The events of the Arab Spring stem from a complex set of circumstances that many Westerners may struggle to understand. Yet these events will continue to have a vital ongoing influence on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) business and economic landscape. Companies working in MENA need to develop a clear understanding of what recent events mean for their business and people.

Join moderator John Cutler and Culturewise’s senior Middle-East cultural consultant, Donna Marsh, for The Arab Spring from a Business Perspective, the fourth in our highly successful series of free cultural awareness training webinars.

You will take away an enhanced understanding of the key questions that recent events in the Arab Spring pose for your business, together with a practical route for finding out more about how to respond effectively to these extraordinary and historic events.

The webinar will address the following key questions…

* What political, social, economic and cultural factors underpin the Arab spring?

* What impact will events have on expatriates and international business visitors?

* What are the key ongoing risks and opportunities?

* Where can you learn more about managing your response to the Arab Spring?

Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now by following the link. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/610014416

The good news is that it is possible to design and deliver training that attracts and engages global audiences. Which means you can get the results you want from training that adds value right across the global organisation.

Join me and cross-cultural training expert Laxmi Chaudhry from 3pm to 4pm on Wednesday 8th September for a live, interactive Webinar. You will take away practical hints, tips and strategies for designing and delivering high impact training that engages and enthuses learners from any cultural background. Visit www.gotomeeting.com/register/739445001 to register

I am pleased to provide information on Culturewise’s new programme of open workshops for 2010.

Workshops

Culturewise’s open workshops develop practical skills for working and communicating effectively in global business.

Workshops are delivered by expert cultural awareness trainers and accommodate a maximum of 10 delegates to ensure interactivity and personal attention.

Workshop spaces cost just £395 + VAT per delegate. This price includes materials, handouts, lunch and refreshments.

All workshops take place at our London offices and run from 9.30 to 17.00.

Bookings

To book a place on any of our open workshop call +44 (0) 20 7403 9525 or visit http://www.culturewise.net.

Open workshops are also available for in-house delivery at your company or one-to-one executive coaching. Call +44 (0) 20 7403 9525 for further details.

Doing Business in India: Understanding Indian Business Culture

Overview: ‘Doing Business in India: Understanding Indian Business Culture’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of Indian culture and business culture, and builds practical skills for communicating, working and doing business with Indian colleagues and business contacts.

Who should attend: Anyone with face-to-face or virtual contact with India including expatriate assignees; international executives; global managers; virtual team leaders; negotiators; and global HR and training professionals.

‘Doing Business in India: Understanding Indian Business Culture’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Wednesday, 13th January 2010

Wednesday, 14th April 2010

Wednesday, 14th July 2010

Thursday, 14th October 2010

An Introduction to Cultural Awareness

Overview: ‘An Introduction to Cultural Awareness is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of cultural differences in international business and builds practical cross-cultural communication, work and negotiation skills. The workshop includes real-life case studies and offers opportunities for hands-on practice.

Who should attend: Anyone with international business or work responsibilities including expatriate executives; international managers and leaders; global negotiators; international sales and export staff; and global HR and training professionals.

‘An Introduction to Cultural Awareness’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Thursday, 21st January 2010

Friday, 16th April 2010

Thursday, 15th July 2010

Monday 15th November 2010

Doing Business in China: Understanding Chinese Business Culture

Overview: ‘Doing Business in China: Understanding Chinese Business Culture’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of Chinese culture and business culture, and builds practical skills for communicating, working and doing business with Chinese colleagues, customers, suppliers, and other business contacts.

Who should attend: Anyone with face-to-face or virtual contact with China, including expatriate assignees; international executives; global managers; virtual team leaders; negotiators; and global HR and training professionals.

‘Doing Business in China: Understanding Chinese Business Culture’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Tuesday, 19th January 2010

Tuesday, 11th May 2010

Tuesday, 13th July 2010

Tuesday, 12th October 2010

Managing International and Virtual Teams

Overview: ‘Managing International and Virtual Teams’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of best practice, and practical skills in managing and leading international and virtual teams. The workshop includes case studies and opportunities to apply learning to real-life challenges

Who should attend: Managers, leaders, advisers and members of international and virtual teams, or anyone in international management or project-management roles.

‘Managing International and Virtual Teams’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Friday, 22nd January 2010

Tuesday, 11th May 2010

Friday, 16th July 2010

Tuesday, 16th November 2010

Doing Business in the Middle East: Understanding Middle Eastern Business Culture

Overview:  ‘Doing Business in the Middle East: Understanding Middle Eastern Business Cultures’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of Middle Eastern cultures and business cultures, and builds practical skills for communicating, working and doing business with Gulf States and Middle Eastern colleagues, customers, clients, partners, and other business contacts.

