Global teams: soup or salad?

Soup or Salad

I once had a conversation with a friend back in my AIESEC days about the difference between a soup and a salad. Global is a soup, every ingredient blended into one flavour. International is a salad, a new and powerful combination where you can still see and recognise each ingredient.

That image has stayed with me, because it sits at the heart of every global initiative: the balance between scalability / standardisation and local ownership / originality. Helping client teams find that balance is core to my work.

And yes, this effectively assumes, and sometimes accepts, that things would not be the same everywhere, for many understandable reasons: different starting points and local dynamics.

For many organisations, global or regional, there are always good reasons for standardisation: efficiency, consistency, scalability. But when things are centrally designed, the challenge isn't only practical, it's about whether people feel it's theirs.

Take the customer relationship model, a classic example. Different cultures have different ways of building and managing relationships, and some are more used to working with a CRM than others. A good customer experience can mean very different things to different people.

Sometimes people don't resist the standard (e.g. using the central CRM) because it's wrong; they resist it because it isn't theirs and they have not been given the opportunity to shape it. Of course, not everything is open to adaptation. Some standards have to hold, for safety, compliance, or simple fairness across markets. But even a non-negotiable standard lands better when people understand why it exists and have a say in how it is applied. Where do local initiatives fit in? How do we build ownership towards something centrally decided? A continued commitment to finding that balance, intentionally and visibly, is what sustains the sometimes fragile alignment.

In practice, that commitment can show up as three simple but intentional habits.

Globalise proven local practices consistently

Excellence is not about what is written down but what is executed and experienced, though we can express and share it more consistently. Ongoing co-refinement doesn't only strengthen ownership; it builds in continuous learning. When something works well in one place, encouraging others to adopt it is a natural next step. And this internal "marketing" of good practices is a form of recognition.

Acknowledge diversity intentionally

Getting to know each ingredient, to stay with the salad, takes deliberate effort. Make time to learn about each other's local business practices, and explore how they might create tension AND opportunity within the system. This conversation doesn't need to be frequent. Once every three months gives the team time to prepare and digest. Surfacing and addressing these differences is an affordable way to strengthen understanding and embed alignment over time.

Translate safe space meaningfully

It sounds basic, but language difference is still a very real barrier, even though AI can translate faster than ever. We're not asking a non-English-speaking team to express their idea once. We're asking them to engage in discussion, sometimes even to advocate or debate, with their peers or their seniors.

A "safe" space can look and feel different from place to place. Not everyone in a global exercise is used to the "chaos" and dynamics of a global team. In some cultures, debating with or challenging one's seniors openly can be deeply uncomfortable. For example, asking for "improvement": some may hear a request for criticism, while others see it as a neutral push to make things better, not people.

Small steps can help. Allow people to contribute anonymously, or ahead of time rather than live. Where possible, circulate materials with translation. Even when AI makes that easy, it's a small signal that different languages, and the people who speak them, are respected.

So, what do you do to keep this micro-alignment happening all the time?