Ask anyone who has sourced or managed a globally distributed project. Collaborating with a customer, supplier, or co-worker located in another country typically brings more than you bargained for - a multicultural learning experience.
You can muddle through on your own or get help. Specialized trainers can heighten your cultural awareness and teach you about the tendencies and work styles of one culture compared to another. But there’s a catch: Fostering multicultural awareness usually involves perpetuating generalizations.
Let’s face it, cultural stereotypes often have more than grain of truth to them, but they also tend to rub people the wrong way. Is it possible to educate globally-collaborative workers about different cultures without making generalizations?
“People don’t like to be generalized about,” concedes Craig Storti, one of the leading cultural consultants. “And they especially don’t like somebody from another culture doing it. What I say in my book and in my workshops is I’m describing how Indians come across to westerners - it’s not how Indians see themselves.”
Storti, the author of Figuring Foreigners Out, wrote that “a generalization can tell you at best how people from a particular culture may behave in a given situation but necessarily how they will behave …”
Storti has a recent book called Speaking of India: Bridging the Communication Gap Between India and the West. While useful for westerners seeking to distribute work to India, the insights may vex Indian outsourcers - especially the ones contending that no such gap exists.
Naturally, the communication gap is unintentional. Take it from someone who misses his share of cultural cues, especially when I’m tired or under stress. “When Americans hear questions [from Indian citizens] they just answer them because they don’t realize that they’re polite ways of saying something,” says Storti. “When an Indian asks ‘Does that work for you’? It’s not a question - it’s a polite way of saying it doesn’t work for me.”
Storti explains that stereotyping is “what higher-order intelligence does - we have to put things into boxes or it doesn’t make sense. And as long as you realize you’re never going to meet the [stereo]type. In the end you have to listen to the person in front of you.”
Are you better off knowing how people from other cultures view your culturally-driven communication style or behavior? Arguably yes. Then you have the possibility of anticipating gaps and meeting one another in the middle.
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Either you are smart or you are something less. There are no cultural differences when two bright, intelligent, open minded people sit down to discuss ideas. I don’t care where you are from.
Now when you put a smart person with a knuckle dragging living in a mud shack state educated being, you got issues.
Read “Cultural Intelligence” by P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski.
I am surprised that AnitNWO responded with such confidence. I disagree heartily with their comment. Without responding to what the tone of the their message, the reality is just wrong. A great example is when people from the US (those that don’t speak foreign languages) think that they understand foreigners that speak English quite well. What they are missing, is that foreigners frequently translate directly from their language to English without understanding the difference in tone / directness. The best example is between Dutch and English. Most would agree that Dutch generally speak English extremely well. They come across confidently and powerful in their speech. One of the reasons is that the structure of their language is more direct. It uses the word ‘must’ much more commonly. To an English listener it often sounds like you’re being given an order. That can make you defensive. The reality is it is just a direct Dutch to English translation, with no sense of the change in tone. This is just one example of where words and what they convey can be interpreted very differently between two cultures/ languages. Just ask my wife and the scores of Dutch and other foreigner with whom I’ve worked. Regarding AnitNWO’s other paragraph. Some of my most rewarding and interesting cultural experiences / communications were with a very old woman in a dirt floored cave at Petra Jordan. She had enjoyed a trinket negotiation we had had so much that she invited my collegue and I for tea at her cave up the side of a hill in Petra. (Where the third Indiana Jones was filmed). Our conversation was 98% handsigns with my little Arabic and her non-existent English. It is amazing how useful a ‘mud’ dirt floor is for three people who don’t speak the same language for communicating. We were able to draw pictures, maps and smiley faces to have a wonderful chat. After about twenty minutes, her grand-daughter arrived from school who spoke some English. She had walked a few miles from the school bus to her grandmother’s cave. There is no question of the smartness of this wonderful woman and her grand-daughter who both lived in caves on the side of this hill in Petra. But you are right there are knuckle draggers among us. Some of them even make comments on blog sites.