-
sure that this happens?

To answer that question, we sought out a
number of people who have worked with
teams in settings where high performance is
crucial: Michael Hillmann, deputy chief of the
Los Angeles Police Department and com-
mander of its Special Operations Bureau,
which includes the SWAT team; Philippe
Dongier, who headed up a joint United Na-
tions/World Bank/Asian Development Bank re-
construction team in Afghanistan after the fall
of the Taliban; the National Fire Academy’s
Robert Murgallis, who trains firefighting
teams; Mary Khosh, the former career coach
for players on the Cleveland Browns of the Na-
tional Football League; Elizabeth Allen, a plan-
ner of society weddings, charity galas, and cor-
porate events; and Ray Evernham, who, as a
stock-car-racing crew chief, helped driver Jeff
Gordon win three NASCAR championships.

The following commentaries—drawn from in-
terviews with each of the authors—offer an
array of perspectives on developing and man-
aging high-performing teams.

The types of teams represented here are
very different. Some are ad hoc, formed for a
specific task, while others are ongoing, typi-
cally improving their performance with each
task they undertake. Some have a clearly de-
fined leader, while others make decisions more
collaboratively. Even when there is a clear hier-
archy, some teams require a leader who micro-
manages whereas others rely on the individual
initiative of their members. The teams may be
composed of people with similar or very differ-
ent personalities and areas of expertise. And
success is measured in very different ways: the
buzz of excited conversation and media cover-
age generated by a successful society wedding
versus the little noticed resolution of a poten-
tially explosive situation by a SWAT unit.

For all these teams, however, the stakes are
high. And despite their differences, some simi-
larities emerge in the ways they achieve top-

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 1

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

When a suspect walks

out of a building and

raises a rifle to the head

of a hostage, a SWAT

marksman doesn’t wait

for the command to

shoot.

level performance. For example, selection of
team members is crucial—as is a willingness to
get rid of members who don’t consistently de-
liver outstanding performance. A leader who
supports and builds confidence in team mem-
bers is also important—and high-performance
teams without such a leader will often infor-
mally create one. Finally, the stress that defines
the work of these teams in itself helps generate
peak short-term performance—and poses the
constant risk that members will eventually
burn out.

Are lessons gleaned from such teams trans-
ferable to teams working in other environ-
ments? Certainly some of them are: Just ask
the U.S. Army, which has studied NASCAR pit
crews for ways to reduce the time their mede-
vac teams take to get injured soldiers off the
battlefield. And even those lessons that aren’t
directly transferable may suggest ways to im-
prove the achievements of your own high-
performance team.

Life-or-Death Tactics
by Michael R. Hillmann

Michael R. Hillmann is the deputy chief of the

Los Angeles Police Department and the com-
manding officer of the department’s Special
Operations Bureau, including the Special Weap-

ons and Tactics (SWAT) team, of which he was
one of the earliest members.

On February 28, 1997, three members of our
Special Weapons and Tactics team heard over
their police radio: “Officer needs help; shots
fired.” The call came from North Hollywood,
where two suspects—heavily armed with auto-
matic weapons and wearing body armor—had
held up a Bank of America branch, shooting
and injuring a number of people in the process.
The SWAT officers, acting on their own initia-
tive, drove to the scene and plunged into the
thick of a firefight between the suspects and
regular police officers already at the scene. As
one of the suspects was about to carjack a by-
stander’s vehicle, SWAT members shot and
killed him and his cohort—thus preventing
them from escaping into the surrounding com-
munity and doing any further harm.

By contrast, the SWAT unit several weeks ago
got a report from the Foothill area that a vehi-
cle belonging to a suspected gang member re-
cently seen brandishing a firearm was parked at

a residence. A SWAT team, led by their tactical
team leader, arrived and systematically evacu-
ated the surrounding neighborhood. Although
a female leaving the house told SWAT person-
nel that no one was in the building, a probe of
the exterior by a canine team determined peo-
ple were indeed inside. Team members covertly
entered the house and, using sophisticated elec-
tronic equipment, found the suspect and two
others hidden in the attic, along with a stock of
handguns. The three men—one of whom, it
turned out, was suspected of involvement in
several recent homicides—were taken into cus-
tody. Not a shot was fired.

These two incidents, one extraordinary and
one very typical, together highlight a key char-
acteristic of a successful SWAT team: the abil-
ity of members both to make quick and coura-
geous decisions on their own and to work
systematically and methodically as part of a
highly coordinated group. When a suspect
walks out of a building and raises a rifle to the
head of a hostage, a SWAT marksman doesn’t
wait for the command to shoot. But if that
same suspect has barricaded himself with oth-
ers in a building, the team needs to execute a
synchronized plan of action, from initiating ne-
gotiations to covertly removing door locks to
creating a diversion that will draw attention
away from colleagues entering the building.

This combination of individual initiative
and disciplined teamwork requires a certain
type of person, which means that selection of
team members is crucial. When the Los Ange-
les Police Department formed the nation’s first
SWAT team in 1966 in response to a growing
number of unusually violent and dangerous
situations, it was staffed with volunteers, many
of them Vietnam veterans using their own
equipment. But in the following years, there
were incidents—a deadly shoot-out at 4115
South Central Avenue involving members of
the Black Panther Party, a confrontation at
54th and Compton with members of the Sym-
bionese Liberation Army during which 9,000
rounds were fired—that made us realize we
needed more than a volunteer organization of
committed officers. We needed a budget and
training and a formal selection process.

Over the years, we’ve developed selection
criteria based on a number of key personal
traits, including self-discipline, perseverance,
maturity, loyalty, and, crucially, the ability to
work as part of a team. Officers applying to

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 2

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

join the SWAT unit—already screened on the
basis of their physical condition and their work
record within the LAPD’s elite Metropolitan
Division—go through a six-day selection pro-
cess. The grueling test includes time in
“Hogan’s Alley,” a mock street scene where
candidates are confronted with surprise situa-
tions in which they must instantly decide,
among other things, whether or not to shoot at
a suspect. There are obstacle courses designed
to test the physical reserves of candidates so
that we can see whether they are able to think
clearly and make correct decisions when they
are exhausted or even hurt. And a series of ex-
ercises—for example, a six-mile group orien-
teering test over rough terrain—show us
whether an individual is a good team player.
It’s important to add that the majority of can-
didates who don’t make the cut are treated
with honor and dignity and their tremendous
effort during the six-day trial is acknowledged.

Passing the test doesn’t guarantee a perma-
nent place in the 67-member SWAT platoon. If
someone fails a physical fitness qualification
more than once, he is removed from regular
SWAT duties until he can pass the test. The fit-
ness requirement is a measure of whether
someone is really committed to SWAT duties.

Despite the high ongoing standards, mem-
bership in the unit is very stable. The average
SWAT team tenure is 14 years for supervisors
and eight years for officers, and people some-
times turn down promotions within the de-
partment to stay in the unit. This consistency is
crucial to the team’s ability to work together
and carry out its mission: to defuse violence
and save lives.

A Country at Stake
by Philippe Dongier

From November 2001 to February 2004, Philippe

Dongier (pdongier@worldbank.org) was the
Manager for Afghanistan Reconstruction at the
World Bank in Washington, DC. He now leads
a task force aimed at enhancing organizational
effectiveness within the World Bank.

Crisis is a powerful motivator. That truth was
brought home in 2001 when I led a joint team
preparing the reconstruction effort in Afghani-
stan following the defeat of the Taliban. The
team included approximately 60 colleagues
from the Asian Development Bank, the United

Nations, and the World Bank. Our mission was
to help set Afghanistan on the path to recon-
struction and development.

The urgency of the situation in Afghanistan
focused our minds sharply. We all knew that
the country could easily fall back into conflict
if the government did not show rapid results.
Because the international community was
keen to get started as quickly as possible, we
had just one month to conduct a needs assess-
ment in order to guide how much assistance
donors would pledge and how help would ini-
tially be channeled to the country.

The team met the challenges and delivered.
We consulted with many Afghans, analyzed all
possible data, fleshed out a vision of what
needed to be achieved over the next ten years,
and prepared plans and cost estimates. Build-
ing on the needs assessment and the subse-
quent work done with the Afghan govern-
ment, the city of Kabul doubled its power
supply in one year. By the end of 2004, about a
third of the country’s 20,000 villages were re-
ceiving grants and implementing small recon-
struction projects such as those for water sup-
ply, schools, and roads. These villages also
conducted secret-ballot elections to choose
leaders to manage the projects—and the ma-
jority of the women voted despite expectations
to the contrary. During the same period, basic
health services expanded in almost all of the
country’s 34 provinces. In Helmand province,
for example, the number of functioning health
clinics has increased from six to 42. These are
just some examples of the progress that has
been made in Afghanistan.

That progress has largely come about be-
cause the government espoused the team’s rec-
ommendation of hiring private firms and not-
for-profit organizations to design and run many
of the country’s reconstruction programs,
guided by a cadre of outstanding Afghan gov-
ernment officials. In parallel, the government
set in motion longer-term reforms of the civil
service. Arriving at such a strategy usually takes
years of debate between aid organizations and
the governments being helped—and the strat-
egy is rarely so clear and shared by key players.

When the team began its work, we found it
was important to step back and take a moment
to define our roles. We had to be selective in
deciding who was going to produce what, as
opposed to just rushing into action in many di-
rections. Probably because of the pressure,

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 3

mailto:pdongier@worldbank.org

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

There’s no time-out

during a fire. You can’t

tell the fire to wait a

minute while you consult

somebody or look up the

solution in a book.

team members needed little convincing to stay
focused on true priorities. Clear accountability
helped generate results.

Furthermore, high team performance didn’t
require micromanagement. To be effective, I
had to step back from the details and play a
support role that, in the end, proved crucial to
the team’s success. It was important, for exam-
ple, to keep the teams linked with one another.
The group focusing on the health sector
needed to remain in contact with those focus-
ing on water supply, for obvious reasons. As
overall team leader, one of my roles was to en-
sure this communication took place.

Forming the right team was probably the
single most important factor in our success. In
choosing team members to lead each sector,
we looked for people who had a reputation for
making things happen. We needed to be sure
that they had firsthand experience with getting
a country rapidly on the path to reconstruction
and development.

Forming the right team also meant letting
go of the least productive team members. As
work progressed, it became clear that familiar-
ity with the country was less important than
teaming up with Afghans who possessed deep
knowledge of the way the country operated. In
fact, some expatriates who had been working
in Afghanistan for years resisted the leadership
of new outside experts by systematically cri-
tiquing their efforts. In the end, those who in-
hibited team performance by focusing solely
on risks and failing to offer constructive strate-
gies had to be sidelined in favor of strong out-
side technical expertise.

