The right way to collaborate with international teams

You know that sinking feeling when you're presenting to a screen full of blank cameras? Nobody wants to come on screen. You feel completely alone, anxiety creeping in as you realize you've got to continue this presentation without any audience feedback

They're disengaged. Stonewalled.

Now imagine that happening every single time you show up for an international enablement session. Doesn't matter the topic. Doesn't matter who's presenting. Same situation, every time.

Why international enablement felt impossible

That was our reality at Instructure for far too long. And let me tell you, it was the epitome of the pit of despair. But here's the thing – we found our way out. And I want to share that journey with you because if you're struggling to connect with international teams, you're not alone. More importantly, there's hope.

Let me paint you a picture of where we started. At Instructure (we're the company behind Canvas LMS), we had the classic SaaS story playing out. High market penetration in the US? Check. Low market penetration internationally? Also check.

We had local boots-on-the-ground teams across our global regions who were smart, scrappy, and had high potential. We had a really competitive product that was displacing competitors left and right in North America. So why weren't we seeing the same success internationally?

The truth about international differences

The actual buying and selling nuances? The way people start to engage with a learning management system? They're wildly different depending on where you are in the world.

Our regionally-based go-to-market teams knew this inside and out. The enablement team had to come to terms with it. Fast.

It felt like this...

It felt like standing on opposite sides of a chasm. We were trying to get enablement across the gap, but it just wasn't landing. Course completion rates in our LMS were abysmal. Sometimes managers weren't adopting or assigning courses at all. There was very little trust. There was even less alignment.

For my team, it was disorienting and demotivating. We knew we had to do something different. We had to fix this complete lack of a relationship with our audience and build something better.

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Three opportunities that changed everything

When I look back on that time, I can pinpoint three specific opportunities that shifted the narrative. These helped us lean into the people side of enablement, which is ultimately what this is all about.

Though I'm talking about this through the lens of international stakeholders, these principles apply whenever you're facing resistance in your enablement efforts.

Opportunity 1: Building genuine trust

Trust. It's such a simple word, but building it across continents and cultures is complex.

We started with two approaches: availability and advocacy.

Availability meant showing them someone was listening. At the time, we weren't a big team. Just me plus three individual contributors. I left one person to focus on onboarding, and the other three of us each took a region. We became the single point of contact for that region.

And then? We just spent time with people.

I know what you're thinking... that sounds like a massive time investment. You've got big business goals, revenue targets, and enablement to deliver. You're right. But we decided it was crucial to set aside that time for relationship building. Without it, those walls would never come down.

Advocacy took a different form. I probably drove people crazy because they'd start hearing the same phrases coming out of my mouth in every meeting with product marketing, marketing, RevOps, you name it.

I got really good at saying things like:

"Have you thought about LatAm?"

"What's Harrison – our GM for APAC – gonna say when I tell him we're not gonna have that product on local servers?"

I coached my team to do the same. We became relentless advocates, making sure other teams kept our international colleagues top of mind. Even though the rest of the company hadn't had that cultural revolution yet, we were going to stand up and be those people who built trust.

One watershed moment came when our APAC team had specific concerns about product. We had a new CRO who hadn't made it out to APAC yet, but everyone was coming in for our customer kickoff. I made it my mission to get him in a room with the APAC team.

Opportunity 2: Understanding and embracing culture

Once we flipped that trust lever, we could move on to our next hurdle: culture.

Obviously, there's the culture of where you live (the rituals, the norms). But there's also culture that's specific to the people working in an office. What I discovered was that the culture in our EMEA office, our APAC office, and our LatAm office were each unique unto themselves. And they were all very different from our North American culture.

We needed to make understanding and respecting those cultures part of everything we did. Here's how:

1 - Time zone shifts might sound trivial, but hear me out. We weren't just meeting with them at the end of our day because it was convenient for us (even though that meant 7 AM for them). We actually made an effort to meet them in their time zone. Yes, that meant I'd meet with someone at 9 PM my time because I knew they'd be awake and at their best. The feedback I'd get would be worth it.

