For succeeding in the global economy today, several companies are relying on a geographically scattered workforce. They build teams that offer the best functional expertise from around the globe, integrated with in-depth, local knowledge of the most encouraging markets. They are produced on the benefits of international multiplicity, bringing together people from many cultures with varied work experiences and different perspectives on strategic and organizational challenge them. All this helps the multinational companies to compete in the current business environment.
Benefits of Cross-Cultural Collaboration
- Diverse cultural views will inspire creative thinking and drive innovation.
- Local market information and insight build a business more competitive and profitable.
- Cultural sensitivity, insight, and local information means higher quality, targeted marketing.
- Recruiting from a culturally diverse talent pool allows an organization to attract and retain the best talent.
- A diverse skills base allows an organization to offer a broader and flexible range of products and services.
- Diverse groups are more productive and perform better.
- Higher chance for personal and professional growth
Challenges of Cross-Cultural Collaboration
- Colleagues from some cultures may be less likely to interact.
- Integration across cross-cultural teams are often robust in the face of prejudice or negative cultural stereotypes.
- Professional communication is often misinterpreted or tough to understand across languages and cultures Navigating visa requirements, employment laws, and also the cost of accommodating work necessities are often troublesome.
- Different understandings of professional etiquette
- Conflicting working styles across teams
- Getting Cross-Cultural Teamwork Right
So how do you negotiate those variations and discover common ground?
Through an in-depth analysis of global organizations and teams, I’ve found that learning, understanding, and teaching are three vital factors — on both sides.
Mutual learning
Global teammates who learn from each other and expect to do so, level the cooperative playing field by sharing the risks and vulnerabilities associated with them having to adapt to established norms. They absorb cultural knowledge and behaviors through careful listening and observation, raise questions to fill in contextual blanks, and can relate to one another on a personal level.
Of course, trust is a crucial component, cultivated mostly through shared interests. Once you establish trust, you start to feel a shared sense of responsibility for bridging cultural gaps and faith in your teammates to do their part. You begin to care about each other. Your daily interactions become more comfortable. In short, you map out a plan for working together more effectively.
The three learning ways — absorbing, asking, and relating — are interconnected. Not only will relating to others offer additional opportunities for questioning and incorporating, but incorporating provides you more experiences to ask about and more ways that to connect with people who have different backgrounds and perspectives. You and your teammates could even begin to adopt some of the new behaviors you are learning about as you work together more closely, making it easier to relate and collaborate.
Mutual understanding
If learning is about discovering what others do, understanding is about grasping why they are doing it. You try to get a hold on the objective that holds a set of cultural behaviors together. At the same time, you and your teammates reflect on how your practices and accomplishments fit into the cultural frameworks you have identified.
This requires suspending judgment. For several global collaborators, moments of confusion and frustration are common, mainly when both sides are operating under terribly different cultural expectations about work practices. Before you draw conclusions about others’ intentions or motivations, you should gather more information about their behaviors, using the same tools (absorbing, asking, and relating) that helped you determine them in the first place. As your cross-cultural relationships develop, accepting differences will be equally important. You will have to abandon many assumptions from your own culture. That’s usually what people mean after they talk about “embracing differences.”
Mutual teaching
In addition to learning and understanding how others do things, you can help familiarize collaborators with your culture’s norms — and that they can do the same for you. As you would expect, this process involves instructing, which often takes the form of advising, educating, or teaching. But it also entails facilitating — primarily, serving as a cultural broker or intermediary. Suppose you are a native of one country but have expertise operating in another. In that case, you'll be able to bridge the gap between those two worlds by noticing when teammates interpret things differently and helping each other see wherever the other is wherefrom to resolve or avoid misunderstandings.
In a facilitator’s role, you’ll act as a mediator, promoting collaboration during a particular scenario — but you may also, more broadly, enable either side to expand their cultural understanding. for instance, you would possibly enlighten colleagues in the united states how they can better hear and understand Chinese teammates while also showing the Chinese teammates a way to “make themselves heard.”
Wrap up
Finding mutual understanding with global teammates is an iterative process. Once you move out of your comfort zone and into a different cultural context, you may actively watch and listen in “take it all in” mode. And as you gain a deeper understanding of teammates’ actions, and help them grasp behaviors they aren’t familiar with, you will still watch and listen for cues — because no one is a mind reader, even on home turf.
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