A compelling shared vision of a rebuilt and
stable Afghanistan and the urgency of the situ-
ation at hand helped to instill a focus on re-
sults and overcome the inertia that often per-
vades large organizations like ours. The Asian
Development Bank, the UN, and the World
Bank are not known for their speed, but in this
case we were able to do away with much of the
red tape during the critical stages of our
project. Clear goals and accountability and
close attention to team composition were
other key success factors.

Performance Under Fire
by Robert P. Murgallis

Robert P. Murgallis (robert.murgallis@dhs.gov)
is a training specialist for the Emergency Inci-

dent Policy and Analysis Programs at the Nation-

al Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

The difference between a team like the New En-
gland Patriots and a team of high-performing
firefighters is the time pressure. In football, you
can call a time-out. There’s no time-out during a
fire. You can’t tell the fire to wait a minute while
you consult somebody or look up the solution
in a book. This is one business where you have
to make very quick decisions on the basis of
very little information.

Intuition is critical to high-performing fire-
fighting teams—it can mean the difference be-
tween life and death. But our kind of intuition
is learned. Through training, reading, respond-
ing to emergencies, and talking with veterans,
we learn the cues and signals that indicate that
certain things might occur. We have a vast
mental data bank that is based on experience
and training. If a fire is a certain color, we
know the chances are pretty good that a partic-
ular product is burning. In a wildland fire, for
example, you know that certain trees burn at a
faster rate. And you know that a fire burns up-
hill more quickly than it does downhill. But
your training has to be such that you recognize
those cues immediately. You can’t start ponder-
ing and planning and getting an official
weather report before making decisions and
taking action.

The fact that there is seldom chaos when
firefighters go into a burning area can be
summed up in one word: confidence—confi-
dence in their skills and in one another. Confi-
dence is contagious. If leaders are self-assured,
capable, and knowledgeable, their people will
respond with high performance. Being a
leader in name only and driving and intimidat-
ing your teams will reduce the effectiveness of
any unit. People need to be guided and moti-
vated. Even self-motivated individuals will lose
their drive if you don’t provide them with posi-
tive reinforcement. The trick for you as the
leader is to make your team members believe
that you believe they have worth.

Like most high-performing teams, firefight-
ers need a mission. It’s the mission that sets the
priorities. If your mission is to stop the fire
from getting to a certain place, all your actions
and decisions will be targeted toward that out-
come. Often the mission will force you to make
very difficult decisions. You may have to antici-
pate letting houses burn that haven’t even

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 4

mailto:robert.murgallis@dhs.gov

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

Whatever form the

coaching takes—athletic

or psychological—a

coach needs to focus on

just one thing: his

players’ confidence.

caught fire yet, because they’re not defensible
based on the type of roof they have or the fact
that they’re surrounded by highly flammable
brush. You can’t waste your resources if you’re
going to accomplish the greatest good for the
greatest number. But it’s hard trying to explain
to home owners why you decided not to pro-
tect their homes.

People who can’t cope with that kind of
pressure shouldn’t be leading high-performing
teams, and in my line of work, leaders who
don’t perform don’t last long. On September
12, the day after the attack on the World Trade
Center, the New York City Fire Department
contacted the National Fire Academy to ask us
if we could help them restore their command
structure because they had lost so many of
their top people. As part of that effort, I saw
one of the team leaders struggling. He was a
nice person, but he really didn’t have a good
understanding of what needed to be done. His
training and expertise in other areas did not
equip him for the situation. As his inability to
cope became more apparent, an unofficial
leader emerged from among his crew who
shepherded the project along. I’ve seen this
happen many times on high-performance
teams: If a leader is not up to the job, the top
performers will step up to produce a leader
who can carry the ball.

The Confidence Game
by Mary Khosh

Mary Khosh was a career coach for the Cleve-

land Browns in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
During that time, she advised players on work/
life issues and was the only woman doing psy-
chological coaching in the NFL. She is currently
a consulting psychologist with the Leadership
Development Institute at Eckerd College in St.

Petersburg, Florida.

When I worked with the Browns, the coaches
emphasized playing one game at a time—al-
ways focusing on the immediate play and the
immediate goal, always focusing on high per-
formance. The Browns’ coaches pushed for
team excellence—in life as well as in the
game—player by player.

Coaching is a major factor in an athlete’s
success. Most of the players I worked with rec-
ognized this. They’ve been coached since they
were first discovered in youth football leagues,

and they’ve always believed in and trusted
their coaches. In fact, sports players’ reliance
on coaches may explain why so many of them
make mistakes in life and lose most of their
money after their athletic careers are over.
They are still looking for a coach, and there are
many con artists happy to oblige.

Great coaches understand the way the
minds of high performers work. Each player
has his own needs. You can see this most
clearly after the players lose a game. Some
want the coach to come up to them and talk to
them about it. Others want to be left com-
pletely alone; they want to deal with the loss in
their own heads first.

During my time with the Cleveland Browns,
I saw players working with several different
coaches. The successful coaches kept the indi-
vidual needs and interests of each player in
mind. The players willingly worked harder for
them because they wanted so much to please
them.

In my own work, my priority was also to try
to get a sense of who each player was. I would
begin with an interview, in which I focused on
understanding a player’s background—when
his talent was first recognized, how he had
been steered into pro football. In a second ses-
sion, I would conduct a more formal assess-
ment to gain a deeper understanding of the
player’s core personality, motivations, values,
needs, problem-solving skills, and interests. Fi-
nally, in a third session, we would go through
all the results of the assessment tests. It was at
that point we talked about who the player was,
what really challenged him, what put fire in
his belly.

Whatever the coaching takes—athletic or
psychological—a coach needs to focus on just
one thing: his players’ confidence. In a top
pro-football team, all the players are talented
and fit. What differentiates the winners is self-
confidence. And that kind of confidence is a
matter of choice. It isn’t something your oppo-
nents can take away; it’s something you give
away when you stop believing that you can
win. That’s why a good coach never undercuts
or demeans his players when a game is going
badly. The players need to believe that their
skills are better than their opponents’. That’s
not to say that coaches should ignore failure—
far from it. They have to analyze and under-
stand the failure in order to avoid repeating it.
But they must not point fingers, because that

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 5

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

The trick is learning how

to manage diverse

individual personalities

and take control with

style and grace.

only makes the players more likely to repeat
the mistake.

I think my main contribution to the Browns’
performance was to get players to separate
their personal identities from their results on
the field. If self-worth were linked to scores, the
pressure associated with each game would be
tremendous. It was important for the players’
self-confidence to see football as their job—
what they did, not who they were. We talked
about their lives in general—about their fami-
lies, their education, and their off-season ca-
reers. The decisions they made in these areas
helped maintain top performance as well as an
attitude about success that accompanied them
onto the field.

In my current work as a consulting psychol-
ogist focused on coaching high performers in
companies, I have found that effective senior
executives are a lot like the best sports coaches.
Like coaches, executives need to be excellent
listeners, able to evaluate the characteristics of
the people they manage. They need to be able
to work in different ways, with different peo-
ple, and in different places. They need to be
dedicated, determined, persistent, and fair.
They need to be visionary and able to commu-
nicate that vision with confidence to those who
are charged with executing it. As a woman, I
used to object to all the male sports metaphors
that are thrown around in business conversa-
tion. Now that I see the parallels, I occasionally
use sports language myself.

Creativity on Demand
by Elizabeth K. Allen

Elizabeth K. Allen is the founder of Elizabeth K.
Allen, Inc., an event-planning company that
organizes and produces society weddings, chari-
ty galas, and corporate events across the United
States. The company has offices in New York and

Boston.

As an event planner who conceives, designs,
and orchestrates every type of event from cor-
porate affairs to weddings, it’s my responsibil-
ity to put together and manage the individual
creative teams that are contributing to the oc-
casions. Together, we do everything from se-
lecting the perfect stamp for the invitations to
installing temporary roads in order to provide
access to an event.

One of the greatest challenges of my job,

yet one of its most rewarding aspects, is work-
ing with creative people on a day-to-day basis. I
deal with a lot of high-profile, artistic individu-
als—people who are extremely knowledge-
able and well known in their own right. They
are passionate and talented, caring and won-
derful individuals who often have their own vi-
sion of how they want particular elements of
events designed and executed. Therein lies the
challenge. As the event producer, it’s my re-
sponsibility to keep everyone focused on the
overall concept and design and to work with
each team leader to ensure that the teams
move forward in the same direction, all while
minimizing difficulties and drama.

When you are working with creative minds,
it’s crucial to keep them on track so they don’t
go off on tangents and disrupt the project’s
rhythm or production schedule. This means
taking a very active management role. If an in-
dividual is not functioning as part of the team
in the way that he should be, I will manage
him a bit more than the others until I feel he is
back on track. If needed, I will take the person
aside and remind him that producing an event
is a team effort and not a platform for an indi-
vidual to shine.

If you can’t get the creative team leaders to
accept some kind of direction and parameters,
then you must strongly consider removing
them from the project and not hiring them in
the future, however brilliant they are. For ex-
ample, I worked with a very well-known and
talented but very self-centered florist. His vola-
tile behavior would wreak havoc on the team
and affect the overall event production. Now I
just won’t work with him. If I have a client who
insists on hiring this particular florist, I decline
the project.

At the same time, you do have to trust your
most talented people. People in general always
produce better results when you trust them—
trust that they are going to perform not only to
your expectations but to their highest levels.
People hate being micromanaged because it
implies that you don’t respect or trust them.
The trick, I believe, is how to manage diverse
individual personalities and take control with
style and grace. I make sure that my people un-
derstand their position within the project
while giving them the latitude to express their
abilities, talents, and ideas.

When you want people to produce at their
peak levels, empowerment and communica-

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 6

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

The performance of the

entire race team was

crucial to our success:

The greatest car and

driver in the world, after

all, can lose four or five

places during a stop on

pit road.

tion are vital. I strongly believe in communica-
tion—it’s what I do all day. I am constantly on
the phone or in meetings. Communication
doesn’t always have to be direct, of course, and
I am a tremendous fan of e-mail. But I do
think, even in this day and age, you really can-
not beat just talking to someone face-to-face or
at least by phone. Obviously, as a leader, you
cannot do all the communicating yourself. The
key is to identify the items that you really must
communicate yourself and delegate the rest.
Of course, for that to work you need to have an
associate who can function as your right-hand
person.

Inspiring and motivating a team to perform
at the top of its game is exciting and some-
times exhausting. But the process is always
very rewarding. You learn a huge amount from
your creative people, and they constantly sur-
prise you with their ideas.

