Origins and Evolution of Cross-cultural Communication.

 Typically anthropologists and social scientists tend to study people and human behavior among exotic tribes and cultures living in far off places rather than do field work among white-collared literate adults in modern cities. Advances in communication and technology and socio-political changes started transforming the modern workplace yet there were no guidelines based on research to help people interact with other people from other cultures. To address this gap arose the discipline of cross-cultural analysis or cross-cultural communication. The main theories of cross-cultural communication draw from the fields of anthropology, sociology, communication and psychology and are based on value differences among cultures. Edward T. Hall, Geert Hofstede, Fons Trompenaars, Shalom Schwartz and Clifford Geertz are some of the major contributors in this field.

[The popular 'Iceberg model' of culture developed by Selfridge and Sokolik, 1975 and W.L. French and C.H. Bell in 1979, identifies a visible area consisting of behaviour or clothing or symbols and artifacts of some form and a level of values or an invisible level.]

What is culture ?

 A simpler definition is ‘the unwritten rules of the social game’.

Generally culture can be seen as consisting of three elements:

• Values - Values are ideas that tell what in life is considered important.
• Norms - Norms consists of expectations of how people should behave in different situations.
• Artefacts - Things or material culture – reflects the culture’s values and norms but are tangible and manufactured by man.

Most of people working with cross-cultural communication and intercultural training and coaching  have heard about the Five  Hofstede’s Intercultural Dimensions (http://www.geert-hofstede.com/).

Geert Hofstede defines culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from another”. The “category” can refer to nations, regions within or across nations, ethnicities, religions, occupations, organizations, or the genders.

Read more about building third culture teams: http://zestnzen.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/how-to-lead-highly-effective-third-culture-teams/

Aims of cross-cultural analysis

Cross-cultural communication or inter cultural communication looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds try to communicate. It also tries to produce some guidelines, which help people from different cultures to better communicate with each other. Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group, which share that particular culture. Although all members of a group or society might share their culture, expressions of culture-resultant behavior are modified by the individuals’ personality, upbringing and life-experience to a considerable degree. Cross-cultural analysis aims at harnessing this utilitarian function of culture as a tool for increasing human adaptation and improving communication.

Cross-cultural management is seen as a discipline of international management focusing on cultural encounters, which aims to discover tools to handle cultural differences seen as sources of conflict or miss-communication.

Beside Geert’s model, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997) model expands the core level of the very basic two-layered model, rather than the outer level. In their view, culture is made up of basic assumptions at the core level. These ‘basic assumptions’ are somewhat similar to ‘values’ in the Hofstede model. Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner use seven dimensions for their model of culture:

• Universalism vs Particularism (what is more important – rules or relationships?)
• Individualism vs Communitarianism (do we function in a group or as an individual?)
• Neutral vs Emotional (do we display our emotions or keep them in check?)
• Specific vs Diffuse (how far do we get involved?)
• Achievement vs Ascription (do we have to prove ourselves to gain status or is it given to us just because we are a part of a structure?)
• Attitude to Time
  • Past- / present- / future-orientatedness
  • Sequential time vs Synchronic time(do we do things one at a time or several things at once?)

• Internal vs External Orientation (do we aim to control our environment or cooperate with it?)

Criticism of current models

One of the weaknesses of cross-cultural analysis has been the inability to transcend the tendency to equalize culture with the concept of the nation state. A nation state is a political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited predominantly by a people sharing a common culture, history, and language or languages. In real life, cultures do not have strict physical boundaries and borders like nation states. Its expression and even core beliefs can assume many permutations and combinations as we move across distances.

There is some criticism in the field that this approach is out of phase with global business today, with transnational companies facing the challenges of the management of global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams, interacting and collaborating across boundaries using new communication technologies.

