Abstract:

The presentation shares the experience of leading international projects during consecutive project periods, parts of which partially coincided with the Global pandemic. Principles of maintaining a good group dynamics, positive atmosphere and motivation inside the team, while at the same time staying true to the course and achieving planned goals and final results will be analysed. The challenges and solutions of leading international teams with culturally different management styles will be discussed, and the products and outcomes of our cooperation will be presented.

As is known from literature on management and leadership, there are in broad terms two main schools: one that focuses on management and hierarchical arrangement of work ( mostly prevelant in Eastern Europe, Northern-America, Finland) - efficiency, measurability, results and deadlines are important. The leader sets the goals and seals the deals, is responsible for results and the outcome of the work. "Efficient work, less talk" could be the slogan. Scandinavian countries, including e.g. Sweden, have rather tended to follow the "Consensus model". Each person in the process is important. Meetings can take hours. Possible scenarios and workers´ feelings in connection to them are discussed. Work culture, and organisation culture are a broad area of research giving valuable insights both into the arrangement of work, leadership as well as the national psyche, credos and may-be - illusions. Joining thus economy and management-related discipline questions with the domain of Cultural Studies, ehtnology and Political Studies.

In management and leadership it is essential to choose the right management style in order to guarantee that the members of the group feel themselves to be listened to, taken seriously, but also to enable everyone to have a say and enable people to make contributions that follow their values. In our international cooperation, we have focused on keeping both the product focused goal: timeline, result, interim deadlines, equal workshare, on the one hand, and process focused goal: following participants´ values and considering their higher academic and personal development goals, on the other hand. We may call it a symbiosis of the Estonian and Scandinavian leadership styles. The presentation and the ensuing article will analyse the work process through a) its different constituent parts and b) principles behind the work rationale that we have tried to follow.

In addition to a relevant literature review on the above, we present an analysis of the communication strategies and styles during the actual work process with a team consisting of representatives from both managerial/ leadership/ communication styles. This action research ( our cooperation is still ongoing in next projects) sheds lights on the differences and similarities in both the hierarchical and Consensus-culture, analyses the possible challenges, and the ways of overcoming these. As part of the cooperation under scrutiny fell under the Global Pandemic with extra stringent conditions, it gives us an even more "lichpin" view, we hope.

Keywords:

Experience Leadership, International projects, International Cooperation, Cultural Diversities in management style, Creating joint learning products.