For the last decade, while leading global training teams across three continents, I have built culturally, geographically, and generationally diverse teams.
The leadership strategy that I employed is what we call establishing multiple excellence hubs. Such a strategy requires you to do global profiling of the overall work performed by the target audience in the field across all locations. This profiling involves understanding historical events, the nature of customer calls, and regions where most of the demand originates. With this data, leaders can identify the key locations where they should position employees to leverage the local demands, events, and actions happening at that location.
The employees at such hubs have language, culture, norms advantages. That allows better and faster service to customers originating from the same region. In more ways, the customers feel as being served at their home grounds.
Admittedly, some regions’ work practices could be influenced heavily by their home-country norms and other traditions. So, it is natural that some unproductive practices may negatively impact the quality of services. To address that, build more frequent and in-depth international exchanges, best practices forums, and interactions among culturally and geographically diverse teams. Such an action would help co-create intelligence that sets up a base for changing practices in the future for such a diverse team to continue working productively.
The leadership strategy of the excellence hub clearly gives cost benefits in certain regions where salaries are relatively lower. In the other areas, it may allow leveraging characteristically younger population profiles. While our typical first preference always has been hiring experienced senior professionals, but we could open up positions at multiple tiers to include mid-senior and younger generations. In such a structure, the younger people received highly experienced mentoring from senior staff and came up to speed. But the most significant advantage comes in the form of fresh ideas like technologies, software, apps, AI tools, and other contemporary expertise this age group brings.
Not only does it massively uplift the quality in line with the technology-driven world, but it also prepares the workforce for future challenges.
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