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How to Thrive in a Shifting Global Labor Market
by Allison Anderson
How can economies thrive in the most innovative regions of the United States, including Central Texas, as high-tech companies bring more and more workers on board in Bombay and Beijing?
That’s just one of the vital issues that came up for debate during an innovative “Business Across Borders” seminar held Oct. 13-17 at the McCombs School as part of the McCombs Plus professional development program. To prepare MBAs to lead the shifting global labor market, the school tapped into top talent in the growing specialization known as “distance management.”
Coordinating far-flung production facilities is already a reality for many U.S. managers who direct virtual teams of product designers spanning a half-dozen time zones and at least as many cultural divides. Most people associate offshore outsourcing with call centers in India, but the labor market has already entered a new phase. Today, jobs associated with innovation, such as those requiring Ph.D.s in engineering and computer science, are increasingly moving to global markets like India, China, and Taiwan.
U.S. firms – and American professionals – can benefit from current labor trends, provided they follow the right roadmap for the future, according to Catherine Crago, a consultant with Austin’s Semicon Group who helped design the cross-cultural seminar. The key, she says, is to add the competencies that the global marketplace demands.
“The best sustainable revenue is from innovation,” says Crago. While jobs are being transferred offshore from Austin and elsewhere in the U.S., “as long as we position ourselves accordingly, we can be the nexus through which these transactions pass.” In other words, central command for international networks could be in Austin, provided the region and its managers are prepared to lead the emerging global organization.
Good Communication Underlies Good Business
Executives from Dell, Motorola and Bank of America addressed both this big-picture issue and the thorny particulars of distance management at the seminar, which brought together students, business people, and industry consultants.
“Let the work flow follow the sun,” was the practical advice doled out by Martha Haywood, the author of Managing Virtual Teams. A team of engineers working through the night in California, she said, would be able to send software to company headquarters in Boston by morning.
Amid the operational insights, whether simple or enormously complex, one theme repeatedly emerged: the number one secret of successful business teams, virtual or not, hasn’t changed. The fundamental ingredient is good communication. Several experts observed that the art of managing virtual teams amounts to good local practices writ large. They said the added complications of working with people from other cultures helped them sharpen their management skills at home.
Dell manager David Keifer recommended that distance managers immediately document and integrate lessons learned throughout a project’s lifetime. It’s more efficient, he said, than waiting until a project is complete to debrief and try to remember what could have been done better.
And as many company operations shift overseas, individuals must constantly monitor their career paths, Keifer said. The task is to avoid obsolescence by maintaining the educational qualifications and skills that a constantly evolving market demands.
“Jobs will be here,” Keifer said. “But they won’t be the same jobs that were here five years ago.”
Cultural Divides
Managing virtual teams can be a hairy task, best approached only after gaining some significant cultural insight, the seminar participants learned.
“In America, people go to the point; you’re very efficient,” said Antoineta Ruiz, an MBA exchange student from Chile. “In America you say in five minutes what we say in 15 or 20 minutes. In Latin America, it’s kind of rude to go straight to the point. You ask about the family, how everything is going, then you get to the subject.”
One cultural characteristic that American business people must understand, said Kai Qu, an MBA student from China, is the Chinese aversion to risk. “Americans try to take initiative, but in China people try to follow directions,” he said.
An everyday aspect of distance management is conference-call
protocol. Qu said a higher tolerance for silence among Chinese can be
misunderstood. Chinese tend to methodically process all the
information
that’s being discussed, defer to any managers in the room, and speak
up only when they’re convinced they have something important to
contribute, he explained.
“But sometimes it’s hard to come up with a genius idea on a conference call,” Qu said. “At Dell [where Qu helped advise on a project with the Eaton Consulting Group], a lot of people say, ‘Are you guys still there?’”
Several Asian and Latin American students added that it would likely be difficult for them to spontaneously comment when their elders and bosses are present. As a result, American employees of a company may not get the full story in a meeting or conference call with their counterparts overseas.
During International Night, Business Across Borders participants took a break from serious strategizing to “Travel around the world in 180 minutes.” Everyone was treated to delicacies from more than 25 countries, each represented by at least one McCombs student. Even the Americans got into the act by staffing booths and sharing food from their home turfs of Chicago, Louisiana and of course Texas.
“By getting to know different countries, we will be better managers dealing with globalization,” said French MBA student Marie-Laure Carvalho, who helped organize the event.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