Who should attend: Anyone with face-to-face or virtual contact with the Middle East region, including expatriate assignees; international executives; global managers; virtual team leaders; negotiators; and global HR and training professionals.

‘Doing Business in the Middle East: Understanding Middle Eastern Business Culture’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Monday, 8th February, 2010

Monday, 10th May 2010

Tuesday, 14th September 2010

Thursday, 9th December 2010

Doing Business in Japan: Understanding Japanese Business Culture

Overview: ‘Doing Business in Japan: Understanding Japanese Business Culture’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of Japanese culture and business culture, and builds practical skills for communicating, working and doing business with Japanese colleagues, customers, clients, partners, and other business contacts.

Who should attend: Anyone with face-to-face or virtual contact with Japan, including expatriate assignees; international executives; global managers; virtual team leaders; negotiators; and global HR and training professionals.

‘Doing Business in Japan: Understanding Japanese Business Culture’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Wednesday, 10th March 2010

Wednesday, 16th June 2010

Thursday, 16th September 2010

Tuesday, 7th December 2010

Doing Business in Russia: Understanding Russian Business Culture

Overview: ‘Doing Business in Russia: Understanding Russian Business Culture’ is a one-day, interactive training workshop that develops understanding of Russian culture and business culture, and builds practical skills for communicating, working and doing business with Russian colleagues, customers, clients, partners, and other business contacts.

Who should attend: Anyone with face-to-face or virtual contact with Russia, including expatriate assignees; international executives; global managers; virtual team leaders; negotiators; and global HR and training professionals.

‘Doing Business in Russia: Understanding Russian Business Culture’ open workshops are scheduled at our London training centre on:

Tuesday, 9th March 2010

Thursday, 17th June 2010

Wednesday, 15th September 2010

Wednesday, 8th December 2010

About Culturewise

Culturewise provides an unrivalled range of cultural awareness training, consulting, coaching and publishing solutions that develop the global mind-set, openness, flexibility, cultural understanding and practical skills of organisations, teams and individuals.

Our customers include many of world’s most successful global businesses as well as smaller companies and the public sector.

Recognised as one of the most innovative and fastest-growing companies in our business we operate from our head office and training centre in London, and around the world through a global network of quality-assured associates and training partners.

Contact Us

Culturewise Limited

4^th Floor, Connect House, 16-18 Marshalsea Road, London, SE1 1HL

Phone: +44 (0) 20 7403 9525

Fax: +44 (0) 20 7403 4893

Email: bookings@culturewise.net

www.culturewise.net

Registered in England 3980076

VAT number GB773819391

Terms and conditions

Prices may change at any time without notice. A guaranteed quote will be provided on workshop confirmation.

Terms and conditions, including charges for late cancellations or late payments, apply to all open and in-house training workshops. For full details on our Terms and Conditions please visit www.culturewise.net/terms.

Common problems in regular teams, such as communication, working together, and producing quality results within tight deadlines, are heightened by distance, time zone differences, physical isolation and linguistic and cultural barriers. The result is that global virtual teams often underperform their potential as commitment and trust issues, miscommunication, and a lack of cohesion take their toll.

Here at Culturewise we have a decade’s experience working with many of the world’s leading companies to help virtual teams to meet their full potential – and even outperform face-to-face teams.

One issue we are often faced with is helping virtual team leaders understand the specific challenges they face in managing effective virtual teams. With this in mind I thought it would be useful to share the six major issues of ‘understanding’ that we see as key for effective virtual team leaders.  

First and foremost, leaders need to understand the ‘why’ of the virtual teams they are leading. What purpose do they serve? How do they fit into broader organisation objectives and processes? Only by understanding this can they hope to inspire other team members.

Secondly, leaders need to understand the enemies of successful virtual teams – in other words, the barriers to potential team success. These include things like geography, isolation, time, history, culture and language. It is important for leaders to remember that most of these barriers relate to the way people interact and communicate, and not to the technology they use.

Thirdly, leaders need to understand how the role of virtual team leader differs from that of face-to-face team leader. It is commonly said that successful virtual team leaders spend less time being a boss, and more time being a mentor and coach.

Fourthly, leaders need to understand the nature and complexity of their virtual teams. There are different levels of complexity in different types of virtual teams, and the degree and nature of this complexity impacts on the challenges team leaders will face.   

Fifthly, leaders need to understand that trust, not power, drives leadership success in virtual teams. A good rule of thumb is to work from the assumption that distance breeds mistrust, but effective communication reduces distance.

Finally, team leaders need to understand that the broader organisational culture in which they work can help virtual teams to thrive, or alternatively make success hard to come by. This means understanding how to develop and ‘live’ the right type of organisation.

In my next blog I will look at what these six elements say about the practical skills that effective virtual team leaders need to demonstrate.

