7 Things I’ve Learned from Leading a Cross-Cultural Team...and how we’ve made it the best job any of us have ever had.

Hi, I’m Sophia, and I run Ignore No More, a SaaS marketing agency for scaling SaaS co’s.

With a team spanning 5 time zones, 12 languages, and at one point, four continents, I’ve learned SO MUCH about what it takes to manage a cross-cultural team (and cross-cultural clients, but that’s a whole other story).

Like, “oh-wow-should-I-be-embarrassed-or-proud-of-this-growth?!” levels of learning.

But not without a whole lot of cringe and awkward laughter at my own assumptions and cultural faux pas.

Over time, we’ve been able to build a company culture that makes working together relatively frictionless and typically loads of fun. And that’s helped us get through eye-popping good times and sob-inducting bad ones - like last year when we temporarily closed because of an unexpected cashflow crunch.

Here’s the biggest things I’ve learned along the way on what it means to manage a diverse team across borders and time zones.

1. Stuff goes down while I’m asleep 😴

I’ll never forget messaging one of my copywriters furtively 9 hours after she missed an internal deadline only to open up the news and find out her city had just been hit by a tsunami warning and they didn’t have power.

Yikes.

She was safe, thankfully, but I learned that “staying up to date” has a lot higher stakes than keeping up with the latest meme.

Now I have alerts set for each of my teammates cities and countries and I check them frequently - especially if they’re slack status is off when it’s usually on.

2. Know the big sporting events 🏉

Because let's be honest - was anyone doing much work during last year’s summer Olympics? I, for one, was sitting in a coffeeshop that had a livestream of the events, pretending to type.

Also great to have a Slack channel for sports (if you’re a larger company) or post about it in the #casual-convo channel.

That way you’re not asking people to work during the Rugby World Cup when years of rivalries get to play out on the pitch.

3. Everybody likes to party (but not at the same time) 🥳

Every 2-4 weeks I ask in the #general channel what holidays or celebrations are coming up in the next month to make sure I’m not scheduling the kickoff or close of a project during them.

And I make sure to post mine too.

I want Memorial Day Weekend unbothered with my fine self on a beach with hard lemonade, not a bench with laptop.

They want Eid off for a week of post-fasting feasting (sounds delicious!)

Win. party. win.

4. Poll for peace of mind 🏖️

I previously worked for an agency that had 2 weeks off in the summer, and 2 weeks off around Christmas/New Years. I thought I’d cram that all together and pretty much give us all of December off.

But after doing it for 2 years, turns out everyone (myself included!) ended up hating it. We like our jobs too much!

So this past December instead of unilaterally deciding our 4-5 weeks of company-wide time, I did a poll on how we all wanted to break up that PTO.

Now we have it split out across 3 different times and have a winter, spring, and summer break that works with Christmas, Ramadan, and general summer holidays!

Our recent Spring break shenanigans!

Aelia in the Chitral mountains at Ayun Fort in indigenous Kalasha traditional dress (dressed by an indigenous Kalasha woman).

Midhat enjoying 3 days of food and costume changes (and lots of reading time! 📚)

Me on Chapman’s Highway with Claire in Cape Town.

Claire and I post-tidal-pool-dip, in Cape Town.

5. Choose teambuilding activities that the whole team already does 📚

Virtual happy hours are no fun when half the company doesn’t drink for religious reasons.

Movie nights are a bust when the jokes are at another characters expense - and that character is from a teammate's country.

Trivia is rough when “90’s kid” is very culture-specific.

So as the team grew, I waited to see if hobbies would naturally overlap was so team events could feel fun and not forced.

Here’s what made the cut:

• A (virtual!) book club - We did a book club for about a year, where we did a rotating round robin on who chose the book each month. I now have my new favorite magical realism novel (sorry Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you’ve been replaced by Shehan Karunatilaka!)

  
  

• A D&D campaign - We’re TOP TIER nerds, but none of us had played DND before. We had a client that required knowing more than the phrase “Nat 20” and now we have a semi-monthly campaign run by a professional DM. There’s nothing like taking an afternoon off for play in cosplay!

  
  

• A recommended watchlist and watch parties - We all had the option to take off time to see Barbenheimer opening weekend and had a call the next week to discuss!

  
  

• A crafting corner - turns out almost all of the team has a crafting hobby! We post pics of our latest Pinterest misadventures in the #casual-convo channel to everyone’s delight

I limit in-person (aka not async!) activities to 1-2 a year.

It’s just too hard across time zones and somebody’s going to be up early or late, and I make sure I rotate into that early/late range too!

The team on our DND Campaign Christmas Party (in character-themed costumes!)

6. Talk about food! 🍛

Food and drink is such a huge part of every culture and celebration and sharing pictures of what your each eating - and trying the recipes and reporting back! - has been one of the strongest ways we started actually getting to know each other.

Fried Oreos I made at our first-ever retreat were remade in Pakistan for a cousin’s special day

Sabering the top of a South African champagne is now company retreat tradition

My weekly recipes list now includes Sheer, Kaali Daal, and Braai seasoning.

Next up: an Ignore No More team cookbook!

Cooking together at our first INM retreat in Nashville in 2023

Fried Oreos in Islamabad the month after the retreat!

7. A short list of my school of hard knocks 🤦🏽‍♀️

• Cash is the best gift and shipping gifts is a losing battle. a little bonus with a personalized note “to round out your fantasy book collection!” is a lot less rigmarole than trying to ship Christmas presents to 14 countries in time

  
  

• Off-sites are a great mental break. visas are a mental nightmare. Use Passport Index to coordinate a place everyone can go to! And be sure to have fun hybrid moments for the teammates who probably can’t make it

  
  

• Make meetings silly. this one isn’t cross-cultural so much as it’s company-cultural. but we start out at least 1 meeting a week with silly convos that often involved the latest TikTok reel and in-country shenanigans. it helps make everyone real instead of 2-D virtual avatars.

  
  

• Check twice message once. Is it 2am their time? check before you hit send, or better yet, schedule send it!

  
  

• Slack is awesome and our best get-to-know-you tool. Custom emoji, Instagram reel links, and games like Braid make it easy and natural to keep the camaraderie going and the inside jokes flowing. our custom emoji library is 300+ gifs and memes long 😆

Dhiya remotely trying desperately to tell Anqa presenting live that the remote peeps couldn’t hear the presentation 🤣

the remote team trying desperately to tell the in-person team that they couldn’t hear the presentation

Cross-cultural management isn’t easy, but for me, it’s been a great joy.

A good 87% of the management struggles I’ve faced since I hired the first peep in 2022 come down to misunderstandings in communication or unmet expectations.

But the ties we’ve built give us the professional and emotional margin to work through those problems and trust each other.

No matter what, I love this (brutally paraphrased) line from Brené Brown’s husband “When I assume that everyone is doing their best, I am a more kind and gracious person.”

That’s the way I want to lead and be treated across the board in any country or cultural context. ⚡

Our one complete group picture at the Nashville retreat in 2023 🥰