Leading Effectively: What is your Global Management Style?

February 25, 2009

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Let’s now look at two types of teams– sales teams and project teams:

Sales Teams

As an example, Monsanto's sales strategy involved dispersing sales people who had strong scientific backgrounds in agronomy, biotechnology, or biology throughout relatively large geographical regions. These sales people provide technical and sales support to distributors of the company's products and to large agricultural growers. It would be cost-prohibitive to shrink the geographical territories and thereby increase the size of the sales force. Furthermore, it made sense to the company not to organize the teams around a team leader—a role much less relevant in a team where the members are geographically dispersed. The company has been able to reduce personnel costs by establishing a team sponsor who is responsible for supporting five to ten teams. The Monsanto model works well when a small, specialized sales force needs to cover a large area.

Project Teams

One of the most common types of teams in organizations is the project team, a team responsible for managing, designing, and/or implementing a project. A project team generally lasts for the duration of the project. It is not unusual for large enterprises with employees located in several buildings within a city, or located in several cities or even countries, to create project teams whose members are not based in the same location. One of the more publicized examples of a virtual team is a Lucent Technologies team made up of subject matter experts (SMEs) located on three continents.[1] This team is responsible for designing a fiber-optic phone switch that the company sells for about $1 million. This team was created in this way for two reasons:

The experts the company needed to design the product were located in a variety of places around the world and it was not practical to relocate them for this one project. The product itself would be sold worldwide, and it was necessary for the team members to ensure during the course of the design and testing that the product would be usable in their home environments.

It is not at all unusual for organizations to design products that will be deployed in widely dispersed geographical locations. Such situations may call for the creation of a virtual project team whose members work together over distance while continuing to do their jobs in their own cities, states, or countries

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