John

When clients ask me this question I often find it useful to talk them through a five-step strategy for recognising and overcoming cultural misunderstandings. The strategy, known by the acronym RADAR*, is equally useful where one or both sides involved recognise culture as a factor in the misunderstanding. RADAR stands for

1. Recognise the cultural dimension

2. Analyse what caused it

3. Decide what your options are

4.Act on the best option

5. Review what happened

The following real-life incident, drawn from work with one of my own clients, identifies how both sides involved in a cross-cultural misunderstanding can the RADAR strategy to as a basis to improve the way they work together.

Some years ago a large British company recently merged its London and New York marketing and sales operations. The merger had been designed so as to leave responsibility for sales activities in local markets but to centralise other functions in one or other of the two cities. The result was a typical matrix style management structure, in which many of the staff had two different managers; one local and the other located across the Atlantic. Most contact between the two was by email. In fact, few of the British staff had actually met their US counterparts, and vice-versa. Some weeks into the restructuring, British managers became puzzled to at some strongly negative feedback from British staff towards their US counterparts and managers. Although none of the UK staff could identify any precise incident, the general feeling was that their US counterparts were treating them in a fairly aggressive and dictatorial manner. The US team was perplexed and somewhat defensive when they found out how they were viewed by many London staff. As far as New York was concerned the restructuring had inevitable created confusion about job roles and UK attitudes simply reflected bad feeling about the loss of functions to better-paid New York staff.

1. Recognise the cultural dimension

In this circumstance it might have been easy for the British to draw on stereotypes of Americans as ‘loud and pushy’ to explain what was happening. Similarly, the Americans might simply have assumed the British were ‘negative’ or ‘cold’, or simply that personality clashes were at the root of the problem. In fact, to their credit managers from both New York and London picked up on the fact that each office had radically different interpretations of what was happening, and that these differences were at least partly cultural in origin. It was this acknowledgment of a potential cultural dimension, together with a willingness to deal openly and honesty with the situation, that formed the first step in overcoming and learning from what was taking place.

2. Analyse what lay behind it

At this point the company approached me for some suggestions as to how the company could better understand what was taking place. As always my first action was to try to come up with a full and objective account of the events underpinning the misunderstanding, together with description of the thoughts and feelings of the various people involved. I talked directly to staff on both sides of the Atlantic and it soon became clear there were a range of interlinked issues involved, some of which related to the particular circumstances of the management reorganisation and some of which were potentially cultural. My attention soon turned to one particular aspect of how they two groups communicated with each other. In particular it was possible to draw a contrast between the US team’s preference for ‘direct’ and to-the-point communication, reflected in short emails without little relational content, with a more ‘indirect’ British communication style in which instructions are phrased as polite requests. The US group viewed direct and to-the-point emails, shorn of excessive social niceties as being the most efficient, and therefore the best, way of communicating. The British, anticipating polite requests expressed in a ‘courteous’ way reacted badly to what they perceived as the high-handed attitudes of the US counterparts.

Of course, this type of minor cultural misunderstanding probably happens quite frequently in Anglo-US business interactions. In this particular situation it moved beyond a minor misunderstanding because the management restructuring had created considerable ambiguity and uncertainty on both sides about job roles, responsibilities and seniority. The British, in the absence of any other information and in the presence of uncertainty about their future, were quite ready to believe there US counterparts anted to boss them about. Added in to this explosive brew was the fact that most team-members had not met face-to-face, and thus had not had the chance to develop the kind of personal relationships that would offer a channel to resolve this type of simple misunderstanding.

3. Decide what your options are

Armed with this analysis of the root cause of this misunderstanding, the company managers and I worked to identify a range of options for both resolving this particular issue and, perhaps more importantly, using the misunderstanding as a springboard for learning and development by the individuals involved and the company as a whole. In this incident managers identified a number of potential actions that could resolve the issue. These included, amongst others:

Above and beyond the obvious skills associated with success in overseas assignments, such as flexibility, the ability to speak the local language, and technical competence, I advise clients to look out for evidence that individuals can handle the cultural challenges of an extended assignment overseas effectively. Assessing cross-cultural competence is a complex area and one which requires a certain level of expertise to perform effectively; nevertheless I often begin by suggesting that clients think carefully about sending anyone overseas who exhibits evidence of one of three following broad personal profiles:

Missionaries

Missionaries are individuals who are generally unaware that cultural differences even exist. This might be because they have never left their own culture or met with individuals from different backgrounds, or because they have simply segregated themselves off from others. Brought up amongst people who share the same values, attitudes and behaviours, they simply cannot conceive that others can operate successfully on a completely different value system. The greatest challenge faced by Missionaries on international business assignments is the conflict they experience between their expectations of how business should be conducted, and the reality of how things are really done in the country to which they have been assigned. Faced with this conflict between how things ‘should’ be and the local reality, missionaries often end up classifying their local counterparts as backward, unsophisticated or uneducated. Some missionaries may even see their role as educating locals in the ‘right’ way to do things.

