Dear Judith:
You wrote in your message LO10595:
"This is a request for assistance. I am involved in designing a technical
meeting which will be attended by people from the United States, France,
the Netherlands, Tiawan, and Korea. All attendees will have at least some
English, but in some cases not a lot. (snip) Needless to say, we would
like to maximize productive communication and minimize discomfort,
incomprehension, and misunderstanding."
"This organization has a sophisticated understanding of meeting
process.(snip)
"We have lots of input on communication issues between any two of these
groups but not on when they are all together. Can anyone point me to
expertise on inter-cultural communication issues with Asians, Europeans,
and Americans all in one room?"
I and my colleagues recently worked on cross cultural team and executive
development with an automotive company and a computer company. I myself am
an Asian Indian and a physicist by training, my colleagues are from
England and USA. We also are 10 years apart from each other. My colleagues
specialize in business strategy and organizational development and I focus
on learning and knowledge development.
Why I described our group is to illustrate that we ourselves have a lot of
diversity among us and we struggled a lot to get to closer relationship
and not to have misunderstandings among us. When we work with other
cultures, we fould the following things help in designing meetings. I am
sure you know about all of these but may be helpful in any way.
1. Stereotyping gets us more quickly into trouble than ignoring the
differences. For example, three weeks ago, my friend was talking to a
person from Thailand. While her looks and behavior were representative of
other Thai people we met, her behavior and conscious attitudes were that
of Americans. She came to our client company very highly qualified by
being able to work at very high levels in a Japanese automobile company
but has been having troubles in this American company working with a
English person. More we understood her, more we could see that she could
not just be put into one catagory (Asian woman, US educated or whatever)
2. Do not assume that you know what the other is talking about: Many
times, the words and what they wanted to communicate do not correlate at
all. Asking a lot of probing questions in a respectful and inquiring way
keeps the dialogue alive and also makes things clearer. Asking for
clarification, examples and explanation helps the communication come
alive.
3. What people say and what they really mean are really different. Some
Asian cultures (like Japan) do have difficulty saying no on the face.
Their reluctance to make a commitment is to be taken as lack of interest
or no. Again, active listening, reading the body language and
clarification helps immensely.
4. Each country and culture have different safe distances between people.
If you cross that invisible boundary, they get nervous or offended or just
move away. It is not personal and looking at how other people from their
culture are standing next to each other: how close or far apart others are
standing could be a good guiding distance to keep in mind.
5. Jokes, embarrassment and pulling ones legs in public make some culture
very nervous. anything one doesn't understand in a mixed culture setting
could be taken an insult in extreme cases.
6. Spoken language means very little compared to rituals, ceremonies and
subtle body language. Watch those in meetings.
7. Dress code need to be made explicit. Also say what you mean by casual
or semi casual. Do not assume they know what you mean.
8. Similarly erring on the side of clarity helps meetings go more
smoothly.
I hope these culture 101 lessons that we have learned are useful to you.
We found that working with multiple cultures requires immense awareness,
attention and empathy on the part of hosts. When you are genuine and
authentic about your respect and care, that comes through everything you
do.
Good luck with your meeting
Prasad Kaipa
-- Prasad Kaipa, Ph. D. (408) 866-8511 Mithya Institute for Learning & (408) 866-8926 (Fax) Knowledge Architecture 4832 Pinemont Drive Prasad@Mithya.com Campbell, CA 95008-5714 Pkaipa@AOL.comWelcome to Mithya Institute Web page: http://www.Mithya.com Topic of focus for the fall of 1996 on website: Unlearning
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