COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP – COLLBORATION ACROSS MULTUCULTURAL SUTUATION:

Culture is basically a set of shared values that a group holds. Each culture has rules that its members learn at an early age, and few of us are aware of how these rules influence our thinking, our behavior, and our judgment of others. That's why dealing with cultural differences is so challenging.

Here are four basic guidelines to help meet that challenge. Become more aware of your own cultural preferences. During a teleconference with clients in South America, I mentioned I'd been invited to a party that was scheduled from 5:00 to 10:00 PM. Hearing that all the people on the call started to laugh. One woman finally asked, how can anyone possibly know when a party will be over?

In the US, Europe and Japan  people treat time as a commodity that can be bought, sold, saved, wasted, or spent. I didn't realize how odd my cultural concept of time might be in parts of the world where time is more of a flow, and where a party or a business meeting simply ends when it ends.

Bring cultural conflicts into the open. For example, most of the international organizations I consult with conduct their global meetings in English. This often results in code switching, where participants in remote locations switch back to their native language in private conversations during the meeting.

When that happens, the English speakers report feeling ignored and dismissed. One team's approach to that conflict was a frank discussion of how difficult it was for those who weren't as fluent in English to keep up. And on the other side, how exclusionary it felt to be left out of the conversation.

Bringing the issue into the open resulted in a compromise in which time was set aside for one private conversation per meeting, after which the remote team would give a brief summary of what was said. Co-create a team culture. Despite different cultural perspectives, your team needs to agree on guidelines for a team culture that would best support your project.

This agreement can then be turned into a document that's given to everyone for reference. The goal here is not to make one cultural approach right and another wrong, but to co-create an approach that will be effective for this particular team.

Assume positive intent. From time to time, members of your team, and you, are going to act in ways that are potentially offensive to another culture. I know I have. But my international clients have been extremely generous in overlooking my cultural mistakes by graciously assuming I meant well. Your team would be wise to adopt the same attitude.

Learning to collaborate cross-culturally is a vital skill in today's business environment. Not only because more teams have global participants, but also because the population in our local organizations is getting more diverse. Keep these guidelines in mind and you'll increase your cross-cultural effectiveness.