“No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive”

One of the largest changes brought about by the rise and rise of online is the opportunity opened up to grow globally. Small businesses aren't hindered by geographic restrictions - if I'm based in Ireland and my product suits the Irish ex-pat audience worldwide, digital now allows me to get in front of that audience at a fraction of the cost that it once would have meant; if I'm looking to have a website built for my business to a very high quality at a competitive price, I can tap into a global services market.

But alongside this removal of geographic restrictions comes the need to understand the various cultures that might come into play - and how the careful management of relationships with these cultures can lead to massive success.

Managing

Firstly, I'm lucky enough to, for over half my career to date, have had the opportunity to manage small and large teams of people from around Europe and the world. And the first big lesson for me as I've done this is, contrary to some of the more typical management viewpoints that float around, I don't, and cannot afford to, have a management style.

Instead, I have a set of guiding principles I use, and the first thing I ask any person I begin to manage is "How do you like to be managed?" The answer to this then allows me to see exactly how individuals like to work, and by ensuring that I take into account how they prefer to be managed as an individual, and any cultural considerations that might need to be considered, and from there, work to help that person achieve. I've seen a manager alienate his entire team by misjudging the cultural acceptance of his actions, and I've learned how damaging this can be - and how powerful it is when you can positively tap into that cultural acceptance.

Partnering

Secondly, in nearly all my past roles, I've gotten to work with business units from all around the world - from deepest Russia to central Europe, from India to the United States. Whether they were part of the same organisation as me or an external partner, I've learned how key it is to understand those cultures, and learn to partner, not compete.

Whether it's one cultures ability to genuinely be better marketeers (and self-marketeers) than another; whether it's the ability to take a job, role or process, and layer on insight and analytics, and come back to you with not only the highest quality job done, but with the improvements to make it even better; whether it's the technical expertise to take a design you've created and deliver back something beyond what you could have imagined, it's key to, up front, be open and honest with any global partners you're working with, and asking some key questions: "What is your competitive advantage? What will you bring to this? What are you strong at that we can all leverage, and where do you feel you can leverage our strengths?"

Having this out on the table can help minimise any future confusion or disappointment, and ensure that global partnerships are exactly those - like a marriage, like a friendship, the relationships we have should always look to allow us to use our strengths to help others, and allow others to help us.

Servicing

And finally, I worked to launch account management for a large company across a variety of global markets, and got to provide services to clients from all around Europe, India and Asia - and learn the positives and negatives of working to provide a service to companies with very different views and opinions to your own. The negatives of misunderstandings and missed service levels (the cultures for whom email was the backup to your face-to-face meeting - even though you were 20 hours travel away; the cultures for whom aggressive negotiation (heavy emphasis on the aggressive) was a way of life), and the positives of when you take the time to talk to those partners, and again, ask those key questions: "This is how we work, how do you work? Where are the gaps? What can we both do better? How can we leverage each other in this so we both succeed?"

Remember - there's no truth, and no one way to do things. There's what I perceive and what you perceive - and somewhere in the middle is where things work best!

Ask the questions

In all three areas, all success ever came down to was asking questions, and often the same or similar questions. Understand that working with global partners, no matter in what regard, means differences - ask early about those differences and look to ensure, as much as possible, you understand each other.

And ask often.