Tsedal Neeley (@tsedal) is a Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School. She has has taught in both the MBA (LEAD, Leading Teams in a Global Economy, Field Global Immersion) and in numerous executive education programs including Global Strategic Management, and Harvard Business Analytics Program and Program for Leadership Development (PLD). Professor Neeley is a recipient of the HBS Charles M. Williams award for outstanding teaching in Executive Education.
With her award-winning book, The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations (Princeton University Press), Professor Neeley's research focuses on the challenges that global collaborators face when they work across national boundaries. Successful global collaboration can enable firms to capitalize on the promise of their global reach. For example, firms can draw on their diverse intellectual capital to meet customer demands the world over, giving them a competitive advantage in a range of marketplaces. The scale and complexity of global collaboration, however, makes its promise often hard to realize. Companies now span more languages, geographies, and cultures than ever before, making it more imperative and more difficult for workers to communicate effectively if they are to meet performance targets. To examine the communication challenges that global collaborators face, as well as potential solutions to those challenges, professor Neeley has identified key determinants of effectiveness in global work.
Professor Neeley has also published her work in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of International Business, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review. Her research has been covered in many media outlets such as CNN, Financial Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist.
Prior to her academic career, Professor Neeley spent ten years in industry working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various capacities including strategies for global customer experience, 360 degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. With extensive international experience, Professor Neeley is fluent in four languages.
Professor Neeley received her Ph.D. from Stanford University's Department of Management Science and Engineering specializing in organizational studies. Professor Neeley was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research as well as a Stanford Distinguished Alumni Scholar.
Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Paul Leonardi, a management professor at UC Santa Barbara, talk about the potential that applications such as Slack, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams have for strengthening employee collaboration, productivity, and organizational culture. They discuss their research showing how effective these tools can be and warn about common traps companies face when they implement them. Neeley and Leonardi are co-authors of the article “What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools” in the November-December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.
by Neeley, T. (2017) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
For nearly three decades, English has been the lingua franca of cross-border organizations, yet studies on corporate language strategies and their importance for globalization have been scarce. In The Language of Global Success, Tsedal Neeley provides an in-depth look at a single organization—the high-tech giant Rakuten—in the five years following its English lingua franca mandate. Neeley's behind-the-scenes account explores how language shapes the ways in which employees who work in global organizations communicate and negotiate linguistic and cultural differences.
This online simulation teaches students about the difficulties in cross-cultural communication and managing global teams. Communicating via chat, teams of 4 or 5 students race against the clock to prepare a VC presentation. Students are assigned the role of a native English speaker or a nonnative English speaker at their organization. The simulation constrains the ways in which the native and nonnative speakers can interact, and the resulting experience replicates communication patterns in real globally diverse and distributed teams. As their team struggles to collaborate, students experience first-hand how communication challenges can interfere with work goals.
Increasingly, almost every team is a global team in some capacity. This presents a difficult challenge for managers everywhere, and especially for high-potential leaders who want to take their careers to the next level: how do you bring together a team whose members are geographically and culturally dispersed? Professor Tsedal Neeley discusses her case of a real-life executive charged with corralling a hugely diverse, underperforming group and leading it back to success on a global scale.
From the October 2015 Issue of Harvard Business Review
To succeed in the global economy today, more and more companies are relying on a geographically dispersed workforce. They build teams that offer the best functional expertise from around the world, combined with deep, local knowledge of the most promising markets. They draw on the benefits of international diversity, bringing together people from many cultures with varied work experiences and different perspectives on strategic and organizational challenges. All this helps multinational companies compete in the current business environment.
But managers who actually lead global teams are up against stiff challenges. Creating successful work groups is hard enough when everyone is local and people share the same office space. But when team members come from different countries and functional backgrounds and are working in different locations, communication can rapidly deteriorate, misunderstanding can ensue, and cooperation can degenerate into distrust.
Receiving an unexpected professional status bump doesn't always feel good, especially if it wasn't really earned. Companies need to be aware of potential problems with unearned status gain, and be ready with solutions, says Tsedal Neeley.
Harvard Business Review Blog from September 10, 2014
People struggle with global teamwork, even though it's essential to success in multinational firms. Despite their efforts to nimbly manage differences in time zones, cultures, and languages, cross-border collaborators often fail to reach shared understanding or common ground. They face conflicting group norms, practices, and expectations — all of which can cause severe fracturing along cultural lines.
So how do you negotiate those differences and discover common ground? Through extensive research on global organizations and teams, I've found that learning, understanding, and teaching are three critical factors — on both sides.
Language pervades every aspect of organizational life. It touches everything. Yet remarkably, leaders of global organizations, whose employees speak a multitude of languages, often pay too little attention to it in their approach to talent management. As we have observed in countless organizations, unrestricted multilingualism creates inefficiency in even the most dedicated and talented workforces. It can lead to friction in cross-border interactions, lost sales, and a host of other serious problems that may jeopardize competitiveness (see also “Global Business Speaks English,” by Tsedal Neeley, HBR May 2012). Developing a comprehensive strategy for managing language can help transform that vulnerability into a source of competitive advantage.
Ready or not, English is now the global language of business. More and more multinational companies are mandating English as the common corporate language—Airbus, Daimler-Chrysler, Fast Retailing, Nokia, Renault, Samsung, SAP, Technicolor, and Microsoft in Beijing, to name a few—in an attempt to facilitate communication and performance across geographically diverse functions and business endeavors.
An increasing number of global firms adopt a primary language for business operations—usually English. The problem: The practice can surface dormant hostilities around culture and geography. Tsedal Neeley discusses her research in this story from HBS Working Knowledge.
For a manager to assume that they can conduct all of their global work without any face-to-face contact is a mistake. In this leadership insight, Professor Neeley discusses how traveling to meet colleagues in other countries not only gives you direct knowledge of what they're doing, but also a better understanding of how they perceive you.
CEOs of global companies increasingly mandate that their employees learn English. The problem: these workers can experience a loss of status and believe they aren't as effective in their learned language, says Assistant Professor Tsedal Neeley.
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