Collaboration leads to success

By Pilar Junco

Published: November 13 2002 10:11 | Last Updated: November 13 2002 10:11

Former investment banker Pilar Junco joined the Insead MBA programme in Fontainebleau in September. Previously she worked for JP Morgan in London and New York and during her studies in London she also spent some time working at the FT. Over the next year she will write a diary exclusively for FT.com.

I am sitting in a cubicle in the main building at Insead, in Fontainebleau, just outside Paris. The cubicles to my left and right are occupied with two teams completing a marketing assignment on the launch of an ice cream.

For the past fifteen minutes the team to my right have had a heated discussion about whether to target teenagers or young children. The arguments turn personal and a very irritated Russian engineer picks up his backpack and leaves. An Indian accountant shouts after him that they can complete the assignment without him. A woman speaks, on the verge of tears. The other two fuss angrily.

The atmosphere on my left side is completely different. The members of that group as are as diverse as in the first, but they are having an organized and civilized conversation about exactly the same case. They speak in turns, let the others finish their sentences and make thoughtful contributions.

The different chemistry in the two groups is no accident: these teams are not put together randomly. The idea is to combine people from completely different professional and cultural backgrounds, nationalities and personalities, with totally different working styles.

One of the first challenges of the Insead MBA is being able to complete complex assignments in teams. During the first four months of the one-year MBA program here we have to figure out ways to work together more effectively, since just like in real life, we need to learn to adapt to different working styles and manage others.

Insead teams are nothing if not diverse. The average group of five has at least four nationalities, from a pool of three hundred students from more than 60 countries. While all our work is completed in English, we all speak at least two other languages. Professional experiences vary widely, from earthquake physicists and actresses to more conventional business backgrounds like consulting, finance and marketing.

The idea of working closely with a varied group of people is not entirely foreign to me. I have just completed the first two months at Insead and previously I had been working in investment banking in London and New York. After spending five years in such a dynamic industry, where working in teams with people with different expertises was part of my daily activities, I thought I would have no problem adapting to Insead's teamwork model.

Moreover, having spent 21 out of 28 years of my life outside my home country, Spain, working with people from different countries has become second nature to me.

To my surprise I, like many of my peers, discovered I still had a lot more to learn about how to make diverse teams work.

Especially at the beginning, this varied mix creates friction. Nationalities and languages actually seem to cause the fewest conflicts: the elements that cause most of the difficult group behaviours have to do more with our different professional experiences and personalities.

By default, different professional experiences will lead to diverse working methods. An example is my own team: we have a Dutch consultant, a French structural engineer, an Italian oil trader, an Egyptian marketing manager and me, a Spanish investment banker. We all have different approaches to problem solving and conflict resolution.

So, finding a method that allowed us five to work together effectively took several discussions and some trial and error.

Additionally, there are no distinct hierarchies and no member has a pre-defined function. "In a team like this, all members - with their distinct backgrounds and experiences - have, in theory, an equal say about all matters," a South American entrepreneur explains. This is another one of the reasons why reaching consensus is so often challenging.

The solutions to these issues varied, but most of them involved creating a more structured work environment that allowed all the team members to feel that they participate equally. During our classes we are given guidance in how to organize our teamwork more effectively and how to plan meetings, divide the work and give feedback.

Since the workload is considerable, we often have to divide the assignments among the team members. However expectations vary. Some team members prefer to rely on individual strengths and so assign the finance homework, say, to the banker. Hence for these team members, learning to trust other people's capabilities becomes essential.

However, others prefer to learn as much as they can exactly because they lack the relevant background, and so they do the work themselves.

Some groups just seemed to have purposely created to guarantee personality clashes. Their members are what can be described as "strong characters" and more of their conflicts arise from a struggle for influence and leadership within the group. As a result, they waste time in power struggles and have a hard time agreeing, especially under tight time constraints.

Other groups are quite the opposite. One of the North American consultants described his group as "lethargic.....I seem to be the only one who has an opinion." The members of these teams are often introverted and will not participate enough which means that the team is not making full use of its resources.

Both types of group have to find ways to adapt.

The masterminds behind these combinations certainly considered our best interests, even though this might not be obvious at first. At Insead, learning to work together effectively with people we have little in common with is another learning process, as important as mastering finance or accounting. The methods by which we will make our current and our future working teams succeed might vary. In the meantime we have all learned valuable lessons in partnership and teamwork disciplines.

These experiences will be relevant in our future careers. At Insead, teamwork is about more than just dealing with diversity, it's about learning to manage the multinationals of tomorrow.

Regarding the ice cream case, I heard that the team that had the fight in the cubicle next to me in the end did a great job targeting both teenagers and children. Incidentally, the team in the other cubicle did a great job. too. As with many of these assignments, the result of the marketing exercise is important but the exercise of getting the work done as a team may prove just as significant.