We also adopted habits like scheduling Slack messages and emails for their working hours. Not every one of our international teams worked this way, but we wanted to show we were hearing them. We understood that getting interrupted during personal time with Slacks and emails was a source of frustration.

2 - Representation became crucial too. Our regional teams needed to see themselves in our materials. They weren't engaging with our North American courses because those courses didn't represent their market, their competitors, or the way their customers were buying.

So we integrated them into our course creation process. Rolling out a new services course? Great! Let's get the APAC and EMEA services leads to help build it. Let's create distinct modules that represent their reality.

We also went out of our way to find top performers and respected thought leaders in each region to feature as SMEs. No more defaulting to the local North American expert for everything. And we stopped using North American examples exclusively, even in our North American content. We made sure international customer examples appeared everywhere.

3 - Pattern matching was controversial at first. The teams didn't trust me on this one. I looked for similarities across our international teams because nobody needs to be an island. So at company events, instead of creating more silos by putting international teams in three separate rooms, we brought them together.

They thought I was absolutely crazy. But at the end of the event? "That was the best thing ever," they said. "They have the same problems we have."

It allowed everyone to have that lightbulb moment: even though you're not at the corporate office, you still have advocates across the company. People experiencing the same things. People who can be part of your community.

Opportunity 3: Creating lasting alignment

Trust and culture laid the groundwork, but alignment made everything sustainable.

We adopted a global-first perspective. Everything we build from an enablement perspective now starts global. We're not building from a North American perspective, or a LatAm perspective, or an APAC perspective. It's global first, then regionalized.

We've gotten good at avoiding what I call "lazy mistakes." Playing Jeopardy with a global audience? That's a lazy mistake. Jeopardy doesn't resonate outside the US. Nobody knows what it is, and they definitely don't care who Ken Jennings is. Using only North American examples? Lazy mistake. Anything that's clearly going to alienate part of your audience? We learned to spot those and rise above them.

The biggest change came when our executive committee started incentivizing the whole company and driving OKRs that would lead to accountability for international success. It got integrated into our AOP (Annual Operating Plan). This is the first year I've seen the full AOP sheet with international called out as distinct segments.

Once you start driving forward, other organizations come with you. There's momentum. You don't feel like you're the only ones chasing this dream anymore.

What success looks like now

The transformation has been remarkable. We've expanded our enablement team with dedicated people in Australia, the Philippines, and EMEA. Every day, they're connecting with individual contributors on the frontline as well as with teams and leaders. We also have a dedicated channel onboarding person. Now we're speaking the language in region, and it's enabling us to continue building that trust and alignment across the organization.

But here's what really matters: those blank camera screens? They're full of faces now. Those stonewalled sessions? They've become interactive workshops where people actually want to participate. The pit of despair? We climbed out, and we're not going back.

Your turn to build better international relationships

If you're facing similar challenges with international teams, start with these questions:

• Are you truly available to your international colleagues, or are you expecting them to adapt to your schedule and style?
• Are you advocating for them in rooms where they're not present?
• Does your content represent their reality, or are you asking them to translate everything through a North American lens?

The journey from the pit of despair to genuine international collaboration isn't quick. For us, it's been a three-year journey and counting. But every step, every late-night meeting, every advocating conversation, every redesigned course, has been worth it.

Because at the end of the day, enablement isn't about the content we create or the sessions we run. It's about the people we serve. And when those people are spread across the globe, working in different cultures with different challenges, our job is to meet them where they are.

Not where we wish they were. Not where it's convenient for us. But exactly where they are.

The good news? You don't have to stay in the pit of despair. There's a way out. And it starts with recognizing that your international teams aren't just an extension of your domestic operations – they're unique, valuable, and deserving of enablement that truly serves them.

Trust me, the view from outside the pit? It's worth the climb.

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