Incubation Team to Start Internationalization — Organization i18n
Day 1 of Internalization
Day 1 of the internationalizing organization is tough. If the local business relies on local language (like Japan), it’s going to be much harder because of the language barrier. Most of the people getting used to doing their business and engineering tasks through the local language. However, we need to transition to international, English base organization to accept more talents from the world.
How we can achieve that without losing the current working local organization members?
Incubation Team
Through my ten years of carrier experience, I believe that how to form an Incubation Team is the key.
Incubation Team is the idea to form an independent international team inside the local organization. The Incubation Team has some missions and working areas for them. Inside the Incubation Team, they work fully internationalized environment. People typically speak their own language. They don’t have to know the local language. This way we can accept more talents from the world without suddenly change the local organization.
The presence of the Incubation Team can be a good exercise for local team members as well. As teams work together, local team members sometimes need to communicate with the Incubation Team member. You do not want to jump into the swimming pool but slowly get into the water so that you can prepare.
Placing Diplomat
The successful key factor of the incubation team is to place a good diplomat.
The diplomat is the typical multilingual talents from the local organization.
The role of the diplomat is connecting two different teams. The Incubation Team sometimes needs help from existing local team members. The diplomat connects peoples from the two teams so that they can work together.
If you are building the incubation team, it’s great if you can be the diplomat. If you cannot be the one, you need to carefully pick the people. The diplomat needs to understand not only the language but also culture as well. Those teams tend to have more conflicts because of a lack of context and different cultures. It’s the diplomat’s role to resolve the conflict in case if it happens between two teams. If you find some people who are extroversive, it’s much easier to resolve the conflict.
The diplomat can be in both directions. Some global talents who speak the local language can be the diplomat to the local language team.
However, it’s better to find a diplomat from the local team. The diplomat from the local team already has a lot of assets including relationships, understanding the corporate cultures, and specific business knowledge.
Downside and Mitigation
The downside of the Incubation Team is the diversion of the organization. As they speak different languages, it’s hard to share the same idea across organizations. The Incubation Team will complain about the lack of information and directions from the organization. The local team will complain lack of common understanding of the business contexts and corporate culture. As a result, they tend to have some conflicts.
To mitigate the issue, the key is again placing the right diplomat. I had an experience that the incubation team is frustrated because they cannot make good progress with limited support from the local members. One day, one colleague who knows both languages and have working experience with many local team members, joined the discussion and resolved almost all the conflict. She fully understands the idea from the Incubation Team and translates it to local members. She also leverages her working relationship to ask for help from the local members to support the Incubation Team. Just like this story, the diplomat has a big impact to make the two teams working nicely.
Just like an infant cannot be in an incubator for a long time, we need to transition to a different scheme once the team becomes big. I will make another article next time to describe how to transition from the Incubation Team to the real internationalized organization.
