The present time is characterized by a significant need of effective cross-cultural communication and cooperation. The reasons for that include a growing interconnectedness of cultures, as well as the global nature of the modern business world. Therefore, an ability to manage staff with different cultural backgrounds is essential for a successful leader of a multinational enterprise.
Google, Inc is an internationally known company that maintains a strong emphasis on diversity. Initially, a search engine, called Google, was invented by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. However, current success of Google can hardly be imagined without its CEO Eric Schmidt. As Google bases its activities on innovation, the most important task of Schmidt’s leadership is facilitating the production of innovation by employees. As Google tends to attract most qualified employees from all over the world, it is important for Eric Schmidt to exercise the functions of CEO with an account to cross-cultural issues.
According to Eric Schmidt, the role of CEO lies in managing the chaos (Yeh, 2015). He tells that Google reminded him of high school, when he first came to the meeting there. Despite the fact that employees had a lot of ideas and were enthusiastic to implement them, the lack of deadlines and deliverables resulted in the lack of success. Therefore, the essential leadership practice, advocated by Eric Schmidt, deals with planning all the processes, ranging from product development to accounting (Yeh, 2015).
This includes having a precise vision of the product to be developed and the time, required for its development. In this regard, it is also crucial for a leader to oversee how things go. In his interview, Eric Schmidt underlines that sometimes he still has to slower things down or narrow the focus of employees’ performance. Thus, he views technical skills, an ability to develop a clear vision for a team and a strategy for realizing it as essential leadership practices (Yeh, 2015).
The design of planning and oversight practices can surely vary across cultures. However, the understanding of a product to be developed and a respective timeframe is shared by the representatives of different cultures.
Another important aspect of the work, exercised by Eric Schmidt is getting to know his employees and letting them have time to solve problems they are passionate about. Getting to know his employees, Schmidt concentrates on the peculiarities of their thinking and things they are interested in. Smartness and enthusiasm about specific issues are major criteria that Schmidt uses, when deciding whether to hire a person. A crucial leadership practice, used by Schmidt to address the motivation-related aspect of employees’ work is letting them have twenty percent of time to work on their own projects (Yeh, 2015). As he tells in his interview, a lot of Google’s inventions and innovations stem from the twenty percent of free time employees have (Yeh, 2015).
Therefore, Schmidt pays attention to the importance of letting the employees work in teams outside of hierarchies, created by many companies. Flat organizational structure facilitates communication between employees, working in different teams, as well as employees and upper management. The atmosphere of openness and lack of formal obstacles tends to facilitate the creation and discussion of innovative ideas. Furthermore, all employees are encouraged to contact upper management directly, if they have ideas to share. Even interns are always introduced to upper management, so that they feel included and feel the prospect of reward.
The above leadership practices cannot be viewed, as similar across all the cultures. As it was reflected in G. Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, the Power Distance Index tends to differ in different cultures. It can be defined as a degree to which least powerful members of a group (organization, institution) accept an unequal distribution of power and expects that power will be distributed in this way (Hofstede, 2016). For example, Japan has always been viewed as a meritocratic society, and hierarchies still tend to play an important role at the workplace. Similar can be told about Middle Eastern countries and India. Thus, a practice, where no exact hierarchy exists and employees can directly access upper management can seem strange and even unacceptable for individuals, coming from the above countries.
Using the GLOBE vision of cultural competencies, one can state that Eric Schmidt surely utilizes some of them. Foremost, he emphasizes performance- and future-orientation by focusing on specific deliverables and deadlines. He also takes in account human orientation by taking care of the wellbeing of employees. However, power distance and uncertainty avoidance aspects are hardly taken into account, as well institutional collectivism and gender egalitarianism (House et al, 2004, p. 543-600)
The analysis of leadership practices, used by Eric Schmidt allows seeing that he does not use any specific practices to manage cross-cultural team. On the contrary, some of the discussed practices (e,g., promoting flat organizational structure and ensuring opportunities for employees’ communication with upper management) can seem strange to the representatives of specific cultures (e.g., Japan, Middle East). However, Eric Schmidt aims to unite employees around the completion of a common goal (organizing the world’s information and ensuring universal access to it) and promotes their creativity and wellbeing. Thus, eh does not only manages diverse population of Google in a highly democratic way, but promotes the image of the company as one of the world’s best employers.
Such democratic style, allowing for the promotion of creativity and collaboration is the best one to manage cross-cultural teams.
References
Hofstede, G. (2016). Dimensions of national culture. Retrieved 7 February 2016 from http://geert-hofstede.com/national-culture.html
House, R.J., Hanges, P.J., Javidan, M. Dorfman, P. and V. Gupta (2004). Culture, leadership and organizations: the GLOBE study of 62 societies. London: SAGE
Yeh, C. (2015). CS183C Session 8: Eric Schmidt. Retrieved 7 February 2016 from https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection/cs183c-session-8-eric-schmidt-56c29b247998#.bng7jqajy
