Building Credible Multicultural Teams
The workshop that I am attending right now assumes that the team you want to build is firmly established in the context of one culture – the culture of the people with whom you are seeking to share the gospel. Therein lies my problem. The teams I am most concerned about operate in international or multicultural contexts. So the “corporate culture” is not well defined. This confusion can result in frustration in the least, and more likely attrition that could be prevented.
My “take away” for this day is that we need appropriate orientation to (new) members both to different cultural systems (for communication, personal space, directness, conflict resolution, etc) as well as to our preferred corporate culture. And since we have not really attempted to define a preferred corporate culture (we have just grown up within the context of middle class American culture) that means we need to take the time to think through what our corporate culture should be so that we can be effective over the coming years!
For example, we discussed the concept of high context vs low context communication systems. A high context communication system means that you need to understand lots of context in order to make sense of the communication. In a low context system, the message is explicit enough that you do not need much context to understand the intended meaning. There is a good example of the use of high context communication in an article at beyondintractability.org. (Look about half way down the article in the section entitled “Combining Starting Points:” I don’t know whether the site as a whole is good or not. This article has a good example of high context communication, though.)
We also talk about direct vs. indirect communication styles. A person coming from a subculture in America that normally uses indirect communication can feel abused by a person who is operating in a more direct communication style. Conversely the direct person may never understand the point the indirect communicator is trying to make.
Simply learning that other people use different communication strategies (and sometimes one individual will use different strategies in different contexts) can help to diffuse communication difficulties. And training and orientation is a big part of my current responsibilities.