The same things can be seen in a different way from people belonging to different countries. This fact could treathen your work team and impair business relationships with your partners.
In an article by Paul Sanders and Donnie MacNicol, you can find ten steps for dealing with different culture:
- Learn about how your values, attitudes, behaviors and communication style may be perceived by someone from another culture
- Relate to each person as an individual and not as a stereotype
- Understand who can make what decisions as it may be at a different level than in your own organization
- Identify if their management style is more typically masculine or feminine―assertive and competitive or modest and caring respectively
- Understand if they have a short-term or long-term view as this will affect the way and the speed at which projects are assessed, justified and decisions made
- Identify their need for structure and certainty as this may vary and affect the level of control, definition, risk taking and governance
- Develop your empathy skills and show people you are making every effort to see and feel things as they do
- If you are unsure what is appropriate, be more structured and have more explicit communication rather than less
- Ask each person how they would like to be addressed and treated
- Assume nothing―a smile and handshake are not necessarily an agreement, “yes” can mean “no”, unsmiling may not mean unfriendly, silence may not mean disagreement
Image source: Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
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