How Different Language Teams Work Together? Deliberately Distributed Teams Build the Best Teamwork — Organization i18n
Language Barrier Problem!
In internationalizing organizations, we sometimes have different language speakers in the team. It’s a typical language barrier problem. We have local language speakers and English speakers. Many organizations try to transform the team more on an English base but it takes time. How we can make this transition smoothly but still make the existing team’s output efficient?
Deliberately Distributed Team
Mike Cohn provided us an interesting insight from his Succeeding with Agile. He introduces the concept of deliberately distributed teams.
Deliberately distributed teams are the concept to mix the team members from the different geo-location. As you see in the diagram, two people are picked from France, and the other two peoples are picked from the US. Mike pointed out that deliberately distributed teams increase transparency across the different locations. For example, both teams have equal access to the scrum master, product owner, or stakeholders which might locate only in one location and might have a severe time zone difference.
What I found that was the same concept can be applied to a language other than geo-location.
Language-wise deliberately distributed teams pick some people from local language speakers while the other people from English speakers. The benefit of this approach is, same as the original idea applied to geo-location, to provide transparency across the team. The scrum master, product owner, or stakeholder might be able to speak only one language (typically it is the local language). Both teams A and B can have equal access to those people with minimal language issues.
Another unique benefit is to accelerate internationalizing organization. The presence of the other language speaker in the same team will provide learning opportunities in both directions. Local language speakers have more chances to speak in English. English speakers have more chances to learn local words which can be beneficial to understand local cultures.
When to Distribute the Team?
There is a downside of course. Mixing different language speakers will cause internal teamwork efficiency at least in a beginning. We need some level of working relationship before distributing the speakers as well as the base level of language skill to avoid the drop of internal teamwork efficiency.
Based on my experience, I recommend starting from the incubation team to achieve these. After we have the base, we can gradually migrate to deliberately distributed teams. This is like a rocket. We need the first stage rocket to accelerate it enough, then switch to the second stage. The first rocket requires enough energy. But after we get enough acceleration, the second stage requires much less fuel to get out of the aerosphere. You need to carefully start with the incubation team and pick the right timing to switch the rocket.
