Reference no: EM133093283

Identify the predictable/common stages of team development and give actionable advice for navigating 1 or 2 of these stages.

Scenario:

A North American company is looking to expand its business in Europe and Asia. They have contracted with your team to provide consulting expertise in virtual collaboration best practices. The senior marketing team from the different regions must collaborate to ensure that their respective groups maintain overall consistency in their marketing campaign for a new digital service product.

This is the first time the client's marketing team has been asked to develop a common global marketing strategy for a new product launch. In the past, each senior marketing leader had designed their own campaign targeted to their specific geographic and cultural region, plus they are adding two new regions in Europe and Asia.

These marketing executives do not need advice in the area of marketing the new product. They are interested in your consulting group's analysis on their current state of collaboration and advice on how to ensure that their team will establish effective communication practices to get things done for the global product launch on budget and on schedule.

They are under tight deadlines (two months) to produce the common marketing strategy for this new product and must do much or all of their work virtually. They have scheduled a 20-minute conference call for your team to present your recommendations. Accessibility for the global audience is essential, so the PowerPoint presentation and any notes need to be documented in a full transcript.

The consulting contract between your team and the marketing executives outlines the following conditions that the company is currently experiencing in their virtual collaboration efforts.

• There is a lack of trust among the marketing executives from the different regions. They may have each been given a different set of expectations from their leadership team.
• The marketing executives have met a few times on short conference calls and currently there is a disagreement among them about a primary element of the marketing plan that they are developing.
• Currently, all the regions use different collaboration tools and communications have become difficult. On a recent video call among the executives from all the regions, two locations were able to see each other's slides and discuss items on the agenda. The European region could hear the conversation, but the video option was not working on the day of the meeting.