Some writers like Nigel Holden (2001) suggest an alternative approach, which acknowledges the growing complexity of inter- and intra-organizational connections and identities, and offers theoretical concepts to think about org

1-Shifting demographic patterns: Over the next 10 years, the world population is expected to rise from the current 6.83 billion to approximately 7.7 billion, with most of the growth in emerging markets generating  high economic growth. We already see an aging and declining population in developed countries with slow economic growth.  U.S. and European businesses are dealing with the challenges of a multi-generational workforce with three distinct generations Baby Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y. Employers will need to develop highly individualized solutions to accommodate the career needs of each generation. We will not see long careers of 10 or more years in one company but maybe 6 years with either functional or geographic changes every 2 years. The youngest  generation  will probably have 15 to 20 jobs during their career and multiple jobs at the same time because that is what they want to do.

2-Rapid technology changes: From nanotechnologies to neuroscience discoveries, many new technologies will be developed and globalization will continue to drive the utilization of advanced mobile technologies reshaping the workforce with increased telecommuting,  virtual  teams and overall more work flexibility.

3-Economic globalization  In our information overloaded global work environment, knowledge is not a competitive advantage anymore as it goes out of date extremely fast and anybody on earth with an internet connection has access to it in real-time. The critical skills to be successful in the new working environment are vision and  foresight.to anticipate or respond to change very quickly, make wise decisions and take action now to create a better future.

More than a year ago,  I had the chance to listen to Seth Godin “live” in a promotional event in Antwerp about the launch of his book “Linchpin”. I collected about 10 very interesting new ideas from his speech that I posted on a blog : “TOP 10 Seth Godin’s Quotes Made in Antwerp, Belgium. April 1, 2010”

Seth Godin is the bestselling author of more than seven books. He writes about marketing, the spread of ideas and managing both customers and employees with respect. His idea about our current economy is that the current recession is a “forever recession” because it’s the end of the industrial age, which also means The end of the average worker (Read more : article )

Nobody will ever be the only one on the market AND people have an infinite ways to access information. Humans evolved from Hunters, Farmers, Workers and now they have to be Artists-Seth Godin

HOW DO YOU BECOME UNIQUE  ?

1-You don’t need to become somebody you are not. Your uniqueness has to be authentic, you need to know who you really are, what is your dominant character, talent, personality, skills, strengths, what motivates you, what’s your passions in life ? How is your  business acumen and leadership style ? Can you summarize all those information in a compelling story for potential employers or clients?

2-You need to remove blocks that prevent you to excel at being truly you: fears, unmet needs, negative self-talk, lack of training and anything that is holding you back.

3-You need a vision, a purpose and a road map: No matter how old you are, how life has treated you in the past, how much money you have or how many debts, you need to give permission to yourself to have dreams, explore your possibilities and identify your options. We all have choices but we need to use our imagination to see them. You need to let your right brain expresses emotional intelligence and free the artist in you. Once you know where you want to be, then put your strategic thinking at work to identify your goals strategy and action plan to get you there.

BE SOCIAL, BE GLOBAL !

You can’t stop globalization even if you close borders and build walls made with bricks and mortars ! The internet, and social media make the world smaller and smaller everyday. Maybe your company is based in the U.S. but  vendors might be in India, and customers in more than 40 countries. That’s why multinational companies need employees able to think globally but communicate locally with cultural sensitivity. I like to use the term “glocalization” to instill the idea that global products and services need to be designed in the early stages of research and development with cultural sensitivity too.

You cannot claim to be a global leader if you have visited many countries as a tourist. It is like learning swimming in a book, you need to get into the water and get wet .

If you are still in college, learn key languages maybe Mandarin, Spanish, Brazilian or Russian will be a good choice in today’s economy. Find an internship or a job abroad for minimum one year.

If you are already a manager employed in a multinational companies, become the first on the list to be picked-up for an international assignment by participating in global projects and working with multicultural teams.

