Turn Multicultural Teams into Fusion Teams

I'm a huge fan of fusion cuisine — when a chef combines elements of, say, French and Mexican traditions — and recently I got to wondering: could multicultural teams learn to use the very best elements of different cultures represented on the team? Could they become fusion teams?

It's certainly not the norm! Most multicultural teams are dominated by one cultural group, sad to say. But some work I've done with colleagues suggests that it is possible — and worthwhile — to build a fusion team.

Here's a story about how one such team evolved, told to us by a former American military officer who got frustrated working on a U.N. peace-keeping mission. The team he was assigned to, which consisted of American, Russian, German, and Turkish officers, was charged with planning and performing the first exhumation of mass graves in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. When the work started (he said) the Americans thought they were superior to everyone else, the Russians and the Germans didn't get along, and nobody paid any attention to the Turkish team members. With the project at a standstill, a Russian major suggested they divide the task into four parts and assign a four-person multicultural team to each subtask. As the subgroups started working, each day the four American officers would commute to the meeting together. As the four officers chatted about the project, it suddenly became clear to them that only the Turkish team members had the slightest idea how to go about this mission. They had relevant experience in earthquake relief, and had started to offer ideas in the small subgroups.

It turns out that fusion teams often do exactly this: break a large team into smaller subgroups, encourage informal conversations, and thereby get input from previously quiet team members. Eventually, the subparts have to be integrated back into a whole; this turns out to be less of a problem than you'd think. In the teams we studied, the trust and respect generated within the subgroups made it reasonably easy to facilitate collaboration in the larger group.

In other cases, we've come across team leaders who achieve the same result (getting the most out of all cultural subgroups) by carefully establishing team norms at the start of a project. For example, we know of one manager who was leading an English-language software-development project; English was not his first language. In fact, his English was strongly accented. When he met with the team for the first time, he told them, "You've probably noticed I have an accent. If I could get rid of it, I'd be happy to do so, but since I cannot, we're going to have to communicate ... regardless of my accent or for that matter yours. If you do not understand me, or one another, whether it's because of accent or anything else, we need to communicate until we do understand." This introduction anticipated what could have been a real problem — for most team members, English was a third or fourth language. The team member who told us this story said that the leader set a norm for open communication not just within the team, but ultimately for on-site communication with customers as well.

We believe that fusion teamwork is based on two norms: co-existence of multiple cultures, and meaningful participation from all of them. The reason for fostering those norms? We think it's the only way to ensure that decisions incorporate the best knowledge available across the global organization.

And we've noticed two things about the teams that start to approach this ideal. First, team members who report that their teams have fusion elements also report that they're developing solutions that are both more novel and more practical than teams with one subgroup dominating. Second, fusion teams always have some members who are culturally metacognitive: in other words, good at using a cultural lens to analyze multicultural situations in nonjudgmental ways.