The Mechanics of Speed
by Ray Evernham

Ray Evernham was the crew chief for driver Jeff

Gordon from 1993 to 1999, during which time
Gordon won three NASCAR (National Associa-
tion for Stock Car Auto Racing) championships.
Today, Evernham is president and CEO of
Evernham Motorsports, which fields a team of
NASCAR entrants for the Dodge division of

DaimlerChrysler.

When seven people have to change four tires,
fill up a gas tank, make quick adjustments to
the suspension, and get a car back on the track
in just over ten seconds, teamwork is, to put it
mildly, essential. And not just for those seven
pit crew members who “go over the wall” dur-
ing a race.

Behind the wall is an entire team of peo-
ple—several dozen mechanics, engineers, and
other specialists—who must also work to-
gether under extreme time pressure, even if
measured in days rather than in seconds. From
one weekend race to the next, they’ll dismantle
an entire car and several engines, making re-
pairs and modifications to correct problems
and customize the car for the particular de-
mands and configuration of the upcoming
track.

I was a young, unknown mechanic when I
began working with a young, unknown driver
named Jeff Gordon. But from the beginning, I

realized that the performance of the entire
race team was crucial to our success: The great-
est car and driver in the world, after all, can
lose four or five places during a stop on pit
road. How were we going to get the top-notch
performance that we needed?

First, we put together a team of particularly
dedicated and intelligent people, looking even
to individuals who didn’t have a lot of racing
experience. Our chief mechanic was a former
truck mechanic who’d been working at a car
dealership in New Jersey. He soon learned the
car racing business and was better than any-
body. Our parts guy was a kid whose full-time
job had been selling plumbing supplies. He
was able to find and get the best piece at the
best price—whether it was a wheel or a toilet,
a shock or a sink.

We also put in place some formal processes
that were unusual for the sport. We’d get ev-
erybody together to watch “game films” of the
previous race and discuss areas for improve-
ment. We kept careful records of race and me-
chanical data. We hired a pit crew trainer, a
former Stanford football player, who was re-
sponsible for the physical training of the crew
and the high-speed choreography of the pit
stop. Many of our rivals thought things like
this were a waste of time. But our record, and
the later adoption of many of our methods by
competitors, proved their value.

And we worked hard to keep people moti-
vated. NASCAR’s nearly ten-month season is
the longest in professional sports, and it’s easy
for people to burn out. But our “Rainbow War-
riors”—the nickname adopted by the race
team because our fire suits bore a rainbow of
paint colors offered by our sponsor, DuPont—
stayed motivated not only for an entire season
but from one season to the next. In fact, the
team remained pretty much intact for the six
years Jeff and I worked together for Hendrick
Motorsports, the owner of the car and em-
ployer of the crew.

More recently, I’ve run a much larger team
that reflects the changes in NASCAR as the
sport has grown rapidly in popularity. In 1999,
Dodge offered me the chance to lead the auto-
maker’s return to NASCAR after a 20-year ab-
sence. Today, we employ nearly 250 people,
many of whom work in areas that go beyond
racing itself: engine and body design (our engi-
neering staff consists of numerous specialists,
including one who holds a PhD in aerodynam-

harvard business review • the high-performance organization • july–august 2005 page 7

• •When Failure Isn’t an Option • PERSPECTIVES

ics), sales and marketing, product licensing,
travel logistics, and so on. We have four facili-
ties that house R&D and manufacturing, six
tractor trailers and three aircraft to transport
cars and people from race to race, and an an-
nual budget of around $50 million.

Again, I’ve tried to establish processes—
some of them, again, unconventional—that
will help this team perform at a high level.
These processes are particularly important as
we grow, because they’ll allow newcomers to
get up to speed quickly. With a team of this
size, I can no longer communicate daily with
everyone as I did when I oversaw 25 people,
but we can instill in individuals a way of think-
ing that will make us winners.

In fact, our team represents a new ap-
proach. Instead of the traditional NASCAR

model that focuses on the individual driver
and car, we’ve adopted a model that we think
represents the future of the sport, one (based
on Formula 1 auto racing) that focuses on the
team’s technology and its sponsors. We run
two identical cars in NASCAR’s Nextel Cup Se-
ries, which doubles our sponsor’s exposure and
the chances of winning. At the track, each car
has its own team, and they both are out to win.
(All I ask of our drivers, Jeremy Mayfield and
Kasey Kahne, is that they don’t crash into each
other.) But our motto is: “One team, one goal.”

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S U M M E R 2 0 0 7 V O L . 4 8 N O. 4

Lynda Gratton, Andreas Voigt and

Tamara Erickson

Bridging Faultlines in
Diverse Teams

Please note that gray areas reflect artwork that has been
intentionally removed.The substantive content of the
article appears as originally published. R E P R I N T N U M B E R 4 8 4 1 1

O R G A N I Z AT I O N

Bridging Faultlines
in Diverse Teams

Project teams can fly

or founder on the

demographic attributes

of team members and

the fractures they can

create. Here’s how to

recognize the potential

for division, and how

to respond in time when

team fractures do arise.

Lynda Gratton,

Andreas Voigt and

Tamara Erickson

C
ompanies create diverse teams to take on their most complex challenges —

tasks across boundaries, functions and geographies that no single department

or function could accomplish. Yet guiding these diverse teams to success re-

quires some counterintuitive management practices. In particular, team

leaders should focus on tasks at the early stages, rather than on interpersonal relationships,

and then switch to relationship building when the time is right.

In a recent study of teams at large companies, we found that diverse membership of

teams and task forces is becoming the order of the day. Take Nokia Corp., which frequently

brings together disparate talent from different departments among its businesses around

the globe, while at the same time partnering with many external suppliers. Or consider the

British Broadcasting Corporation, which routinely creates huge teams for events, such as

the production and broadcast teams for the 2006 FIFA World Cup and the 2008 Olympic

Games. These typically involve groups of more than 100 people, a high proportion of whom

are not full-time employees. Team members often represent more than 15 different nation-

alities, with skill sets ranging from electrical work to intellectual property, from scheduling

to production. The BBC’s teams also face the daunting challenge of a one-shot deal for

which execution has to be right the first time.

The challenges that Nokia and the BBC face are by no means unique. Between 2004 and

2006, we partnered with executives from 15 large European and American companies to study

55 of their teams. What was most striking about these teams was their sheer size and complex-

ity. The diversity of Nokia’s design team — with men and women of many nationalities and

with a wide range of ages, representing multiple functions from many different businesses

— was repeated in companies in many different industries from across the globe. Companies

in the media industry (such as Reuters Group PLC and the BBC), in telecommunications

(such as France Telecom and Canadian wireless giant Rogers Communications Inc.) and in

banking (such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Lehman Brothers Inc.) all employ large and

diverse teams to attack some of their most difficult problems. Many of the teams in the study

numbered more than 50 people, all had more than three nationalities represented and most

brought in people from several functions and businesses. (See “About the Research,” p. 24.)

Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at London Business School.She is the author of Hot
Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces and Organizations Buzz With Energy — and Others Don’t (San Fran-
cisco:Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007). AndreasVoigt is a research assistant in organizational behavior at
London Business School.Tamara Erickson is president of the Concours Institute, the research and education
arm of the Concours Group, a professional services company headquartered in Kingwood,Texas, and a coau-
thor of Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent (Boston:Harvard Business
School Press, 2006).Comment on this article or contact the authors through smrfeedback@mit.edu.

22 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2007 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

https://SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

mailto:smrfeedback@mit.edu

Companies form these teams precisely because they bring to

bear the range of experiences and attitudes that will ensure that

the final product or service will be market-sensitive and innova-

tive — more so than an offering designed by a group of people

with similar characteristics.1 Paradoxically, however, the very

nature of team diversity often creates challenges that reduce the

team’s innovative capacity and even significantly lessen its overall

effectiveness. So while business heads may wish for innovation

through diversity, what they sometimes achieve is reduced pro-

ductivity and efficiency.2

How Diverse Teams Fail, and How Some Succeed
The teams in our study failed in many different ways. Some

could not deliver on time; others fell short of the hoped-for

productivity; still others were unable to produce innovative re-

sults. Some teams broke up in acrimony and

bad feeling; some foundered in incompe-

tence. They were a litany of what could go

wrong. Many executives had been trained to

manage rather simple teams but were sur-

prised at just how hard it is to create a

high-performing team of diverse people.

Analyzing these problems uncovered two

root failures. The first was a failure of collabo-

ration, in which team members did not

develop trust and goodwill among them-

selves.3 The second was a failure of knowledge

sharing, in which team members withheld

their individual knowledge from other team

members or from other teams.4

Why is it so fiendishly difficult to enable

high-performing, diverse teams? To under-

stand the nature of the collaborative and

knowledge-sharing failures, we looked closely

at the demography of the teams. Using com-

plex statistical modeling, we created a unique

demographic profile for each team that took

into account team members’ ages, genders,

nationalities, education levels, functions and

tenures within the company. The model ex-

amined the configurations as a whole and the

interplay of different demographic attributes.

Close examination of these team dem-

ographic profiles revealed that in many cases

the failures in collaboration and knowledge

sharing were a direct result of faultlines —

subgroups or coalitions that emerge naturally

within teams, typically along various dem-

ographic lines. (See“An Overview of Faultline

Theory,” p. 25 for causes and characteristics

of faultlines.) These faultlines split the teams into subgroups

that were based on shared demographic characteristics. When

faultlines emerge, subgroups rarely collaborate with other sub-

groups, instead tending to share knowledge only within their

subgroup. Yet knowledge sharing across subgroups is critical for

complex teams to operate effectively.5

Despite the emergence of faultlines in many of the 55 teams,

some teams were able to work collaboratively and share knowl-

edge. Deeper analysis of these productive and innovative teams

showed that a defining factor was the behavior of the team leader

and the way in which she or he structured the leadership role.

Thus, although faultlines are a common hazard, some executives

are able to reduce the problems associated with diverse teams

and, indeed, to enhance the benefits.

In particular, the executives’ leadership style and the manner

SUMMER 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 23

O R G A N I Z AT I O N

About the Research
We studied 55 workgroups in 15 European and

American

companies (ABN AMRO, BBC, BP, Citigroup, France Telecom,

Lehman Brothers, Marriott, Nokia, PricewaterhouseCoopers,

Reuters, Rogers Communications, Royal Bank of Scotland,

Siemens AG, Standard Chartered Bank and XL Global Serv-

ices). The study was based on a quantitative survey of

1,543 members of the workgroups and their leaders. The

teams ranged in size from four to 184 people, with an av-

erage team size of 43 members. Most of the teams were

diverse in terms of gender (32% women), age (ranging

from 4% under 25 to 15% over 46), nationality (26% Brit-

ish, 23% American, 23% European, 15% Asian and 13% rest

of world) and education level (7% high school diploma,

50% undergraduate degree, 37% master’s degree, and 6%

doctorate). We achieved a 64% response rate.

