When Leading a Global Team, Don’t Leave Connection to Chance

Recorded: Jan. 22, 2026, 11:03 a.m.

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Episode 146

When Leading a Global Team, Don’t Leave Connection to Chance

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Practical ideas for building trust, avoiding cultural stereotypes, and creating space for informal interaction.

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January 21, 2026

Leading people across countries and time zones means dealing with communication gaps and friction that can easily throw a team off course. Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, explains why global teams are especially vulnerable to misunderstandings and why leaders often don’t realize there’s a problem until collaboration starts to suffer. She has advice for getting everyone to understand one another so that they have enough trust and context to contribute fully.
Key episode topics include: collaboration and teams, cross-cultural management, leading teams

Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: Communicate Better with Your Global Team
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Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at hbr.org

AMANDA KERSEY: Welcome to HBR On Leadership. These episodes are case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I’m HBR senior editor and producer Amanda Kersey.
Leading people across countries and time zones means dealing with communication gaps and friction that can easily throw a team off course.
In the 2014 IdeaCast episode you’re about to hear, Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, talks to host Sarah Green Carmichael about why global teams are especially vulnerable to misunderstandings.
She has advice for getting everyone to understand one another, so that they have enough trust and context to contribute fully.
Here’s Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: Tsedal, thanks so much for joining us today.
TSEDAL NEELEY: Thank you for having me.
SARAH GREEN: So, I thought we would just start by talking about some of the challenges faced by managers of globally distributed teams, and maybe how some of those challenges are different from, maybe, the challenges faced by any team that’s, maybe, like a virtual team, or distributed. What are the special challenges of globally distributed teams?
TSEDAL NEELEY: It’s interesting, because any time you have dispersion– which means that you have members of a collaboration who are not co-located having to work together– you have a layer of complexity that these collaborators need to contend with. And then you overlay this global component, and you have what you just named as globally distributed work, or globally distributed teams.
And some of these boundaries that they have to manage extremely well in order to be effective include time zone differences. How do you make sure that you’re able to engage one another in a way that doesn’t inconvenience one member or one group more than the other? And how you make sure that you’re constantly on the same line, even though the time zone differences could be so vast that you have very little overlapping time from which to coordinate work?
There are differences is around norms. There are differences surround practices. There are differences, of course, around language. There’s differences around culture. There are differences around local markets that they have to bridge.
And oftentimes– and the thing that gets in the way for most globally-distributed team members– is that they don’t know what they don’t know. What I mean by that is they often don’t realize that another member of the global team or the globally distributed team is interpreting something in the wrong way, that that member may not have the proper context by which to make decisions or even to access what’s going on. There’s a ton of blind spots. And so, these teams need to develop a very strong mutual adaptation process in order to work successfully, and, ultimately, deliver the types of results that they are put together to deliver.
SARAH GREEN: So, in that mutual adaptation process, what does that involve?
TSEDAL NEELEY: It involves a number of things. One is people have to show up with the mindset that they have to constantly learn, and that they have to constantly teach about where they are and about their perspective. And what I mean by that is that people have to be in a position to always teach their collaborators and also learn from their collaborators– not only about the work that they’re engaged in, but also the process by which work is done. That’s one.
Another aspect of this mutual adaptation is to always be in a position where you’re constantly communicating about the basics of your relationship and constantly evaluating the social dynamics of your relationship. Where am I? Where’s the other person? OK. Let me put myself in the shoes of the other and really learn about their position, and why, in fact, they’re making these decisions. Let me try to understand the temporal dimensions of my collaborators. That could mean just how people treat time worldwide. Very, very different. So, there’s this constant need to teach, learn, suspend judgment, and communicate in order to make it work.
I think of this as almost like a marriage, or an important relationship where you have partners. You have to constantly communicate in order to make things cohere in the right way.
SARAH GREEN: It’s interesting. When you said it was like a marriage, a lot of heads– my head started nodding, my sound producer here started nodding. I was like, yeah. That is what it sounds like. And, actually, that makes me wonder– how much are some of these things that teams need to do things that any team in one office working together and one country we need to do? And is it just accentuated and it becomes even more critical in a globally dispersed team? Or are some of these things actually different?
TSEDAL NEELEY: Great question. Some things are very much accentuated. Some things are different. And the way you lead one of these globally distributed teams are definitely different. Granted, you’re doing all of the traditional elements of managing people, whether thinking about the composition of your team, thinking about the process by which you communicate and interact, thinking about the culture or the norms of the teams. You have to do that.
But you also have to do a number of things that are very different in globally distributed teams. For example, we know that globally distributed teams are not meeting face-to-face and are not thinking on a regular basis. And, in fact, may not even have the opportunity to meet face-to-face for an entire year, if not more. And so, the leader has to ensure that the aspects of any face-to-face contact are recreated virtually. Spontaneous communication needs to exist pretty regularly.
How do you do that when people don’t meet face-to-face? Well, the way you do that is you implement it as part of your regular communication, your formal communication. You create space for people to engage spontaneously while you have your formal meetings. I call this structuring unstructured time. Very different than your classical team. And so it becomes very important to create these elements from a virtual way such that people have access to one another in a spontaneous way, such that people have the room and the opportunity to disclose what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, such that people are constantly remembering their collaborators in other countries and remembering their constraints, regularly.
SARAH GREEN: So, when you talk about structuring unstructured time in that way, is they’re an example that would really bring this home?
TSEDAL NEELEY: An example of structuring unstructured time is when a global team leader sets aside six to seven minutes at the beginning of a regular conference call with his or her team to check in with people. Some people label it as our shared time, where people can just talk about what’s happening to them personally, what’s happening to them at the workforce, wins, successes, et cetera,
In order for this to really work, leaders have to model this. So, they have to bring in their own stories, their own scenarios, in order to encourage other people to do the same. This is particularly important when you’re in a cross-cultural situation where people are not accustomed to bringing these types of unstructured conversation in a formal meeting period. That’s an example of this.