Ex-pats

In contrast to Missionaries, Ex-pats recognise that cultural differences in business practices exist, but believe that their own ways of doing things are (in sometimes ill-defined ways) ‘better’ than those of the host culture. In other words ‘things around here’ are vastly inferior to ‘our ways of doing things’ back home. In the Ex-pat world there is limited space for shades of grey and precious little empathy for the expectations and assumptions of behaviours of people from different cultural. The greatest challenge faced by Ex-Pats on international business assignments is a lack of motivation to treat their assignment overseas as an opportunity for learning or growth. Indeed, because Ex-pats often find the country to which they have been assigned so frustrating, they tend to avoid contact with locals as much as possible. They have few, if any, local friends, and spend most of their private life socialising with people from their own home culture. Long afternoons may be passed, complaining loudly about the perceived failings of the locals.

Global villagers

Global villagers, like Ex-pats, recognise that cultural difference in business etiquette and customs exist. However, unlike ex-pats, global villagers rarely judge local customs to be inferior and may well thoroughly enjoy the long lunches and laid-back local lifestyles associated with certain foreign assignments. What is missing from the Global villager’s perspective is any understanding that cultural differences exists at a deeper level than attitudes towards lunch hours and punctuality. In the Global villager’s world, important deeper differences in core values or basic beliefs about how to conduct business are sidelined or ignored. The greatest challenge faced by Global Villagers on international business assignments is overcoming the belief that ‘people are the same’ wherever you go, and ‘business is business’ wherever you go. Global villagers may, quite correctly, say that everyone on earth is in business to make money, but will blithely ignore differences in the way people go about making money, what ethical standards they work to, what making money means in terms of family and group responsibilities, and who the business is ultimately meant to serve.

I was forcefully reminded of the potential damage that Missionaries, Ex-pats and Global villagers can cause their companies by a chance conversation at a London Chamber of Commerce and Industry seminar this last week. The seminar, entitled Maximise your Potential in International Trade was designed to explore how British companies can use language and cultural skills to enhance their success in international export markets. One of the seminar highlights was an excellent short presentation on how to do business in by Joanne Alexander-Sefre, a leading expert on French business culture.

At the break following Joanne’s presentation I got talking to a Senior Relationship Manager with a high profile global investment bank. This individual had been distinctly unimpressed by Joanne’s advice to British business people to adapt their ways of working and communicating to be more successful in the French market. According to this individual the problem with doing business in France was nothing to do with culture but the fact that the French are just bloody difficult… They refuse to speak English even though they can and are arrogant, unfriendly and just anti-British. Nothing I can do will change that.

At this point (and having confirmed that no he was not actually joking) this classic Ex-pat upped and left the seminar, presumably to go back to the office and continue his attempt to build relationships with his French counterparts. Never mind Joanne, you cannot win them all

Drawing on my experience as a trainer, author and consultant in the area of cross-cultural communication and international business, I’ll be taking a regular look at some of the challenges and opportunities that exist when interacting with clients, colleagues and business contacts from other cultural backgrounds. My hope is that this blog will be interesting and useful for anyone who wants to improve they way they conduct business with people from different regions, countries and cultures.

Kate describes herself as someone who does ‘pop-anthropology’ which is a self-deprecating way of saying she is probably Britain’s most high-profile writer on the mores and behaviours of English cultures and sub-cultures, with a host of academic books and papers to her name.

In ‘Watching the English’ Kate has produced 400-odd pages of highly amusing and often acutely accurate personal observations on the some of the rules underpinning English communication and behaviour codes. Middle class English people in particular will find themselves wincing with embarrassment as they recognise the behaviour of themselves and others. Kate’s obvious affection for (and equally obvious frustration with) her compatriots comes across clearly and humorously, whether she is observing the 20 minutes or see we take to say farewell to anyone, or our continual discussions about the weather, or our abject fear of creating a public ‘fuss’.

Kate does not claim to be an expert on English business culture, and from my perspective the section on the English at Work is probably the least effective or well-observed part of the book. In my experience overseas business-people need to know a great deal more about working in Britain than our tendency towards a Monday Morning Moan, or our tendency towards polite procrastination when entering negotiations.  I also think that Kate’s suggestion that the English have a generalised taboo about talking about money in business is just plain wrong.

Nevertheless, Watching the English on the whole gives some interesting (if occasionally stereotyped) insights into English culture and will be added to my bibliography of useful reading for my overseas clients and business visitors to the United Kingdom.  It is also worth a read if you are English and want to find out some of the reasons why you do the things you do.