We measured demographic faultline strength along six

demographic variables: gender, age, nationality, educa-

tion, work function and tenure in the company. We

applied a statistical procedure that produced an overall

quantitative index of faultline strength by combining the

effects of all individual attributes. We used multiple re-

gression analyses to identify the faultlines and to control

for the size of the group, the degree of task complexity,

the geographical distance between team members and

industry-level differences.

in which they prioritized actions significantly reduced the extent

to which faultlines hindered collaboration and the flow of knowl-

edge. By studying the way these executives behaved, we are able

to make recommendations about leading diverse teams. How-

ever, while some of the recommendations are straightforward,

others are deeply counterintuitive and defy the received wisdom

about good management practice.

The Emergence of Faultlines
To illustrate this seeming paradox, consider a team from a tele-

com company in our study. Think of the faultlines in this team

as analogous to geologic fractures in the Earth’s crust. Like geo-

logic fractures, faultlines can remain dormant and invisible for

some time. Geologic fractures explode as earthquakes when put

under immense pressure. The same is true of team faultlines,

which cross multiple layers of demography. In many cases, the

tensions of the faultlines emerge under the pressure of a com-

plex, time-dependent task.

The stated goal of the telecom team was to bring together

several parts of the business to build an innovative product and

service offering for one of the company’s major multinational

clients. Many of the client’s needs were standard, but meeting

their expectations would require the creation of a rather complex

service and delivery process. A business unit head was assigned

leadership of the new project and given charge of a core group of

22 people. She had to bring together the remainder of the team,

which was expected to total 48 people, from the four countries in

which the client had significant operations (Germany, the United

States, Japan and France), drawing from three functions (tech-

nology, marketing and operations). Although this may seem a

rather large and diverse team, many of the teams studied were of

a comparable size and complexity.

Initial Faultline Formation Is Based On Surface-Level Attributes
The telecom team members began to get to know one another

through face-to-face encounters and e-mails. Within a short

time, however, the initial faultlines began to emerge. These fault-

lines were drawn around readily detectable demographic

attributes — for example, the team members’ age, gender and

functional background. Team members typically use obvious

characteristics to assign themselves and others to subgroups. In

this team, an early faultline emerged between a subgroup of male

technical engineers and a subgroup of female marketing special-

ists. Other subgroups rapidly emerged: for example, between

people of French nationality (many of whom had been in the

company for years and were typically in their 40s and 50s) and

Americans (many of whom had joined the company recently and

were in their 20s and 30s). Note that none of these subgroups was

based on a unitary dimension but rather on the combination of

multiple dimensions (gender and function in the first case; na-

tionality, age and job tenure in the second). A strong faultline

emerged because the team members fell into distinct, nonover-

lapping subgroups based on demographic attributes. (See “The

Emergence of Faultlines in a Telecom Team,” p. 26.)

As a rule, when subgroups emerge within complex teams, each

tends to see itself as an “in-group” — people like us, who we like

because we have something in common — and those across the

boundary of the faultline as an “out-group” — people not like us,

whose interests we may find puzzling. Each subgroup within the

telecom team collaborated closely among its members, who all

got to know, like and trust one another. In a sense, what each

subgroup was doing was learning more about what its members

already knew. This deepening of knowledge can be crucial as a

team builds professional insight and muscle. However, for a team

to become truly innovative, the combination of knowledge across

subgroups is essential.6

As members of the telecom team’s subgroups began to iden-

tify more strongly with one another, the team leader came to

understand that the emerging faultlines had negative conse-

quences. The dealings across the subgroups became a source of

tension and conflict, particularly under the pressure of task dead-

24 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2007 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

https://SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

lines. For example, the predominately male engineers at one stage

refused to allow the predominately female marketing group ac-

cess to some of their product findings. The story was that this

information was too technically sophisticated for the marketing

function; the reality was that the engineering subgroup did not

want to let go of their valuable knowledge. The subgroups just

didn’t seem to understand one another — they did not know the

other’s interior language, and they did not understand the other’s

key concepts and models.

Deep-Level Attributes Come Into Play At Later Stages of Team
Development As complex teams develop and group members get

to know more about one another, a deeper layer of faultlines

becomes visible — this time based not on surface-level attri-

butes but rather on subtler, deep-level attributes such as personal

values, dispositions and attitudes. At the time of a team’s forma-

tion, these deeper-level attributes are not visible. They emerge as

team members interact with one another and reveal themselves

through their actions, words and what they choose to disclose

about their personal lives.7

In the telecom company team, a later set of subgroups also

formed around values, disposition and

attributes. A faultline surfaced between

those members with cooperative values

and a subgroup of people with more

competitive values.

The Leader’s Role in Faultlines
In the geological analogy to faultlines,

various external factors (such as pres-

sure) have an impact on how a fault

actually fractures. Similarly, many as-

pects of a team’s context can affect the

extent to which faultlines impact the

team’s performance. Two examples are

the extent of the cooperative culture in

which the team operates and the de-

gree to which team members believe

senior executives work across bound-

aries. The most important factor in

determining whether destructive fault-

lines emerged was the style of leader,

and in particular the extent to which

the group’s leader was task-oriented or

relationship-oriented.8 Some leaders in

the study were able to adjust their lead-

ership styles as the project progressed,

beginning with a task orientation and

then switching to a relationship orien-

tation, or beginning with a relationship

orientation and switching to a task orientation. (See “The Four

Paths of Leadership Style,” p. 27.)

Path 1: Task Orientation In this pathway, the team leader uses a

strong and consistent task-oriented leadership style, as perceived

by team members, during the entire life of the team or project.

The leader can do this by creating a detailed project plan, build-

ing tight schedules for the work and emphasizing performance

goals that are high but realistic. This type of leader places great

emphasis on the task at hand, so he or she strives to remain ac-

cessible at all times and provide information that team members

need to carry out their day-to-day work. Leaders who follow this

pathway are often technically proficient — and they see their role

as providing the team with the technical and specialist assistance

critical to the task.

Path 2: Relationship Orientation This type of leader places par-

ticular emphasis on the culture of the team and on the extent

and depth of relationships among team members. They do this

by treating team members with kindness and respect, encourag-

ing a climate of trust and cooperation and providing recognition

An Overview of Faultline Theory

Faultline theory explains how a combination and the configuration of the attributes of

team members can influence the team’s behavior and ultimately its performance. The

attributes that drive faultlines can be surface-level or deep-level. Readily detectable at-

tributes such as gender, age, nationality and education are surface-level. Underlying,

or deep-level, attributes include values, personality and knowledge.

Strong faultlines emerge in a team when there are a few fairly homogeneous

subgroups that are able to identify themselves. Weak faultlines can emerge in two

rather different configurations. Faultlines generally do not emerge, or do so only

weakly, when all the members of the team are rather similar (for example, the same

age and job function). However, at the other end of the spectrum, faultlines also are

unlikely to emerge when there is heterogeneity — when the members of the team

are all very different from one another (for example, different ages and working in

different job functions).

Strong faultlines are particularly likely to emerge when all the demographic attrib-

utes of the members of the subgroups form distinct, nonoverlapping categories. For

example, a strong faultline will emerge if all women in a team are over 50 years old and

all the men are under 30. In this example, gender and age have formed a single, strong

faultline.

Whether a faultline emerges depends on how apparent the attribute is to members

of the team. As the team members get to know each other better and learn what is

similar and what is different, the possible sources of potential faultlines increase.

Strong faultlines can create a fracture in the social fabric of the team. This fracture

can become a source of tension and a barrier to the creation of trust and goodwill and

to the exchange of knowledge and information. Inevitably, therefore, when strong

faultlines emerge, the team’s creative and innovative capacity is severely limited.

SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU SUMMER 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 25

https://SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

O R G A N I Z AT I O N

and appreciation for individual and group accomplishments.

These leaders are often skilled communicators and listeners.

Path 3: Task Orientation, Switching to Relationship Orientation In this

pathway, the leader begins with a strong task-oriented style by

setting targets and scheduling work. As the project progresses,

these leaders encourage team members to collaborate with one

another and work to increase the general trust and goodwill

within the team.

Path 4: Relationship Orientation, Switching to Task Orientation This

type of leader begins by creating a feeling of trust within the

team, putting an emphasis on socialization and meetings. As the

project progresses, these leaders move to a more task-oriented

approach by setting clear goals and standards and carefully

monitoring the group’s progress.

Which, if any, of these leadership paths is most appropriate

when there are strong faultlines in a team? Where it is likely

strong faultlines will emerge, the natural tendency of many lead-

ers is to encourage team members to come together through

meetings and socializing. In effect, these leaders take Path 2.

However, this leadership action actually increases the likelihood

that faultlines will strengthen: when team members simply so-

The Emergence of Faultlines in a Telecom Team

Faultlines quickly emerged around obvious demographic attributes with

the formation of a team in a telecommunications company. None of the

subgroups was based on a unitary dimension but rather on the combina-

tion of multiple dimensions (gender and function in the first case;

nationality, age and job tenure in the second).

Male Engineers

Female Marketers

American

French

cialize, their differences become more apparent, and the fractures

in the team can solidify.

In fact, a leader can significantly mitigate faultlines — but not

in the most obvious manner. To increase collaboration and

knowledge sharing across teams with strong faultlines, leaders

need to vary their leadership style according to how long the

team has been together. There are times when a task-oriented

style works very well and other times when a relationship orien-

tation would be more appropriate.

Recommendations For Leading Diverse Teams
The leaders of complex teams should take four actions:

1. Diagnose the Probability of Faultlines Emerging At the outset of

a project, team leaders should think very carefully about the

diversity in their team and strive to predict as accurately as pos-

sible the probability of faultlines emerging. (See “The

Probability of Strong Faultlines Emerging in a Team,” p. 28 for

a short questionnaire that provides a way of gauging this likeli-

hood.) It is important to remember that faultlines are not a

natural result of diversity per se but are found in situations of

moderate diversity, when a team is neither very homogeneous

nor very heterogeneous in member attributes. A medium de-

gree of diversity leads to the emergence of only a

few fairly homogeneous subgroups. The divides

between these subgroups create the tensions that

can impede the team’s functioning.

If there is a high probability of subgroups and

faultlines emerging, then the leader should empha-

size a task-oriented leadership style in the early

stages of the project.