We’ve looked at structured unstructured time in teams, and we’ve looked at teams that don’t hold the structured unstructured time. And there’s a material difference in the cohesion of the team with the unstructured structured time. There’s a clear difference with their performance. And there’s a clear difference with their ability to work together in the long term when you create that page.
So, in a sense, when I talk about structuring unstructured time, it may feel very inefficient to spend six, seven, or eight minutes in a one-hour meeting doing this conversation. But at the end of the day, it really buys improved work relationships, improved work results, and can be extremely efficient.
SARAH GREEN: That’s so interesting. So, shifting slightly, to focus more on the communication aspects of this itself, I know sometimes I worry at HBR and at other business media that when we’re talking about communicating across cultures, I worry sometimes that focusing so much on the differences between people, we’re sort of stereotyping people. How do you strike the balance between being respectful of potential differences, but not really making assumptions about someone just because they come from a different country or a different culture?
TSEDAL NEELEY: That’s a great question. It’s interesting, because what I’m witnessing with global teams, or globally distributed teams, or any types of collaborations that are extending across geographies, and what I’m witnessing is that the members of these settings are so multicultural that it becomes difficult for individuals to behave in ways that are stereotypical.
For example, no longer do you have teams with five Americans, three Germans, and four Japanese employees. You may have a team or a group having a conversation, 15 people that are representing 10 countries. And so, it becomes, then, important to develop cultural intelligence. Not on the specific stereotypical countries, the dos and don’ts that people imagine that they need to follow for particular countries. But it becomes even more important to have a strategy on how do I communicate and learn from others who are from other countries? It’s not about the dos and don’ts. It’s about how do I make sure at the intersection of both of our conversation, communication, at the intersection of the engagement of other people, how do we make sure that we create a moment where we understand each other fully? Where we communicate fully? And we drop this belief of pinning certain stereotypical attributions about people.
So, if you have a group communicating, and it’s a group from 10 countries, it’s impossible to do the stereotyping. You have to slow yourself down and think really hard on how to make sure that everyone in that group understands you and you understand everyone in that group. Inquiry is important. Advocacy is important. Listening is important. And listening without talking is even that much more important, because there’s a lot to discern in order to be productive in that context.
SARAH GREEN: Mm. Well, and speaking of understanding a group of people from 10 different countries, I know you’ve done a lot of work on global teams using English as a common language. Tell us a little bit about your thinking on that topic, and why English seems to be the way to go.
TSEDAL NEELEY: It’s interesting, because I have been looking at the phenomenon for a very, very long time– well over a decade. And the reason I became interested in it is because it’s out in the world. So, in a sense, I’m documenting what’s happening out in the world, and trying to bring it to the forefront for companies to make sure that they’re thinking very carefully about their language strategy that today involve a very diverse workforce.
The reality is that English has become the preeminent business language of the world. Period. And for that reason, you have millions of people around the world who are working hard to migrate to this business language in order to communicate with their colleagues– in country, outside of country, et cetera. And so, my argument has been, for the last decade or so, that we need to be aware of this. We need to make sure that we harness people’s abilities to engage one another quite well. And that we understand what it means to have people who have fluency in English communicate with others who don’t have fluency in English. You have to empower and train people.
And, at the end of the day, we also need to make sure that everyone in a global communication setting has the sensitivities and the right behaviors to ensure that every member of that team or that group can strive. That’s the reason I’ve been very interested in this. And I think it’s starting to really make a difference. Major corporations are thinking very hard about their language strategy as their thinking about the global strategy. What’s more fundamental than communication? What is more fundamental the language to enable communication? And so, this is the reason I’ve been really interested in it. And this is the reason why companies are becoming very interested in developing their strategies around this.
SARAH GREEN: Well it seems and– I think you’re starting to speak to some of this– it seems important that if a company is going to say, OK, we’re just admitting that most of the time, we communicate in English, and that’s going to be your lingua franca, that they have some kind of talent development or policies in place so that the non-native speakers aren’t becoming second-class citizens in the organization.
TSEDAL NEELEY: I think that’s exactly right. And at the same time, it also is important for the organization as a whole, in terms of knowledge development, of knowledge-sharing, in terms of ensuring that English native speakers are trained to communicate with those who are not fluent in their language. There’s so many dimensions to consider when thinking about a language strategy, but the one that you mention is critical. Those who don’t have the fluency need to be supported fully, so that you get the best from your talent pools.
There is one person who really stood out to me at a very large German software company a very long time ago. And I never really forgot him, because he had a Ph.D. In computer engineering. And it was one of their super engineers. Very competent. Had a long history in the company. And the company, at the time that I spoke with him, had just decided to make English its business language. And this would affect thousands of German nationals at the time. And he said, you know, when I communicate in English I feel like a child. And I don’t say as much as I need to. I don’t argue. I find myself shrinking.
Here you have this incredibly competent person they call a super engineer. They’re so proud to have him at this company. And as soon as they changed languages, he feels like he’s a child. Childlike. And, at that point, had begun to withdraw. That’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to counter with the language strategy conversation.
SARAH GREEN: I think that’s great. Yeah, I think we’ve all probably– if we’ve traveled to a country where we don’t speak the language — had some kind of feeling of there’s just a lot of cognitive activity happening when you don’t speak the language. So, I think that’s really important.
TSEDAL NEELEY: And one more thing with this is that if you don’t give people the type of support to harness their talent, to harness everything they bring to the table, you create a culture in which some people are included and others are excluded. You create an environment where there are some people who speak the most, but they may not be the most talented.
SARAH GREEN: And that’s, I think, important for any manager to think about.
TSEDAL NEELEY: Absolutely. Yeah.
AMANDA KERSEY: That was Tsedal Neeley speaking with IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichael. Tsedal is a professor at Harvard Business School and the chair of its MBA program. Her latest book, with Paul Leonardi, is The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI.
HBR On Leadership will be back next Wednesday with another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review. If this episode helped you, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. While you’re there, consider leaving us a review.
When you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, find it all at HBR.org.
This episode was produced by me, Amanda Kersey. On Leadership’s team includes Maureen Hoch, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, and Anne Bartholomew. Music by Coma Media.