Learning a new language should not depends on age, you don’t need to be fluent but it is important to understand how a language is structured to get some clues about cultural values and unspoken social rules or business etiquette. You can learn about the fundamental cultural dimensions from colleagues or local intercultural clubs and of course online through many specific forums and social media.

Continued learning in a large variety of topics every day will become mandatory.

Where do you see careers heading in 2012 and beyond ?

 Have you invented your future yet ?

Related articles:

• How Is Technology Impacting the Changes in the 21st Century Workplace?

• Can we find new love for an old job? (lisamtetzloff.wordpress.com)

According to the latest Gallup survey on American employee’s productivity conducted in 201,  only 29% of employees were engaged or involved and enthusiastic about their job. In contrast 71 % of full-time workers, were “not engaged” including 20% miserable or actively disengaged. These findings are really shocking  and very disheartening. Miserable employees are simply ignored, they are disconnected from the company’s goals, often scared to lose their job, taking sometimes additional workload from a colleague who has been laid-off.

Can sustainable organizations ignore employee’ s morale ?  Cutting costs has direct impact on the bottom line but not necessarily in the desired way:

“miserable employees create miserable customers” 

For the most part the recovery of the American economy is dependent on the innovation capacity of America Inc.  If employees are not intrinsically motivated chances are very high that they are not creative as well. and won’t work hard enough as passionate people do according to  Steve Jobs in a video about the rules for success.  I cannot agree more and I have observed the power of passion in people at any level and any function of organizations and across cultures.

Passion is putting you in a state of “flow” where you ignore fatigue or hunger because you are so engaged by what you do that you ignore the time you spend on a particular activity, you are intrinsically rewarded by what you do and truly happy. The concept of “flow” has been introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a psychologist making connections between satisfaction and daily activities in his book: ” Flow: The Psychology of the Optimal Experience“.

Being passionate is coming from the inside-out. You can break somebody’s motivation  very easily but it is very hard for leaders to inspire people to give happily the best of what they have to offer if they don’t want to and don’t have trust in the management.

High performance organizations know that engaged employees drive customer value and business performance. Good examples of such companies are Google or Zappos with its CEO’s vision of putting his people first.

HOW TO BOOST EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT ?

Gallup measures employees’ engagement by collecting the answers of the following 12 survey items listed bellow.

If you want to engage people you need to provide what it takes for them to say YES to a maximum of the questions:

• Q01. I know what is expected of me at work.
• Q02. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
• Q03. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
• Q04. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
• Q05. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
• Q06. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
• Q07. At work, my opinions seem to count.
• Q08. The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.
• Q09. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
• Q10. I have a best friend at work.
• Q11. In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
• Q12. This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

The Three ‘E’s of Engagement: Engage, Empower, Enable:

Do you know where you motivation comes from ? 

Think about how you feel when you speak to someone about a problem and the person gives advises. Do you really want to follow them ? Well most of the time the  answer is NO ! Right ?

Why is it that our first spontaneous answer is NO to advises even if the solutions offered really work ? My theory based on my observations, is that knowledge is not the issue , the issue is TO DO the things we need to do and you cannot move someone else into action.

“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink”

So that means you can give the opportunity to someone to do something by telling some tips,  but you cannot force them to do it if they do not want to  !

Want examples ?

What about quitting smoking ? You know that it gives cancer and you can die from heart attacks. Is that stopping smokers to smoke? NO ! Why ? because for most people those reasons are not intrinsically motivating and there is no instant rewards to stop smoking, only hypothetical long-term promises that we are not going to die but  we will all die sometimes anyway!

Let me confess,  I smoked for years but quit cold turkey when I was pregnant and never smoked again, I cannot even stand the smell of smoke around me. When I started working, smoking was a great way to socialize at work at the smoking corner so that was one reason that drop when I had my son because I quit working in the corporate world at the same time. Something also might have happened during my pregnancy that made me quit for the benefit of my baby.

Hope this short example is giving you the opportunity to think about what really motivates you when you set a goal to change your life forever.