2. Focus on Task Orientation When a Team Is Newly
Formed As previously mentioned, the inclination

for many leaders when they saw faultlines emerg-

ing in a new team was to focus on the relationships

between members of the subgroups. The leaders

created opportunities for people to get to know

one another better, hoping that socializing would

cause the faultlines to be bridged. Yet this exacer-

bates the problem. Simply put, in a team’s early

going, the more people interact with one another,

the more likely they are to make snap judgments

and to emphasize their differences.

A better strategy for leaders of teams with poten-

tial faultlines is to create energy around the task

itself. This was clearly visible in teams at the Royal

Bank of Scotland. In these teams — even those with

strong faultlines — collaboration and knowledge

sharing were strengthened through a host of task-

26 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2007 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

https://SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

The Four Paths of Leadership Style
began with a task orientation, coordinating the

team’s activities, creating clear schedules and

Time

Path 3
Path 2

Relationship-Oriented

providing technical support. This support from
The most important factor in determining whether destructive faultlines the top initially ensured that the subgroups
emerged in a team was the style of its leader and, in particular, the extent learned more about each other and began the
to which the leader acted along a continuum of task orientation and rela- process of sharing knowledge. At the same
tionship orientation. time, the leader’s capacity to clearly state the

team’s mission and create a common goal en-
Path 1

sured that the subgroups became strongly
Task-Oriented

Path 4 aligned to a common purpose despite the fault-

lines already running through the team. The

members of the team began to feel that they

were united in a goal that was greater than the

differences among the subgroups.

Over time, however, deep-level faultlines in

this complex and diverse team began to emerge

and become increasingly important. The major

faultlines initially had formed around func-

tional specialization and nationality. The

oriented characteristics. At the beginning of team formation,

leaders created very detailed descriptions of realistic perfor-

mance goals. Next, the work was planned and scheduled with

precision: Every project was on a 30-day, 60-day or 90-day time-

table. At this early stage, much effort was focused on providing

the necessary resources and coordinating team members’ activi-

ties. Team members learned about one another’s skills and

competencies rather than about their personalities and lives.

This task orientation focused the attention of team members on

performance and requirements. Subgroups did emerge, but they

revolved around task-oriented characteristics such as functional

expertise and education, rather than personality differences. By

learning who they could go to for particular types of informa-

tion, the subgroups at Royal Bank of Scotland were able to move

swiftly into the task itself

However, while this approach increases the early effectiveness

of teams, it is not as useful for dealing with some of the tensions

that later emerge, such as around deeper personality traits and

differences in values. To do this, team leaders must learn how and

when to switch leadership styles.

3. Learn When to Make the Switch Focusing on the task is crucial

to the early effectiveness of a team in which strong faultlines are

expected to emerge. However, if the team is to be effective in the

longer term, then the leader has to switch styles from task ori-

entation to relationship orientation. If the leader fails to make

this switch, the team will slowly become less effective, as ob-

served in one of the media teams in our study. The team leader

media team’s creative designers came mostly

from the West Coast of the United States, while

the production teams were located on the East

Coast and in Germany. These differences were bridged by the

clear sense of a shared task and goals created by the team

leader. Later, though, subgroups began to form around the at-

tributes and personalities of group members. A subgroup of

high-energy, highly competitive people (known as Type A per-

sonalities) began to form. These are people who like to work

under pressure and create pressure for others, who enjoy the

rush of adrenaline and love competing.9 Members of this sub-

group were drawn from the West and East coasts of the United

States and from Germany; some were men, some were women;

some old, some young. Their deep-level Type A characteristic

cut across the surface-level characteristics.

As the original faultlines began to be bridged through a

shared task, this new personality-based, deep-level faultline be-

came an increasing source of conflict and tension. Those outside

the Type A category created names for them (“the crazies,” “the

no-lifers”), while the Type A subgroup became frustrated by

what they saw as slowness and a lack of focus from the others.

The task-oriented leader — who also had a Type A personality

— failed at this point to switch styles, instead continuing to plan,

organize, schedule and create tasks. Since the Type A subgroup

was the most vocal (and the team leader was a member of the

subgroup), the schedules simply became faster- and faster-paced

and the task demands more and more frequent. Conflicts arose

often, and those outside the Type A subgroup became more iso-

lated, demotivated and unhappy.

This discord came to a head during a performance meeting.

The business unit head overseeing the project criticized the team

SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU SUMMER 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 27

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O R G A N I Z AT I O N

leader for the lack of innovative ideas coming from the team.

The team was fast-paced, but the results were often boring and

predictable. Looking back, this outcome should have been no

surprise: Some of the most creative members of the team were

not among the Type A subgroup, whose members were calling

all the shots. Yet those outside the dominant subgroup lacked the

power to slow down the program, argue for time for reflection

or get their creative ideas heard and discussed.10

The team leader had failed to read the signs that called

for switching from task-oriented leadership to relationship-

oriented leadership. The Type A subgroup was able to dominate

by overly influencing the agenda and taking most of the

resources.

4. Switch to Relationship Building When the Time Is Right In the

media company example, the team leader had built an effective

team but not an innovative team. The leader had failed to make

the switch that characterizes Path 3 of leadership.

A team leader did follow the third path in one of the fi-

The Probability of Strong Faultlines Emerging in a Team

nance companies studied. At one point, tensions were coming

to the fore around different values and personalities among

team members. The team leader — who previously had been

predominately task-oriented — was able to switch to a more

relationship-oriented style. Over the course of a few weeks, the

leader brought the team together for several social activities,

surfaced and talked openly about the tensions the members of

the team felt and showed respect to the various work styles and

values in the group.

Developing Better Teams and Team Leaders
So how does a team leader know when to switch from task ori-

entation to relationship orientation? The switch will be

successful only at the point at which the team has sufficient

shared experience to have developed a clear protocol for com-

munication and coordination of activities and an established

operational structure.11

As a guideline, when all members of a team have developed

specific expectations for the project and have negotiated a

For team leaders: This short survey will show you the probability d. They are from different businesses and functions in the

of a strong faultline emerging in your team. Rate your team company and from longstanding partners from outside the

members against these four elements: company.

e. They are from different parts of the company and include

1. The number of nationalities in the team longstanding partners of the company and new partners

a. Team members are all of the same nationality. and customers of the company.

b. There are two nationalities. 4. The values and aspirations of the team
c. There are three to five nationalities. a. All members of the team have very similar values, disposi-
d. There are six to 10 nationalities. tions and attitudes.
e. There are more than 11 nationalities. b. Many members of the team share values, dispositions and

2. The current age, education and gender of the team members attitudes.

a. The majority are the same gender and about the same age c. There is a clear divide between groups with regard to values,

and have the same education level. dispositions and attitudes.

b. The majority are the same gender and have the same educa- d. Many people have different values, dispositions and attitudes.

tion level but are of different ages. e. There is a great deal of variety in values, dispositions and

c. The majority are of the same age and have the same educa- attitudes.

tion level and are both men and women.

d. The majority are the same age and gender and have differ- Low probability of faultlines emerging:

ent education levels. Scoring mostly a’s and b’s — The team is relatively simple and

e. The team contains both men and women of different ages homogeneous, so it is unlikely that faultlines will emerge.

and education levels. Scoring mostly e’s — The team is heterogeneous. Therefore, it is

unlikely that faultlines will emerge.
3. The current business location of team members

a. They are all from the same function and the same business. High probability of faultlines emerging:

b. They are all from different functions in the same businesses. Scoring mostly c’s and d’s — This team has a high potential for fault-

c. They are all from different functions and different busi- lines to emerge because a medium degree of diversity tends to lead

nesses within the company. to the development of only a few fairly homogeneous subgroups.

28 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SUMMER 2007 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU

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https://discussed.10

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A leader can significantly mitigate faultlines. To increase collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams with
strong faultlines, leaders need to vary their leadership style according to how long the team has been together.

widely accepted influence structure, then the time is right to

switch to a relationship-oriented leadership style. Instilling

confidence in the team and creating opportunities to socialize

at that point helps the development of new abilities and allows

the team to grow. However, if the team is still trying to learn

the specifics of the project, clarify people’s roles and negotiate

members’ status and authority, then the switch would come

too early and would only amplify the underlying tensions be-

tween subgroups.

This provides important guidelines for managers who head

diverse teams, which are tasked with some of the most impor-

tant and difficult challenges that companies face. But it also

points to an important new development challenge for execu-

tives. Not only do future leaders need to develop solid program

management skills and confident interpersonal skills but they

also need to learn which leadership style to emphasize, based on

their team’s needs and characteristics. Providing team leaders

with a framework for assessing faultlines will give them the in-

sights needed to overcome the divisions and move teams toward

achieving their, and the company’s, ultimate goals.

REfEREncEs

1. The power of integration on innovation has been described in L.
Gratton, “Managing Integration Through Cooperation,” Human Re-
source Management 44, no. 2 (2005): 151-158; and S. Ghoshal and L.
Gratton, “Integrating the Enterprise,” MIT Sloan Management Review 44,
no. 1 (fall 2002): 31-38.

2. Richard Hackman’s work on group dynamics provides early in-
sights into the formation and maturation of teams; see, for example,
J.R. Hackman, ed., “Groups That Work (and Those That Don’t): Cre-
ating Conditions for Effective Teamwork” (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1989). The difficulties of managing complex teams are
described in L. Gratton, “Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Workplaces
and Organizations Buzz With Energy — And Others Don’t” (San
Francisco: Berrett Koehler Publishers, 2007).

3. The way in which teams collaborate with each other is increasingly
seen as central to their effectiveness. An overview of this argument is
provided in S. Alper, D. Tjosvold and K.S. Law, “Interdependence and
Controversy in Group Decision Making: Antecedents to Effective Self-
Managing Teams,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision
Processes 74, no. 1 (1998): 33-52.

4. Knowledge sharing has been argued to be central to the innovative
capacity of a company. See, for example, I. Nonaka and H. Takeuchi,
“The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create
the Dynamics of Innovation” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

5. The challenge of team faultlines is currently being studied by several
scholars. For an academic description of faultline theory, see D.C. Lau
and J.K. Murnighan, “Demographic Diversity and Faultlines: The Com-
positional Dynamics of Organizational Groups,” Academy of
Management Review 23, no. 2 (1998): 325-340.

6. The study of in-groups and out-groups has been a central theme of
group analysis. For an overview of some of the key concepts, see, for
example, H. Tajfel and J.C. Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of
Inter-Group Behavior,” in “Psychology of Intergroup Relations,” ed. S.
Worchel and L.W. Austin (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986), 7-24.

