Best Practices: Five Strategies For Leading Diverse, Distributed Teams To Success

Leading teams is a job not for the faint of heart — particularly when those teams are multicultural, geographically distributed, and composed of individuals who work for multiple companies with competing priorities. To successfully lead these diverse, distributed teams, your leaders need solid leadership skills and an understanding of development and delivery processes, but that's not enough. They also need improved soft skills and the ability to bridge cultural, geographic, and organizational gaps to bring people together despite differences. Managing diverse, distributed teams challenges many team leaders, but by adopting five best practices — staffing the team thoughtfully, building trust, communicating robustly, managing time zone differences, and using technology wisely — any leader can improve team outcomes, despite diversity.