Hint: What do you SEE, FEEL, SMELL, HEAR when you think about reaching your goal ?  Visualization is a powerful tool used by athletes and successful people.

Do you want to share what works for you and get a chance to inspire others ?

Many of you made your New Year Resolutions with enthusiasm, thinking this New Year will be different, that you will quit bad habits, lose weight, exercise, attend a language class or whatever, But did you really think deeply if this is what YOU want ? Do you want to please others ? Do you spend time on somebody else’s agenda ? Do you have the motivation, discipline time and other resources to achieve your goals ? I guess you may have chosen your usual new year resolutions without thinking as a whole person, with finite resources such as time, money and specific support.

In 2012, do you want to simplify your life and implement processes or habits that last more than a couple of weeks after New Year? Here are two simple steps you can take that will give you guidance and makes you spending your efforts on activities that really matters to you.:

Step One: Identify Your Priorities:

Identify your current level of satisfaction for each area in the wheel and connect the dots. Then think about things you really want to improve and develop. Please note that a balanced life does not require that you dedicate equal amounts of time to each little piece of your life. Balance is about taking care of all of you and all of what is important to you. That means that you must make time to invest in your self-care, define what matters to you, and allow yourself to be busy with those activities. Once you selected the categories you want to develop, Think about what a 7 a (Satisfied/Fulfilled) would look like for each one you selected ex. Fitness: enjoy going to the pool once a week and indoor biking 1 hour. Be specific, realistic, make sure you have time and energy or other resources like money or partner. Avoid the “should” or the “have to”. Then select only 3 goals to focus on with actions to reach a 7 in your top priorities (you can have multiple goals in one area).

Step Two : Managing your Resource of Time

The process of using your time effectively becomes possible when you begin to view it as a commodity that you have the choice to spend—or invest. When you invest, you essentially allocate your resources to something you believe will give you a positive return.

Do you view your time with as much consideration as you view your money?

I would bet that you would not burn a dollar bill. Yet, you may be willing to burn through an hour of your time based on someone else’s demands. You need a system connecting your priorities and managing your calendar. There is an excellent method developed by Steven Covey in his book : “First Things First “ See bellow his tool to classify your weekly TO DO list before planning time in your calendar. The idea it to focus on the important things that contribute the most to reaching your goals (Quadrant II) implementing processes and habits to anticipate the urgent and Important (Quadrant I) such as having an automatic bill payment system online for example. You also need to reduce time spent on non important things or quit bad habits that are wasting your time.

If you decide to quit a bad habit, always compensate by an activity you really enjoy that gives you more rewards and fun than the bad behavior.

For example replacing what I call “Pavlovian Tweeting or Facebooking ” by meeting friends outside for hiking or walking. This woks for me, It is fun, good for my health and great to meet new people in my neighborhood.

IF you really want to get the LIFE you enjoy and deserve without the struggle, start working today on identifying your priorities and select your 3 most important goals, make an action plan for each and decide how much time to allocate for each activities on a weekly basis.

If you need some clarification how to use those tools or help you set your goals, please do not hesitate to contact me for a FREE, no obligation, REAL coaching Session:Click HERE

Related articles

• Don’t Make New Year’s Resolutions, Build Solid Foundations First (zestnzen.wordpress.com)
• Acorns, Dreams, and New Year Resolutions (chrislocurto.com)

Change is inevitable, we all agree on that, but are we always forced to change because we live in a highly connected  fast-paced global environment ?  I think change for the sake of change has nothing to do with true innovation and fostering creativity or acquiring new knowledge and learning the necessary new skills to stay competitive. I am not going to talk about creativity and change management here but you can read a very good article about The Innovation Catalysts on how to change ideas into great products or services.

If you are a small business owner, a corporate executive or an employee, do you think you have to change if you are satisfied and successful with who you are, what you do and with  most of the components of your work and life environments ?