7. The distinction between surface-level and deep-level attributes
has been explored in more detail in S.E. Jackson, K.E. May and K.
Whitney, “Understanding the Dynamics of Diversity in Decision-Mak-
ing Teams,” in “Team Effectiveness and Decision Making in
Organizations,” ed. R.A. Guzzo and E. Salas (San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1995), 204-261. For a more academic treatment of the
theory, see D.A. Harrison, K.H. Price and M.P. Bell, “Beyond Rela-
tional Demography: Time and the Effects of Surface- and Deep-Level
Diversity On Work Group Cohesion,” Academy of Management Jour-
nal 41, no. 1 (1998): 96-107.

8. Task orientation and relationship orientation are a continuum
of leadership styles and have been examined in leadership re-
search for more than a decade. For an overview of both, see G.A.
Yukl, “Leadership in Organizations,” 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs,
New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2005). The distinction was first made in
the 1950s in the seminal research by E.A. Fleishman, “The Descrip-
tion of Supervisory Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 37,
no. 1 (1953): 1-6.

9. For a more detailed overview of Type A characters, see, for exam-
ple, M.A. Chesney and R.H. Rosenman, “Type A Behavior in the
Work Setting,” in “Current Concerns in Occupational Stress,” ed. C.L.
Cooper and R. Payne (London: John Wiley, 1980), 187-212; and M.
Friedman and R.H. Rosenman, “Type A Behavior and Your Heart”
(New York: Knopf, 1974), which provides a detailed description of the
psychological construct.

10. The potentially negative impact of speed on creativity has been
explored by several scholars. See, for example, C. Mainemelis,
“When the Muse Takes It All: A Model For the Experience of Time-
lessness in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 26, no.
4 (2001): 548-565. For an overview on time, see D.G. Ancona, P.S.
Goodman, B.S. Lawrence and M.L. Tushman, “Time: A New Re-
search Lens,” Academy of Management Review 26, no. 4 (2001):
645-663.

11. For an overview of studies on the impact of time on group develop-
ment and processes, see S. Blount, ed., “Time in Groups,” vol. 6,
“Research on Managing Groups and Teams” (Greenwich, Connecticut:
JAI Press, 2004).

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Teams whose members come

from different nations and

backgrounds place special

demands on managers—

especially when a feuding

team looks to the boss for help

with a conflict.

Managing
Multicultural Teams

by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:

1 Article Summary

The Idea in Brief—the core idea

The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work

2

Managing Multicultural Teams

10

Further Reading

A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further

exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

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Managing Multicultural Teams

The Idea in Brief
If your company does business internation-
ally, you’re probably leading teams with
members from diverse cultural back-
grounds. Those differences can present
serious obstacles. For example, some
members’ lack of fluency in the team’s
dominant language can lead others to
underestimate their competence. When such
obstacles arise, your team can stalemate.

To get the team moving again, avoid inter-
vening directly, advise Brett, Behfar, and
Kern. Though sometimes necessary, your
involvement can prevent team members
from solving problems themselves—and
learning from that process.

Instead, choose one of three indirect inter-
ventions. When possible, encourage team
members to adapt by acknowledging cul-
tural gaps and working around them. If
your team isn’t able to be open about their
differences, consider structural interven-
tion (e.g., reassigning members to reduce
interpersonal friction). As a last resort, use
an exit strategy (e.g., removing a member
from the team).

There’s no one right way to tackle multicul-
tural problems. But understanding four
barriers to team success can help you begin
evaluating possible responses.

The Idea in Practice
FOUR BARRIERS

The following cultural differences can cause
destructive conflicts in a team:

• Direct versus indirect communication.
Some team members use direct, explicit
communication while others are indirect,
for example, asking questions instead of
pointing out problems with a project.
When members see such differences as
violations of their culture’s communication
norms, relationships can suffer.

• Trouble with accents and fluency. Mem-
bers who aren’t fluent in the team’s
dominant language may have difficulty
communicating their knowledge. This can
prevent the team from using their expertise
and create frustration or perceptions of
incompetence.

• Differing attitudes toward hierarchy. Team
members from hierarchical cultures expect
to be treated differently according to their
status in the organization. Members from
egalitarian cultures do not. Failure of some
members to honor those expectations can
cause humiliation or loss of stature and
credibility.

• Conflicting decision-making norms.
Members vary in how quickly they make
decisions and in how much analysis they
require beforehand. Someone who prefers
making decisions quickly may grow frus-
trated with those who need more time.

FOUR INTERVENTIONS

Your team’s unique circumstances can help
you determine how to respond to multicul-
tural conflicts. Consider these options:

C
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P
YR
IG
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T
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2
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7
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A
T
IO
N
. A
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R
IG
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T
S
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E
SE
R
V
E
D
.

Intervention Type When to Use Example
Adaptation: Members are willing An American engineer working on a team that included
working with or to acknowledge Israelis was shocked by their in-your-face, argumentative
around differences cultural differences

and figure out how to
live with them.

style. Once he noticed they confronted each other
and not just him—and still worked well together—he
realized confrontations weren’t personal attacks and
accepted their style.

Structural The team has An international research team’s leader realized that
intervention: obvious subgroups, when he led meetings, members “shut down” because
reorganizing to or members cling to they felt intimidated by his executive status. After he
reduce friction negative stereotypes

of one another.
hired a consultant to run future meetings, members
participated more.

Managerial Rarely; for instance, A software development team’s lingua franca was
intervention: a new team English, but some members spoke with pronounced
making final needs guidance accents. The manager explained they’d been chosen
decisions without in establishing for their task expertise, not fluency in English. And she
team involvement productive norms. directed them to tell customers: “I realize I have an

accent. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, just stop
me and ask questions.”

Exit: voluntary or Emotions are running When two members of a multicultural consulting
involuntary removal high, and too much team couldn’t resolve their disagreement over how to
of a team member face has been lost on

both sides to salvage
the situation.

approach problems, one member left the firm.

page 1

Teams whose members come from different nations and backgrounds

place special demands on managers—especially when a feuding team

looks to the boss for help with a conflict.

Managing
Multicultural Teams

by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern

C
O
P
YR
IG
H
T
©
2
00
6
H
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C
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R
A
T
IO
N
. A
LL
R
IG
H
T
S
R
E
SE
R
V
E
D
.

When a major international software devel-
oper needed to produce a new product
quickly, the project manager assembled a
team of employees from India and the United
States. From the start the team members
could not agree on a delivery date for the
product. The Americans thought the work
could be done in two to three weeks; the Indi-
ans predicted it would take two to three
months. As time went on, the Indian team
members proved reluctant to report setbacks
in the production process, which the Ameri-
can team members would find out about only
when work was due to be passed to them.
Such conflicts, of course, may affect any team,
but in this case they arose from cultural differ-
ences. As tensions mounted, conflict over de-
livery dates and feedback became personal,
disrupting team members’ communication
about even mundane issues. The project
manager decided he had to intervene—with
the result that both the American and the
Indian team members came to rely on him
for direction regarding minute operational

details that the team should have been able to
handle itself. The manager became so bogged
down by quotidian issues that the project ca-
reened hopelessly off even the most pessimis-
tic schedule—and the team never learned to
work together effectively.

Multicultural teams often generate frus-
trating management dilemmas. Cultural dif-
ferences can create substantial obstacles to
effective teamwork—but these may be sub-
tle and difficult to recognize until significant
damage has already been done. As in the
case above, which the manager involved told
us about, managers may create more prob-
lems than they resolve by intervening. The
challenge in managing multicultural teams
effectively is to recognize underlying cul-
tural causes of conflict, and to intervene in
ways that both get the team back on track
and empower its members to deal with
future challenges themselves.

We interviewed managers and members of
multicultural teams from all over the world.
These interviews, combined with our deep

harvard business review • november 2006 page 2

Managing Multicultural Teams

Jeanne Brett is the DeWitt W.
Buchanan, Jr., Distinguished
Professor of Dispute Resolution and
Organizations and the director of the
Dispute Resolution Research Center at
Northwestern University’s Kellogg
School of Management in Evanston,
Illinois. Kristin Behfar is an assistant
professor at the Paul Merage School of
Business at the University of California
at Irvine. Mary C. Kern is an assistant
professor at the Zicklin School of Busi-
ness at Baruch College in New York.

research on dispute resolution and teamwork,
led us to conclude that the wrong kind of man-
agerial intervention may sideline valuable
members who should be participating or,
worse, create resistance, resulting in poor team
performance. We’re not talking here about re-
specting differing national standards for doing
business, such as accounting practices. We’re
referring to day-to-day working problems
among team members that can keep multicul-
tural teams from realizing the very gains they
were set up to harvest, such as knowledge of
different product markets, culturally sensitive
customer service, and 24-hour work rotations.

The good news is that cultural challenges
are manageable if managers and team mem-
bers choose the right strategy and avoid
imposing single-culture-based approaches on
multicultural situations.

The Challenges
People tend to assume that challenges on mul-
ticultural teams arise from differing styles of
communication. But this is only one of the
four categories that, according to our research,
can create barriers to a team’s ultimate suc-
cess. These categories are direct versus indi-
rect communication; trouble with accents and
fluency; differing attitudes toward hierarchy
and authority; and conflicting norms for
decision making.

Direct versus indirect communication.
Communication in Western cultures is typi-
cally direct and explicit. The meaning is on
the surface, and a listener doesn’t have to
know much about the context or the speaker
to interpret it. This is not true in many other
cultures, where meaning is embedded in the
way the message is presented. For example,
Western negotiators get crucial information
about the other party’s preferences and prior-
ities by asking direct questions, such as “Do
you prefer option A or option B?” In cultures
that use indirect communication, negotiators
may have to infer preferences and priorities
from changes—or the lack of them—in the
other party’s settlement proposal. In cross-
cultural negotiations, the non-Westerner can
understand the direct communications of the
Westerner, but the Westerner has difficulty
understanding the indirect communications
of the non-Westerner.

An American manager who was leading a
project to build an interface for a U.S. and

Japanese customer-data system explained the
problems her team was having this way: “In
Japan, they want to talk and discuss. Then we
take a break and they talk within the organi-
zation. They want to make sure that there’s
harmony in the rest of the organization. One
of the hardest lessons for me was when I
thought they were saying yes but they just
meant ‘I’m listening to you.’”

The differences between direct and indirect
communication can cause serious damage
to relationships when team projects run into
problems. When the American manager
quoted above discovered that several flaws
in the system would significantly disrupt com-
pany operations, she pointed this out in an
e-mail to her American boss and the Japanese
team members. Her boss appreciated the
direct warnings; her Japanese colleagues were
embarrassed, because she had violated their
norms for uncovering and discussing prob-
lems. Their reaction was to provide her with
less access to the people and information
she needed to monitor progress. They would
probably have responded better if she had
pointed out the problems indirectly—for
example, by asking them what would happen
if a certain part of the system was not func-
tioning properly, even though she knew full
well that it was malfunctioning and also what
the implications were.

