Intercultural Training? Ugh, That's So 20th Century!
What Great Intercultural Support Looks Like in the 21st Century.
Learning — any kind of learning, including intercultural learning — is usually a process of accessing information, and information can come from many sources: an informal discussion with a mentor, coach or colleague; through a formal, student-teacher, classroom experience; reading a book or online information; or working through a self-paced learning module. While providing information that may be organized toward understanding, none of these modalities produce behavioral change.
Training, on the other hand, including intercultural training, provides the opportunity for real behavioral change, which is precisely what is needed when working across cultures. Merely accessing information, or learning the facts about working abroad, does not ensure productive, culturally-appropriate behaviors. Individuals need to know how to translate the intercultural “head” knowledge they may have gained (through a class, a discussion, a coaching session, or an online tool) into on-the-ground, immediately implementable behaviors that work for them to accelerate their success with their colleagues in other cultures.
Good cultural training? That’s so 20th-century. Great cultural support that provides learning, training and after-training support is what you need now.
Training builds on learning, and includes all the modalities of learning, plus the very important additional opportunity to practice new culturally productive behaviors, receive feedback, be coached and test out, fail and re-strategize. In short, individuals working across cultures (and that means all of us in the 21st century) need both “learning experiences” for knowledge and “training experiences” for real skills development. And of all the skills required for intercultural competency, the ability to communicate across cultures — to verify that what is being said by all is understood correctly by all, so that critical, trust-based relationships can develop — is the most important skill for global managers. This skill cannot be learned, and no amount of reading information provides it; it can be developed, however, through training.
The Dilemma: Old-School Training vs New-School Learning
Here’s how we used to do it: Old-school cultural training, if done well, provided both learning and skills development at a price, from an ROI perspective, that was more than worth it. The cost of traditional intercultural training is less than half of 1% of the total cost of failed assignments (without cultural training, an average 30% of expatriate early return across all industries; with cultural training, an average 6%).
If done poorly, however, old-school cultural training provided just the up-front learning piece without the skills development. In today’s world, where technology can more cheaply and easily produce the up-front learning, we don’t need to pay dearly for that piece in traditional training programs. As we say in the training business: “Training ain’t talking.” A “teacher,” providing information in a traditional classroom, is an inefficient and expensive way of providing essential intercultural facts, especially in today’s world of technology-provided information, unless he or she is also a “trainer,” providing the critical skills-development opportunity that technology cannot efficiently deliver.
Here’s how we can do it: With the advent of technology, we are now able to access intercultural information, and get involved in both formal and informal learning relationships with mentors, teachers, colleagues and coaches. If done correctly, this can provide the learning part of the formula more efficiently than traditional classroom learning. But it doesn’t provide the skills-development part. Formal training can provide the skills-development side, but may not be the most resource-efficient way of providing the up-front learning piece. Fortunately, we have the ability today to deliver the up-front intercultural learning piece efficiently and inexpensively (but only if done correctly), and the skills-building training experience.
So, how are we doing with that? From my 30-plus years of intercultural training experience, I’d say we’re about halfway to the magic formula of “learning plus training.” Too often, technology-based intercultural learning programs are seen as the solution, because they are cheaper than training. But remember, you get what you pay for: information access that does not provide skills, and certainly does not provide the important global communication skills that training delivers. Additionally, providing access to information does not ensure that users actually access the information or understand it when they do. So, access to information is certainly cheaper these days than paying a trainer to “talk” it, but there is no guarantee that users really use it or learn from it, and we know for a fact that this kind of learning does little to produce any of the required intercultural communication skills global managers need. On the other side, classic intercultural training, if done well, provides up-front learning, plus the critical-skills development piece.
And the Most Critical Skill …
As we said, it’s the ability to communicate globally. So, let’s unpack this concept of “global communications skills” in order to discover its specific elements. We can start with language, the most apparent aspect of communications. While the language of business is still the language of the customer, the language of global communications is English, but an English that changes as we go around the world. The ability to manage Global
English is critical, yet many global managers never even focus on it.
A US-based client working in Taiwan was furious when his Taipei associate promised to send an item “ASAP,” and it didn’t arrive for several weeks. When confronted with the American’s frustration, the fellow in Taipei was deeply wounded, saying, “But I told you I would send it at my earliest convenience: if you had needed it sooner, why didn’t you just say that?” A client was stumped when his Indian colleague told him he would “do the needful.” And British-American differences can be the most confounding of all, perhaps because they are least expected: The American at a recent meeting in London suggested “tabling this item,” and the Brits acted as if they had not heard him and commenced with an immediate discussion about it. (“Tabling” an item in British English means to bring it out for discussion; “putting it on the table.”)
But managing Global English and language differences goes deeper than just vocabulary; how to manage accents or differences in tone is also a part of language management. Many US-Americans complain that they cannot understand their Indian associates when they speak English with them, as the Hindi accent is heavy, and they speak English very fast. Same thing for West Indians speaking English. Or Singaporeans speaking English. The fact is, in all cases, English is being spoken at approximately the same speed for all, but the inability to understand the accent makes it sound to the listener as if the other is “speaking too fast.” Some cultures speak softly, as a sign of respect, while others value emotional display as a way to ensure emphasis and clarity. Israelis or Egyptians, for example, might have difficulty “hearing” softer-spoken Indonesians, while Indonesians might be shocked at Israeli and Egyptian “shouting.”
Going deeper still, understanding non-verbals, such as eye contact, facial expressions, degrees of physicality, gestures, and more, is essential to successful global communications. That thumb-to-forefinger, “OK” sign in the US is definitely not OK in Brazil; that “V-for-Victory,” US-American hand gesture, if done palm facing outward, will not work in the UK; a smile in Malaysia probably does not mean that your Malay colleagues are happy, and your indiscriminate use of your left hand in Saudi Arabia will be insulting to your guests in Riyadh. The list goes on. Suffice it to say that a knowledge of these differences, and their culture-specific variations, is necessary for global managers.
But at the deepest level, global communications skills means managing more than language and nonverbal differences: it means being able to successfully modify one’s behaviors in order to respond productively to the deepest cultural value differences that reveal themselves in global communications.
How best to respond to your Japanese associate when their response to your question on a conference call is silence? How must I word my email to a colleague I have not yet met in Brazil in order to get a timely response? And how must the same email be written differently when I send it to my associate in Frankfurt? Don’t my French associates realize that their interruptions of my presentation is unsettling to me, and what can I do to make a successful presentation in Paris? And how must the same presentation be modified when presenting in Seoul? Why is it that when I ask, “does anyone have any questions?” after a presentation in Beijing, no one volunteers, but that when I open my email inbox, I receive many questions from those same meeting participants who wouldn’t ask them at the meeting? What can I do to verify that Raj is telling me everything I need to know about how the project in Delhi is going, and what do I do to ensure that I have all the information I need? Most important, how can I really be sure that Raj and his team have all the information they need in order to complete the project; when I ask, I am always reassured that “all is going well.” What does a senior female global manager need to do to ensure that her professional authority is respected at a meeting in Saudi Arabia, and what kind of behavior does a senior ranking executive in Korea require of the Canadian project manager?
The list here of cultural misunderstandings, miscues and mistakes can be long and painful, but they are all linked to the ability — or not — of global managers to handle the array of expectations surrounding deep cultural value differences, and the “best practice” behaviors that need to be employed in order to manage them successfully. Nothing less than intercultural training — certainly more than mere learning — can provide this ability.
So, what should super-great, over-the-top intercultural support look like? Here are ten things to keep in mind:
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