This book's journey started a long time ago, in a classroom in a small town called Dole, in France. When I was in primary school, from age six to age eleven, I was extremely shy and spent a lot of time observing my classmates. As I was watching my friends work on school projects in groups, I noticed how certain groups of children seemed to always complete their class projects on time, while others were always late or needed help from the teacher. At the time, I didn’t really understand why this happened, but I was certainly very interested in these dynamics.

A few years later, as I started university, me and my fellow students often had to work in groups to complete work assignments that were part of our curriculum. Again, I quickly noticed that these research projects were completed earlier and scored better grades when completed by certain groups of students, while other groups of students were often late and scored lower grades. I wasn’t quite sure what ‘magic' made some teams work better than others, but I was fascinated by my observations. The best teams were not just made up of smarter students; in fact, some of the best teams had some students that were only average as individuals. Likewise, some of the worst performing teams had some excellent students in them, so a team's success was not linked to the quality of each individual.

Shortly after university, I started working for a few technology companies in London, and I was curious to see if companies had figured out how to make all teams perform well at the same time. Instead, I was shocked to see that each team had their own way of operating and that each department could produce completely different results from one another, with some exceeding their targets and some struggling with their targets. For example, in one company, which was a software vendor, the sales team had not hit the sales target for the last three quarters and had a high employee turnover; in contrast, the software engineering team consistently shipped new software updates and new software features on time, with excellent customer feedback and almost no employee attrition. These differences in team performance from one team to another were consistent among all organizations I worked with. When I asked around as to what management principles managers were using, I only received vague answers, and it appeared that most managers and team leaders were not following any specific method.

Although I learnt a few principles about team management during my time working for technology organizations, I still felt like something was missing in the way people were being managed. I continued to work for a few other technology companies and went on to watch team after team never quite reach their full potential. Some of the teams I worked for had a very difficult culture, whereby team members, including myself, didn’t feel safe to contribute to new ideas without fear of being ridiculed or penalized.

At that point, it became clear to me that I should start my own firm offering consultations to organizations and speak about a method to improve team management. As I started receiving an increasing number of requests for consultations with regard to team management and culture, I realized that the demand for creating better workplaces where teams and organizations thrive was very strong. During the first year, I received many messages from employees who were feeling disengaged at work and disconnected from their team, excluded by their boss, or even considering leaving their organization. I also received many requests from managers who confessed that they didn’t know how to create the right environment for their people to thrive.

It was becoming clear that there was a real need for better team management systems, so I decided to write a book focusing on inclusion in the workplace, and I had many speaking engagements on that topic. Demand for my work exceeded my expectations as I started to speak more globally, including for firms headquartered in North America, Europe, and even Asia. Then Covid-19 happened. The Covid pandemic created a revolution in the workplace. It was bigger than the introduction of emails, and bigger than cloud adoption: it is called ‘hybrid work’, and it changed the way teams function in a post-Covid economy through new technologies and social dynamics. Only the teams that are mastering culture are thriving in hybrid work. I became convinced that I should write a book to help team managers learn how to build world-class hybrid teams that produce great results consistently through fostering a strong culture.

Unlike my previous book, this one focuses on how to make a team successful in a hybrid work environment by focusing on the culture element. Over the past 18 months, I have observed what successful teams do to consistently perform well in a flexible work environment, with some team members working from home, some team members working in the office, and some team members alternating between the two. I have worked very closely with many clients, and together we have identified a certain framework that makes a team successful when working in a distributed environment. All the learnings that I share in this book are based on my own observations, having worked with hundreds of people working in teams since the start of Covid-19. ‘I also share observations on what makes the best teams succeed in a hybrid work environment, drawn from my experience of working in a flexible working environment during my own career, and what I have learned from a few years of working in hybrid teams.

My sincere hope is that you enjoy reading this book and you find some helpful strategies that will help you build, nurture, and retain a world-class team in a hybrid work environment. Ultimately, my goal is to help create workplaces where people and organizations thrive. Whether you are a CEO, HR professional, team leader, or entrepreneur, and whether you work at a small business, mid-size organization, or large enterprise, my wish is that this book will help you to build the world-class team that you are capable of building, and create a workplace where your people and your organization are successful and productive.

My Personal Journey as a Multicultural Digital Nomad

As I started writing this book, I reflected on my own journey and what led me to write about what makes a team successful when it is geographically distributed. In many ways, my personal and professional journey has given me a lot of experience that is extremely relevant to this book. To start with, I have a history of living in different countries and speaking different languages. As a child, I grew up in France, and I spent most of my summer holidays in Germany, speaking German and hanging out with our German friends. My dad had kept in touch with his German friend from school, and each summer I would spend a few weeks in Germany, learning the local culture and getting to know the German lifestyle. In my early adulthood, I moved to Italy, where I spent three years working at a company in Genoa. I learnt the Italian language, I discovered Italian culture, and I also moved in with an Italian man, who eventually became my husband. In time, I moved to the United Kingdom (London), where I got to practice my English language; I also learnt the British culture, and I became familiar with the British way of life. Having lived and worked in three different countries, I quickly learnt that to be successful at working with people from different cultures, it is critical to have a strong cultural awareness. If I had been behaving with my London team the same way I had been behaving with my team in Genoa, I would not have been as successful. The unwritten rules of culture play a key role in how teams communicate, give and receive feedback, and perform.

The second experience that has helped me write this book is that I have worked for many years ‘on the road'. As a head of marketing, I was often managing tradeshow and industry event sponsorship and presence for my employers, meaning that I was frequently travelling for work, out of the office for several days at a time. These business trips, which were often abroad, meant working remotely, and I learnt how to successfully work with a team even when in a different location. The challenges of working from different locations are not the same as for those working in the same office. For instance, remote workers are missing out on a lot of ‘water cooler conversations' that happen organically in the office, and as a result, they tend to be less aware of the dynamics around decisions. To an extent, remote workers must work twice as hard to communicate with different stakeholders to keep up with the unofficial dynamics. Because most decisions taken in the organization are the result of multiple, unofficial chats that tend to happen face-to-face, in between meetings, remote workers must work hard to stay in the know of all the water cooler chats. In many ways, working remotely for so long has taught me strategies that I now use to build successful teams in a hybrid work environment. A lot of this is down to education and awareness and is about teaching managers practical steps to create the right environment for a world-class hybrid team.

My hope is that my personal and professional experiences as a multicultural digital nomad will help you uncover how to manage your distributed team successfully. It is my goal that managers, HR professionals, entrepreneurs, and business leaders attract, nurture, and retain the best talent for their distributed teams by putting culture at the centre of everything they do, so that people and organizations thrive in a hybrid world.