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Leading a global team presents unique challenges, often stemming from communication gaps and a susceptibility to misunderstandings. Tsedal Neeley, a Harvard Business School professor, highlights this vulnerability, emphasizing the need for teams to foster adequate trust and context to ensure full contribution. This summary delves into Neeley’s insights, offering a comprehensive exploration of the complexities involved in managing globally distributed teams.

Neeley underscores that any dispersion of collaboration – where team members aren’t co-located – inherently introduces layers of complexity, and combining this with a global component dramatically increases this challenge. Key obstacles include time zone differences, norms, practices, and language variations, compounded by potential cultural differences that can lead to individuals misinterpreting each other’s actions or intentions. This often results in “blind spots,” where team members lack the understanding needed to make informed decisions, necessitating a robust mutual adaptation process for successful collaboration and ultimately, delivering expected results.

A core aspect of Neeley’s advice revolves around fostering an environment of continuous learning and teaching. Team members must proactively show up with a mindset of constant learning, simultaneously communicating and teaching about their own perspectives and processes. This mutual adaptation entails constant communication regarding the basics of the relationship and the ongoing evaluation of the social dynamics involved – essentially, understanding where each team member sits, and how that position impacts their decisions and actions. Furthermore, individuals are challenged to regularly suspend judgment and communicate effectively to mitigate these blind spots. This process can be likened to a marriage – requiring constant communication and effort to maintain coherence.

Neeley stresses that structuring unstructured time is critical to achieving this. This involves carving out dedicated time for informal conversations, akin to a shared moment where team members can openly discuss what’s happening personally and professionally. This approach isn’t merely a luxury; it's a strategic investment necessary for building relationships and ensuring team cohesion. This concept directly combats the typical rigid structure often found in formal meetings.

The challenges are notably amplified when considering the increasing globalization of business, with English often serving as the dominant language. Neeley argues that organizations need to recognize the significant impact of this dynamic and implement strategies that support those whose first language isn’t English. Leaders must cultivate a culture of inclusivity, ensuring everyone has the opportunity to contribute fully and effectively.

Neeley’s work emphasizes that while standard management practices apply – such as team composition, communication processes, and cultural norms – specific adaptations are crucial for global teams. The extended distances and diverse backgrounds necessitate a heightened focus on building understanding, fostering trust, and actively mitigating potential misunderstandings. Ultimately, she advises teams to constantly question assumptions, embrace diverse perspectives, and prioritize clear, open communication to overcome these complexities and deliver optimal results.