Going the Distance
Learning to excel in today’s global teams, student teammates in Milwaukee and Glasgow get down to business.
This story is part of “Appeal of the Real,” a series focused on highlighting the college of business and administration’s newfound commitment to experiential learning. For more stories from the initiative, click here.
For some other group projects he’s tackled during his four years at Marquette, Mason Howard says he could text his classmates at 9:30 p.m. and within minutes they’d “meet up and knock something out in the library.”
Such spontaneity was not possible for the project the senior business student worked on in Dr. Monica Adya’s project management class. Casual meet-ups at Raynor Memorial Library were out of the question because the other members of his group were six hours ahead of him, living in Scotland. Any time they wanted to work together, they’d start looking days in advance for a feasible time — say, morning in Milwaukee and late afternoon in Glasgow. Then they’d wind up chatting over Skype.
If this all sounds like the default setting for today’s international work teams, that’s by design. Knowing that her students’ educations would be incomplete if project management was limited to individual workplaces, or even individual continents, Adya, chair and professor of management, insists on giving her students a global experience.
In this case, months ahead of time, she circulated a partnership request on an international Listserv. Faculty members at Glasgow Caledonian University were most eager to set up initial contacts by phone and Skype and quickest with follow-up information — “generally good indicators of a collaborator who will continue to engage deeply,” she says.
Thanks to these early steps, Howard and fellow Marquette business students in information technology spent the semester partnering with engineering students in Glasgow, collaboratively conceptualizing, designing and planning to market an eco-friendly product. With their differing approaches and areas of expertise, the engineering students aimed for process perfection and exceptional product quality, while the business students worked to make the product marketable and produced efficiently enough to allow for competitive pricing.
The tension was just another element to manage long distance. “With collaboration comes conflict,” says Adya. “There is a lot of uncertainty in the real world, and [students] need to learn to react to situations thoughtfully,” even when collaboration extends across an ocean.
Read coverage in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of the Marquette-Glasgow Caledonian collaboration.
As someone who had never been abroad and never interacted meaningfully with residents of another country, Howard had much to learn from working with his Scottish peers. “Instead of going into a meeting with my own predetermined ideas, I’m now more open-minded and ready to adapt and learn from different people and their experiences,” Howard says. “The Scottish students brought a lot to the table that I would not have considered.”
Another key to his team’s success was Adya, whom Howard describes as
a “firefighter,” always there to help the students address and extinguish any communication problems or other issues that arose.
Though she could have had a graduate assistant manage the team’s cross- Atlantic video-conference sessions and the reflections that followed them, she committed to being there herself. “In a project like this, things can always fall apart — technology, team assignments, calendar coordination. We never engaged in a blame game … and focused on what needed to change going forward,” she explains. “We maintained a good sense of humor even when we had fiascoes, as we did.”
To learn more about career-altering experiences like Mason’s, read the stories of Thomas, Alyssa, and Charlie.
