Leading Global Teams

Tsedal  Neeley

Module Note | February 2017

Leading Global Teams

Abstract

This module aims to help students become effective leaders and members of global teams that must work together across national boundaries and toward a common goal. Students will learn to diagnose the challenges that global teams often face as well as strategies that they can employ to foster effective collaboration in those teams.
Learning to navigate the challenges associated with global teams is a critical component of today's MBA curricula. Students will emerge from their MBA programs to join companies that rely on employees from around the world to help the firms capitalize on the promise of their global reach and resources. Global teams, however, face significant challenges; physical separation and demographic differences can create social distance, or lack of emotional connection between groups, that then contributes to disruptive misunderstandings and mistrust. This module prepares students with the knowledge and skills necessary to address these challenges.

Keywords: Groups and Teams; Leadership; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues;

Language: English

Format: Print

29 pages

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Citation:

Neeley, Tsedal. "Leading Global Teams." Harvard Business School Module Note 417-073, February 2017.

Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2020 (Revised September 2020)

Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)

Tsedal Neeley and John Masko

With the economy in a freefall, MetricStream is losing customers, hemorrhaging cash and struggling to make payroll. Several board members are threatening to quit. Others are pressing to sell the company even at dismally low valuations. It’s 2008 and lightning has struck for Shellye Archambeau once again. As CEO of MetricStream, she had spent the last seven years turning a tech startup on life support after the dot-com bust into a market leader of governance, risk, and compliance software for businesses. As a black female CEO, Archambeau is no stranger to adversity. Becoming a leader had been her goal since high school and she had achieved it through decades of hard work and skillful decision making. Now she faces her most critical leadership decision. She calls a meeting with her board chairman, Gunjan Sinha, to discuss the best path forward: Sell MetricStream while offers are on the table, or try to save it by looking for a big customer of the company’s risk management software against the backdrop of the financial crisis? Both options have dire consequences. Valuations are plummeting by the day. Cash is disappearing by the minute. Archambeau and Sinha need to decide and act swiftly.

Keywords: Leadership; Race; Gender; Leadership Style; Risk and Uncertainty; Change; Prejudice and Bias; Decision Making; Personal Development and Career; Technology Industry; California;

Citation:

Neeley, Tsedal, and John Masko. "Shellye Archambeau: Becoming a CEO (A)." Harvard Business School Case 420-071, June 2020. (Revised September 2020.) View Details

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As a leader, you will need to master action plans to implement solutions that advance your organizational goals. Here are six simple steps to diagnosing situations and systematically developing action plans.

Greg James, a global manager at Sun Microsystems, Inc., sets out to meet with his entire 43-member customer implementation team spread across India, France, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America to resolve a dire customer system outage as required by a service agreement. Rather than finding a swift resolution to the rapidly escalating customer situation that motivated his trip, he finds himself facing distributed work, global collaboration, conflict, and management issues that are threatening to unravel his team.

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Leading Global Teams

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