As our research indicates is so often true,
communication challenges create barriers to
effective teamwork by reducing information
sharing, creating interpersonal conflict, or
both. In Japan, a typical response to direct
confrontation is to isolate the norm violator.
This American manager was isolated not just
socially but also physically. She told us, “They
literally put my office in a storage room,
where I had desks stacked from floor to ceil-
ing and I was the only person there. So they
totally isolated me, which was a pretty loud
signal to me that I was not a part of the inside
circle and that they would communicate with
me only as needed.”

Her direct approach had been intended to
solve a problem, and in one sense, it did, be-
cause her project was launched problem-
free. But her norm violations exacerbated
the challenges of working with her Japanese
colleagues and limited her ability to uncover
any other problems that might have derailed
the project later on.

harvard business review • november 2006 page 3

Managing Multicultural Teams

Team members who are

uncomfortable on flat

teams may, by deferring

to higher-status

teammates, damage their

stature and credibility—

and even face

humiliation—if most of

the team is from an

egalitarian culture.

Trouble with accents and fluency. Although
the language of international business is En-
glish, misunderstandings or deep frustration
may occur because of nonnative speakers’
accents, lack of fluency, or problems with trans-
lation or usage. These may also influence
perceptions of status or competence.

For example, a Latin American member of
a multicultural consulting team lamented,
“Many times I felt that because of the lan-
guage difference, I didn’t have the words to say
some things that I was thinking. I noticed that
when I went to these interviews with the U.S.
guy, he would tend to lead the interviews,
which was understandable but also disappoint-
ing, because we are at the same level. I had
very good questions, but he would take
the lead.”

When we interviewed an American mem-
ber of a U.S.-Japanese team that was assessing
the potential expansion of a U.S. retail chain
into Japan, she described one American team-
mate this way: “He was not interested in the
Japanese consultants’ feedback and felt that
because they weren’t as fluent as he was, they
weren’t intelligent enough and, therefore,
could add no value.” The team member de-
scribed was responsible for assessing one as-
pect of the feasibility of expansion into Japan.
Without input from the Japanese experts,
he risked overestimating opportunities and
underestimating challenges.

Nonfluent team members may well be the
most expert on the team, but their difficulty
communicating knowledge makes it hard
for the team to recognize and utilize their ex-
pertise. If teammates become frustrated or
impatient with a lack of fluency, interper-
sonal conflicts can arise. Nonnative speakers
may become less motivated to contribute, or
anxious about their performance evaluations
and future career prospects. The organiza-
tion as a whole pays a greater price: Its invest-
ment in a multicultural team fails to pay off.

Some teams, we learned, use language dif-
ferences to resolve (rather than create) ten-
sions. A team of U.S. and Latin American
buyers was negotiating with a team from a
Korean supplier. The negotiations took place
in Korea, but the discussions were conducted
in English. Frequently the Koreans would
caucus at the table by speaking Korean. The
buyers, frustrated, would respond by appear-
ing to caucus in Spanish—though they

discussed only inconsequential current events
and sports, in case any of the Koreans spoke
Spanish. Members of the team who didn’t
speak Spanish pretended to participate, to
the great amusement of their teammates.
This approach proved effective: It conveyed to
the Koreans in an appropriately indirect way
that their caucuses in Korean were frustrating
and annoying to the other side. As a result,
both teams cut back on sidebar conversations.

Differing attitudes toward hierarchy and
authority. A challenge inherent in multicul-
tural teamwork is that by design, teams have
a rather flat structure. But team members
from some cultures, in which people are
treated differently according to their status in
an organization, are uncomfortable on flat
teams. If they defer to higher-status team
members, their behavior will be seen as ap-
propriate when most of the team comes from
a hierarchical culture; but they may damage
their stature and credibility—and even face
humiliation—if most of the team comes from
an egalitarian culture.

One manager of Mexican heritage, who was
working on a credit and underwriting team
for a bank, told us,“In Mexican culture, you’re
always supposed to be humble. So whether
you understand something or not, you’re sup-
posed to put it in the form of a question. You
have to keep it open-ended, out of respect. I
think that actually worked against me, be-
cause the Americans thought I really didn’t
know what I was talking about. So it made
me feel like they thought I was wavering on
my answer.”

When, as a result of differing cultural
norms, team members believe they’ve been
treated disrespectfully, the whole project can
blow up. In another Korean-U.S. negotiation,
the American members of a due diligence
team were having difficulty getting informa-
tion from their Korean counterparts, so they
complained directly to higher-level Korean
management, nearly wrecking the deal. The
higher-level managers were offended because
hierarchy is strictly adhered to in Korean or-
ganizations and culture. It should have been
their own lower-level people, not the U.S.
team members, who came to them with a
problem. And the Korean team members
were mortified that their bosses had been
involved before they themselves could brief
them. The crisis was resolved only when high-

harvard business review • november 2006 page 4

Managing Multicultural Teams

level U.S. managers made a trip to Korea,
conveying appropriate respect for their
Korean counterparts.

Conflicting norms for decision making.
Cultures differ enormously when it comes to
decision making—particularly, how quickly
decisions should be made and how much
analysis is required beforehand. Not surpris-
ingly, U.S. managers like to make decisions
very quickly and with relatively little analysis
by comparison with managers from other
countries.

A Brazilian manager at an American com-
pany who was negotiating to buy Korean prod-
ucts destined for Latin America told us, “On
the first day, we agreed on three points, and on
the second day, the U.S.-Spanish side wanted to
start with point four. But the Korean side
wanted to go back and rediscuss points one
through three. My boss almost had an attack.”

What U.S. team members learn from an ex-
perience like this is that the American way
simply cannot be imposed on other cultures.
Managers from other cultures may, for exam-
ple, decline to share information until they
understand the full scope of a project. But
they have learned that they can’t simply ig-
nore the desire of their American counter-
parts to make decisions quickly. What to do?
The best solution seems to be to make minor
concessions on process—to learn to adjust to
and even respect another approach to deci-
sion making. For example, American manag-
ers have learned to keep their impatient
bosses away from team meetings and give
them frequent if brief updates. A comparable
lesson for managers from other cultures is to
be explicit about what they need—saying,
for example, “We have to see the big picture
before we talk details.”

Four Strategies
The most successful teams and managers we
interviewed used four strategies for dealing
with these challenges: adaptation (acknowl-
edging cultural gaps openly and working
around them), structural intervention (chang-
ing the shape of the team), managerial inter-
vention (setting norms early or bringing in a
higher-level manager), and exit (removing a
team member when other options have
failed). There is no one right way to deal with
a particular kind of multicultural problem;
identifying the type of challenge is only the

first step. The more crucial step is assessing
the circumstances—or “enabling situational
conditions”—under which the team is work-
ing. For example, does the project allow any
flexibility for change, or do deadlines make
that impossible? Are there additional re-
sources available that might be tapped? Is
the team permanent or temporary? Does the
team’s manager have the autonomy to make a
decision about changing the team in some
way? Once the situational conditions have
been analyzed, the team’s leader can identify
an appropriate response (see the exhibit
“Identifying the Right Strategy”).

Adaptation. Some teams find ways to work
with or around the challenges they face,
adapting practices or attitudes without mak-
ing changes to the group’s membership or
assignments. Adaptation works when team
members are willing to acknowledge and
name their cultural differences and to assume
responsibility for figuring out how to live with
them. It’s often the best possible approach to a
problem, because it typically involves less
managerial time than other strategies; and be-
cause team members participate in solving the
problem themselves, they learn from the pro-
cess. When team members have this mind-set,
they can be creative about protecting their
own substantive differences while acceding to
the processes of others.

An American software engineer located
in Ireland who was working with an Israeli
account management team from his own
company told us how shocked he was by the
Israelis’ in-your-face style: “There were defi-
nitely different ways of approaching issues and
discussing them. There is something pretty
common to the Israeli culture: They like to ar-
gue. I tend to try to collaborate more, and it
got very stressful for me until I figured out
how to kind of merge the cultures.”

The software engineer adapted. He im-
posed some structure on the Israelis that
helped him maintain his own style of being
thoroughly prepared; that accommodation
enabled him to accept the Israeli style. He
also noticed that team members weren’t
just confronting him; they confronted one
another but were able to work together effec-
tively nevertheless. He realized that the con-
frontation was not personal but cultural.

In another example, an American member
of a postmerger consulting team was frus-

harvard business review • november 2006 page 5

Managing Multicultural Teams

trated by the hierarchy of the French com-
pany his team was working with. He felt that
a meeting with certain French managers who
were not directly involved in the merger
“wouldn’t deliver any value to me or for pur-
poses of the project,” but said that he had
come to understand that “it was very impor-
tant to really involve all the people there” if
the integration was ultimately to work.

A U.S. and UK multicultural team tried to
use their differing approaches to decision
making to reach a higher-quality decision.
This approach, called fusion, is getting serious

attention from political scientists and from
government officials dealing with multicul-
tural populations that want to protect their
cultures rather than integrate or assimilate. If
the team had relied exclusively on the Ameri-
cans’ “forge ahead” approach, it might not
have recognized the pitfalls that lay ahead
and might later have had to back up and start
over. Meanwhile, the UK members would
have been gritting their teeth and saying “We
told you things were moving too fast.” If the
team had used the “Let’s think about this” UK
approach, it might have wasted a lot of time

Identifying the Right Strategy
The most successful teams and managers we interviewed use four strategies for dealing with problems: adaptation (acknowledging cultural
gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape of the team), managerial intervention (setting norms
early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team member when other options have failed). Adaptation is the ideal strat-
egy because the team works effectively to solve its own problem with minimal input from management—and, most important, learns from the
experience. The guide below can help you identify the right strategy once you have identified both the problem and the “enabling situational
conditions” that apply to the team.