I think there is a difference between being reactive to changes and anticipating changes but in both cases you need to balance the costs and risks associated with change versus the benefits you can expect to gain. You also need to plan carefully the changes by having first some research conducted and a sound strategy before implementing any new tactics, even a small one like changing a logo on a product or a color in your website.

For big or small businesses any change in brand identity such as image, logo, slogan, has an impact on the brand image and how the customers perceive the products or services.

People make decisions to buy from you or hire you more based on emotional needs than rational reasons. Buying is based on TRUST.

Changing any brand attribute may have a different impact if you consider potential new customers or existing loyal brand lovers with emotional bonds attached to it. In a majority of cases, loyal brand lovers hate change,  so why taking the risk of changing anything if you are not forced to do it due to change in competitive environment for example ?

So the question to ask before implementing any change is :

What additional value do I bring to my customers, employees and other stakeholders ? 

Do you have experience with companies that changed just for the sake of change and fail ? We all lean from failures but we don’t need to be one

Related Articles: 

• Coca-Cola Sheds Light on Changing Brand Images

• Can you really change your brand image? Should you?

The answer to that question is YES and most probably the person is YOU!

For small business owners like me Internet is really a double edge sword. I have access to people from all over the world and get my business ideas and clients mostly online. I am really enjoying learning about what makes my clients wake up at night, their issues and hot topics in their industries. I spend a fair amount of time managing my emails, paying bills online, read many magazines and articles and participate actively in online group discussions, writing articles and testing new marketing tools.

If you use your time instead of paying someone to help you create your social media content for example, it is easy to fell into the trap of wasting too much time online on non-important activities and get distracted. You need to be conscious about  how you spend your resources and time is your most precious asset. It might be difficult to calculate a ROI on your time spent on each online platform but you need to have a social media strategy (WHO to target, WHAT to say , HOW to communicate and HOW to measure the impact of your efforts.) you also need a good discipline and effective time management tools.

The frontier between professional and private usages of the internet is becoming more and more fuzzy with the development of social media and mobile technologies,  As a consequence it is becoming harder and harder to stay focused on the bottom line and multitasking is decreasing productivity, tremendously.

People compensate partly by working longer hours but this is not sustainable in the long run especially if you become sleep deprived. Employees from small or large organizations are increasingly facing similar issues in time management.

How Do You Manage Your Time Online To Be More Effective ?

Take Our Poll

Here the seven habits I have already implemented:

1-I do not switch my computer on in the morning before I clean my desk and make my “to do list” for the day on a piece of paper.

2- Doing first things first: I focus on what is important and urgent first: pay the bills on time, shop, cook, clean before I make any contact online unless it is part of my to do list

3-I allocate time to spend on each social network and best timing to reach my favorite friends and target audience,

4-I use a timer to control my time online: Better spend 15 minutes 4 times per day (every 2 hours or so) than one hour at once except when I am blogging or working with clients.

5-Make sure  I spend 80% of my time planning, reading and sharing content that  brings value to my specific audience.

6-Allow me to spend 20% of my time online for fun: chat with friends, share funny videos or quotes, put serendipity at work.

7-Use tools to save time without losing interactivity as nobody likes talking to robots, so I follow people manually but use Buffer.com for example to send content while I am sleeping since my audience is living worldwide.

Related articles:

• Time Management or Results Management? (miller7mark.wordpress.com)

1. What were your 11 most read posts in 2011 ? See table 
2. Do you think those most read posts reflect your expertise or interests? I think I do 
3. Do you write for your audience or for yourself first and then see what sticks ? Both
4. Do you have a content strategy ? Yes but need more interactive content

Please share your own comments 

Here my top 11 Most Read Posts in 2011(click on the link to read the article)

Why don’t you make a similar compilation in your blog and post the link here in the comment section? It is shameless promotion for your blog and we can cross-post feedback about the posts-thank you,

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