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There are a lot of aspects to building teams. Managers in big companies do not have total control over who joins their teams. Then there is the classical problem of course of people having different management style, and the style clashing. Other problems might be that within a team everybody is wanting to run things when in fact only one person can be in charge. In fact, teams that have everybody with the same characteristics are often less effective than teams that have a real mix of abilities and approaches. But of course once you have got your team together, you are only starting to build your team, and it is that area of training and development in team building that most of our work is involved in these days. There are a lot of ways of training managers. One general method, for example, is to get managers together to talk about how they work as a team and to use models like the Belbin's model to give insights into how people behave in the management team group. Another approach is to give people personal feedback about their management style and how they are seen by their colleagues. Presenting the members of the management team with business dilemmas is an approach widely used nowadays. People then have to decide which of a number of answers to specified dilemmas they would adopt, and then defend that viewpoint with the rest of the management team.


There are a lot of management theorists who bang on about ideal teams. According to experts you never get the ideal management team and the fact is, you have to work with what you have got and not aim for perfection.

The types of problems that emerge when a team is formed of people of mixed nationalities vary between the types of company that one is dealing with. Some international companies have such a strong culture, IBM would be a publicly recognised example, that the people who join the firm buy into that culture at an early stage. In some senses it is stronger than the local national culture. But in companies that have not got that strong culture you observe tremendous differences between the approaches of different nationalities, and the cultural gap is sometimes difficult to deal with.


As to the question whether it is possible to have in a team the complete maverick. Yes, a maverick in a team of people who very much follow the company line can extremely be useful both in pointing out, you know, the emperor has no clothes, and this kind of thing, and also stimulating discussion.