Briefing for Assessment in M503 Behavioral Competencies in Virtual Teams

You work as a Transformation Manager for Liquid Assets (LA), a financial service provider who has global
operations. LA has made substantial acquisitions over the last 10 years but has so far never made the
effort of integrating these acquisitions. While there is a common IT backbone system, such a backbone
does not exist in processes of branding, products, clients, and administration. Management is convinced
that there is a lot of potential for uniting LA’s operations and its several acquisitions under one common
brand.

Specifically, LA sees tremendous opportunities in its Latin American and Asian sales
territories, particularly India, China and Australia. In particular, LA’s operations and
acquisitions in Mexico, Brazil, India, Mainland China, Hong Kong and Australia are critical to LA’s future
strategy because they are growth markets. The plan is to closely integrate
operations in North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia into an entity
internally referred to as “the Axis.”

The transition of the various operations in the diverse geographies should be managed by a team that you are
given the responsibility for as the Team Lead. Your team must not exceed the headcount of 10 including
yourself.

Your management gives you full discretion to select the people you want in your team.
However, your manager thinks that it is politically wise to have a fair balance of team members representing
as many geographies as possible in your team. Functionally, you will know that you need people with IT

skills, with a project management background, and with sales/business development, and also above-
average communication skills in your team.

You pull together a team of experts to prepare yourself for that important career step that is due for you now.
What you put together in a brief presentation or report for your manager is an overview of the how you
are going to build the team, how you conduct the selection process, what infrastructure, processes and
policies you plan to do install to get your team up and running:
1. Team composition — how are you going to select the people and what are your assumptions
about competencies and personal characteristics of the people in your team
2. Communication policy incl. ground rules
3. Communication infrastructure incl. technologies, meeting schedule
4. Even if you all get it right — what can still go wrong

Ad 1. You have just gone through a training on psychometric testing and you aware of several tools which you
can you to build assumptions about the competencies of people who you need to get the team to
performance.

Ad 2. You are aware that you will have a truly global team with representatives of different
cultures. You think that speaking English will iron out most of the intercultural difficulties
that may occur. Your expert team alerts you that you need to build a truly inclusive team culture and advise
you that you should document your ideas about a positive and inclusive intercultural team in a kind of
“Team Manifesto“.

Ad 3. /Ad 4. You are aware that you have to communicate a lot with your team. You are
uncertain how to set up communication and which technology to use. Your expert team has some brilliant
ideas. Effectively, you see the need to build an organizational agenda (which is what the presentation or
report will cover) but there is also your own agenda i.e., your power sphere which you do not want to
share with your manager, but you are keen to hear what advise your team of experts has about this.