REPRESENTATIVE
PROBLEMS

ENABLING SITUATIONAL
CONDITIONS

STRATEGY COMPLICATING
FACTORS

• Conflict arises from decision- • Team members can attribute a Adaptation • Team members must
making differences challenge to culture rather than be exceptionally aware

• Misunderstanding or stone- personality • Negotiating a common
walling arises from commu- • Higher-level managers are not understanding takes
nication differences available or the team would be

embarrassed to involve them
time

• The team is affected by emo- • The team can be subdivided Structural • If team members aren’t
tional tensions relating to flu- to mix cultures or expertise Intervention carefully distributed, sub-
ency issues or prejudice • Tasks can be subdivided groups can strengthen

• Team members are inhibited preexisting differences

by perceived status differ- • Subgroup solutions
ences among teammates have to fit back together

• Violations of hierarchy have • The problem has produced Managerial • The team becomes
resulted in loss of face a high level of emotion Intervention overly dependent

• An absence of ground rules • The team has reached on the manager

is causing conflict a stalemate

• A higher-level manager is able
and willing to intervene

• Team members may
be sidelined or resistant

• A team member cannot ad- • The team is permanent rather Exit • Talent and training
just to the challenge at hand than temporary costs are lost
and has become unable to • Emotions are beyond the point
contribute to the project of intervention

• Too much face has been lost

harvard business review • november 2006 page 6

Managing Multicultural Teams

trying to identify every pitfall, including
the most unlikely, while the U.S. members
chomped at the bit and muttered about anal-
ysis paralysis. The strength of this team was
that some of its members were willing to
forge ahead and some were willing to work
through pitfalls. To accommodate them all,
the team did both—moving not quite as fast as
the U.S. members would have on their own and
not quite as thoroughly as the UK members
would have.

Structural intervention. A structural inter-
vention is a deliberate reorganization or re-
assignment designed to reduce interpersonal
friction or to remove a source of conflict
for one or more groups. This approach can be
extremely effective when obvious subgroups
demarcate the team (for example, headquar-
ters versus national subsidiaries) or if team
members are proud, defensive, threatened,
or clinging to negative stereotypes of one
another.

A member of an investment research team
scattered across continental Europe, the UK,
and the U.S. described for us how his man-
ager resolved conflicts stemming from status
differences and language tensions among the
team’s three “tribes.” The manager started by
having the team meet face-to-face twice a
year, not to discuss mundane day-to-day prob-
lems (of which there were many) but to iden-
tify a set of values that the team would use to
direct and evaluate its progress. At the first
meeting, he realized that when he started to
speak, everyone else “shut down,” waiting to
hear what he had to say. So he hired a con-
sultant to run future meetings. The con-
sultant didn’t represent a hierarchical threat
and was therefore able to get lots of participa-
tion from team members.

Another structural intervention might be
to create smaller working groups of mixed
cultures or mixed corporate identities in order
to get at information that is not forthcoming
from the team as a whole. The manager of
the team that was evaluating retail opportu-
nities in Japan used this approach. When she
realized that the female Japanese consultants
would not participate if the group got large,
or if their male superior was present, she
broke the team up into smaller groups to try
to solve problems. She used this technique
repeatedly and made a point of changing the
subgroups’ membership each time so that

team members got to know and respect
everyone else on the team.

The subgrouping technique involves risks,
however. It buffers people who are not work-
ing well together or not participating in
the larger group for one reason or another.
Sooner or later the team will have to assem-
ble the pieces that the subgroups have come
up with, so this approach relies on another
structural intervention: Someone must be-
come a mediator in order to see that the
various pieces fit together.

Managerial intervention. When a manager
behaves like an arbitrator or a judge, making
a final decision without team involvement,
neither the manager nor the team gains
much insight into why the team has stale-
mated. But it is possible for team members to
use managerial intervention effectively to
sort out

problems.

When an American refinery-safety expert
with significant experience throughout East
Asia got stymied during a project in China,
she called in her company’s higher-level
managers in Beijing to talk to the higher-
level managers to whom the Chinese refin-
ery’s managers reported. Unlike the Western
team members who breached etiquette by
approaching the superiors of their Korean
counterparts, the safety expert made sure to
respect hierarchies in both organizations.

“Trying to resolve the issues,” she told us,
“the local management at the Chinese refin-
ery would end up having conferences with
our Beijing office and also with the upper
management within the refinery. Eventually
they understood that we weren’t trying to in-
sult them or their culture or to tell them they
were bad in any way. We were trying to help.
They eventually understood that there were
significant fire and safety issues. But we actu-
ally had to go up some levels of management
to get those resolved.”

Managerial intervention to set norms early
in a team’s life can really help the team start
out with effective processes. In one instance
reported to us, a multicultural software devel-
opment team’s lingua franca was English, but
some members, though they spoke grammati-
cally correct English, had a very pronounced
accent. In setting the ground rules for the
team, the manager addressed the challenge
directly, telling the members that they had
been chosen for their

task expertise, not their

harvard business review • november 2006 page 7

• • •

Managing Multicultural Teams

One team manager

addressed the language

challenge directly, telling

the members that they

had been chosen for their

task expertise, not their

fluency in English, and

that the team would have

to work around

problems.

fluency in English, and that the team was
going to have to work around language prob-
lems. As the project moved to the customer-
services training stage, the manager advised
the team members to acknowledge their
accents up front. She said they should tell cus-
tomers,“I realize I have an accent. If you don’t
understand what I’m saying, just stop me and
ask questions.”

Exit. Possibly because many of the teams we
studied were project based, we found that
leaving the team was an infrequent strategy
for managing challenges. In short-term situa-
tions, unhappy team members often just
waited out the project. When teams were per-
manent, producing products or services, the
exit of one or more members was a strategy of
last resort, but it was used—either voluntarily
or after a formal request from management.
Exit was likely when emotions were running
high and too much face had been lost on both
sides to salvage the situation.

An American member of a multicultural
consulting team described the conflict be-
tween two senior consultants, one a Greek
woman and the other a Polish man, over how
to approach problems: “The woman from
Greece would say, ‘Here’s the way I think we
should do it.’ It would be something that she
was in control of. The guy from Poland would
say, ‘I think we should actually do it this way
instead.’ The woman would kind of turn red
in the face, upset, and say, ‘I just don’t think
that’s the right way of doing it.’ It would
definitely switch from just professional differ-
ences to personal differences.

“The woman from Greece ended up leaving
the firm. That was a direct result of probably
all the different issues going on between
these people. It really just wasn’t a good fit.
I’ve found that oftentimes when you’re in
consulting, you have to adapt to the culture,
obviously, but you have to adapt just as much
to the style of whoever is leading the project.”

Though multicultural teams face challenges
that are not directly attributable to cultural
differences, such differences underlay what-
ever problem needed to be addressed in many
of the teams we studied. Furthermore, while
serious in their own right when they have a
negative effect on team functioning, cultural
challenges may also unmask fundamental
managerial problems. Managers who inter-

vene early and set norms; teams and managers
who structure social interaction and work to
engage everyone on the team; and teams that
can see problems as stemming from culture,
not personality, approach challenges with
good humor and creativity. Managers who
have to intervene when the team has reached
a stalemate may be able to get the team mov-
ing again, but they seldom empower it to help
itself the next time a stalemate occurs.

When frustrated team members take some
time to think through challenges and possible
solutions themselves, it can make a huge dif-
ference. Take, for example, this story about a
financial-services call center. The members of
the call-center team were all fluent Spanish-
speakers, but some were North Americans
and some were Latin Americans. Team perfor-
mance, measured by calls answered per hour,
was lagging. One Latin American was taking
twice as long with her calls as the rest of the
team. She was handling callers’ questions ap-
propriately, but she was also engaging in chit-
chat. When her teammates confronted her for
being a free rider (they resented having to
make up for her low call rate), she immedi-
ately acknowledged the problem, admitting
that she did not know how to end the call
politely—chitchat being normal in her cul-
ture. They rallied to help her: Using their
technology, they would break into any of her
calls that went overtime, excusing themselves
to the customer, offering to take over the call,
and saying that this employee was urgently
needed to help out on a different call. The
team’s solution worked in the short run, and
the employee got better at ending her calls in
the long run.

In another case, the Indian manager of a
multicultural team coordinating a company-
wide IT project found himself frustrated
when he and a teammate from Singapore met
with two Japanese members of the coordinat-
ing team to try to get the Japan section to
deliver its part of the project. The Japanese
members seemed to be saying yes, but in the
Indian manager’s view, their follow-through
was insufficient. He considered and rejected
the idea of going up the hierarchy to the Japa-
nese team members’ boss, and decided in-
stead to try to build consensus with the whole
Japanese IT team, not just the two members
on the coordinating team. He and his Sin-
gapore teammate put together an eBusiness

harvard business review • november 2006 page 8

Managing Multicultural Teams

road show, took it to Japan, invited the whole
IT team to view it at a lunch meeting, and
walked through success stories about other
parts of the organization that had aligned
with the company’s larger business priorities.
It was rather subtle, he told us, but it worked.
The Japanese IT team wanted to be spot-
lighted in future eBusiness road shows. In the
end, the whole team worked well together—
and no higher-level manager had to get
involved.

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A R T I C L E S
Making Differences Matter: A New
Paradigm for Managing Diversity
by David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely
Harvard Business Review
September 1996
Product no. 96510

You can strengthen your teams’ ability to use
the adaptation process suggested by Brett,
Behfar, and Kern by fostering a working envi-
ronment in which cultural differences are
valued. To cultivate such an environment: 1)
Encourage open discussion of cultural back-
grounds. For instance, a food company’s
Chinese chemist draws on her cooking, not
her scientific, experience to solve a soup-
flavoring problem. 2) Eliminate forms of
dominance—by hierarchy, function, race,
gender, and so forth—that inhibit team
members’ full contribution. 3) Acknowledge
and swiftly resolve the inevitable tensions that
arise when employees from different back-
grounds share ideas and emotions.

Oil and Wasser
by Byron Reimus
Harvard Business Review
May 2004
Product no. R0405X

In this fictional case study, executives from an
English firm and a German company who are
seeking a supposed “merger of equals” must
resolve cross-cultural tensions threatening the
deal. Four experts provide suggestions. For
example, develop a new shared vision and
common strategic goals for the project (such
as “Beat the competition and become number
one”) that rise above national differences.
Cultivate personal relationships with the
“other” to eliminate stereotypes, by getting
together in relaxed, shoptalk-free social
settings. When you get to know one another
as individuals, it becomes easier to let go of
negative stereotypes.

Cultural Intelligence
by P. Christopher Earley and
Elaine Mosakowski
Harvard Business Review
October 2004
Product no. R0410J

Team members can further strengthen their
adaptation skills by developing their cultural
intelligence. 1) Look for clues to the shared
understandings that define another culture.
For example, do people from that culture tend
to be strict or flexible about deadlines? Are
they receptive to highly imaginative ideas, or
do they prefer more conservative thinking? 2)
Adopt the habits and mannerisms of people
from other cultures. You’ll discover in an
elemental way what it’s like to be them. And
you’ll demonstrate respect for their ways. 3)
Cultivate confidence that you can overcome
multicultural obstacles and setbacks and that
you’re capable of understanding people from
unfamiliar cultures.

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