Cross Cultural Fluency

Are you cross culturally fluent? We all think that we understand what
is happening out there in the world and with a growing sense of
globalisation we are all coming into contact with more people that are
not the same. The idea of sameness and difference is a big factor in
people’s identities but it is increasingly important to both live your
identity – but also to have a resilience in being able to suspend
judgement – so that you can get business done.

The world of work has changed. You may be outsourcing your work to a
office-work centre in some other country and find yourself collaborating
and working together on ideas for markets that neither of you have ever
worked in.

Gone are the days where companies can afford to work in a homogenous
way and where everyone sits on the same floor and can walk across to
each other and work through issues. Skills are simply scarce and people
combine in new ways to work together on common purposes and vision. This
integrated work phenomena is both fuelled by the growing adoption of
technology and also the increased costs of global travel and the
ever-growing nature of global corporations that chase growth across the
world.

Virtual teams come together and need to adapt very quickly to very
different work styles and methodologies that are followed in different
markets. What may seem obvious for you may work very differently in
another place. What seems commonplace to you may not exist in another
market.

To operate in this new world requires new organisational and
individual competencies including surprisingly a lot of spiritual and
emotional intelligence. There is an old saying that it is hard to know
others if you do not know yourself. When starting to interact with
clients, partners, suppliers and decision makers from other cultures you
soon realise that you are in fact different in ways that you did not
understand before. This is true also for companies in that the corporate
identity and culture becomes the defining factor – much more so than
where you come from and how you grew up. It is also true for
individuals, as you may have to learn to suspend judgement and assert
yourself in unexpected ways to achieve outcomes that came very naturally
previously.

Some people thrive on this change and many people just withdraw into
their own worlds and insist that people deal with them as they are.
While the jury is out on which team will win – it is more likely that
cultural fluency will define the winners. It is unfortunately not that
easy and as it is important to build language fluency – so there is a
new idea of building skill in culture – which translates as cultural
fluency.

So ask yourself if you are indeed fluent in the cultures of the
world? Can you translate between that which is believed and understood
in one culture and realise that it is not the same in another
environment, while capitalising on it? These skills are rare but you can
learn a lot from programmes that expose you to new ways of thinking and
that develop your competencies in this area.

The differences between people play out in the workplace in subtle
ways but often have massive consequences. We often think that we have
agreed, only to find out later that one person’s “Yes” is another
persons’ “I’ll think about it” and for another person it means “I’ll say
yes now and we will see what happens later” while for another person it
may mean “Definitely not no – but I don’t think it will work”. We often
ignore the subtleties of agreement and disagreement, the differences in
approaching conflict and how to deal with what remains unsaid. How do we
get past these hurdles? There are clear techniques that can be used
including agreeing on how tasks will be defined – what deadlines mean
and to have a discussion about work-styles. This is why more companies
are spending time on “socialisation” of issues and getting to know each
other on a social and personal level. When you are in a high performance
environment you may need to understand how the other person reacts under
pressure and also how the cultural variables enter into the equation.
There are also issues of language and cultural biases that may not be
obvious in your day to day interactions – but can be the difference
between closing the deal and not.

A big challenge in cross-cultural fluency is stereotyping. We may
think that all people of a certain race, creed or origin has specific
characteristics. Yet every person on earth is unique and it is only in
understanding the strengths that a particular person can bring to an
environment that we create a new appreciate for the contribution of each
person to a collective whole. This requires you to learn to look past
barriers of language, development, history, race and many more – and to
look at the person behind it. This idea of moving past the external
experience of a person to an inner experience is often called
relationship mindfulness, caring or just reaching out for the humanity
in ourselves. Interestingly, this idea entered into the mainstream when
studies showed that there is better results in firms when people are
engaged and these days companies are spending a lot more time talking
about individual, team, leadership and customer engagement and even more
intensely about finding our common humanity in business.

The people that spend a lot of time engaging with people from
different cultures develop a way to communicate and through regular
practice and become fluent in understanding various differences.
Culturally sensitive people develop an ability to learn about other
people without stereotyping and cultural masters go on to harness these
differences to make the most out of the creativity that is unlocked
through different cultures.

One of the best ways to learn about other cultures is to become
curious? What makes me different from others? What do I know about my
own culture? What excites me, how do I relate to others? What prejudices
do I have and where do these come from? This is not always an easy task
but well worth the journey.

In the end you can still be yourself – but improving your skill in
relating to others may make all the difference.