In this blog, long-term Axiom collaborator and culture expert, Dr Domna Lazidou asks wherever you work and whatever your leadership role if the following challenges and sentiments sound familiar or trigger frustration? Domna then explores why they increasingly resonate and offers a way forward.
And I quote…
“When I put together the team I had really high hopes for their ability to deliver; on paper they are some of our best people from various backgrounds, multiple functions, different offices and across three continents: I expected that bringing their talents and different experience together would drive real innovation. I must admit I am disappointed. Six months later the progress is slow and all I am getting is complaints about problems with (less that collaborative) behaviour. Half of the team are upset that their colleagues are not following agreed decision-making protocols, others are complaining about a lack of transparency and straight talking, yet more are frustrated about lack of trust and respect and some of their colleague’s time management habits. I thought they were all experienced professionals who knew how to collaborate including in diverse teams, but clearly this is not the case. I think I should have paid more attention to cultural differences at the outset.”
I heard this in a recent interview from a line manager who was keen to improve the effectiveness of a multicultural team. It is becoming a familiar story across organisations that are trying to sustain and drive better performance in increasingly complex, diverse and often remote workplaces.
Our manager was right: the key that unlocks that performance is understanding how culture and cultural differences work in the workplace and what to do about this. By ‘culture’ we don’t just mean national culture in isolation, but different cultures (national, organisational, professional, etc.) and the way they interact to create shared ways of doing things and shared perspectives on how things work for each group of co-workers. It is when we do not have visibility and understanding of those shared cultural assumptions that drive colleague behaviours, that collaboration and, by extension, innovation and performance can really go awry.
Here Dr Domna Lazidou explains, in some depth, why paying attention to culture matters now more than ever, why it is so often difficult to get it right, and how we can leverage cultural diversity to increase performance and indeed wellbeing. Together with Domna, Axiom have created a deep dive culture diagnostic and workshops for multicultural teams and organisations to help develop understanding and increase intercultural effectiveness across boundaries of all types, not just geographical ones.
Why working effectively across cultures is more important than ever
In his excellent book ‘Rebel Ideas’ author and journalist Mathew Sayed argues convincingly that it has never been more important to bring teams with diverse capabilities together. This is because the challenges organisations, communities and nations face today – from geopolitical instability to economic uncertainty, and from unprecedented changes in ecosystems, to rapidly disruptive technologies – are too complex to be addressed by individuals or even teams who see the world in the same way. Such complexity demands different ways of looking at the same problem in order to come up with the right solutions and that’s where cultural diversity comes in.
In our culture training we explore, for example, how our cultural upbringing might make us focus on different aspects of something we study, such as taking a holistic view of the problem or separating out individual aspects of it. Having teams that are able to do both, and also question their colleagues’ ‘blind spots’ when necessary is key. And being able to offer alternatives and fresh perspectives to viewing an issue is essential for addressing the complexities of the modern workplace.
Research, such as that by American business scholar Nancy Adler, does in fact show that bringing together employees from different cultural backgrounds can drive creativity and innovation, increase workplace learning and create flourishing organisations.
The signs that working across cultures isn’t actually working
And yet… despite much investment in increasing diversity including cultural diversity in organisations and teams, there is little evidence that most businesses are reaping the potential benefits. The reasons seem to be twofold:
1. Increasing diversity is good – but only a part of the solution
First, simply increasing diversity by implementing targeted recruitment policies, for example, without investing in developing intercultural understanding and collaboration creates more problems than it solves. Without that development, colleagues from different backgrounds may rush to misinterpret and misjudge others’ behaviour, seeing it only from their own cultural point of view.
The team members in our story who complained about their colleagues’ attention to the protocols or lack of openness and candour, or lack of respect, were simply operating from a different cultural script. Had they considered that their colleagues ways of doing things were not ‘wrong’ but just different and equally valid, had they been given the opportunity to understand why, and had they been able to discuss and negotiate shared ways of doing things that worked for all of them, the team may have flourished rather than faltered.
In fact there is really good evidence that when cultural differences are not only acknowledged and understood but also are rigorously explored and utilised, that’s when teams drive superb value. Distefano and Maznefski who have studied what makes culturally diverse teams work, call such teams ‘Creators’ (in contrast to ‘Destroyer or ‘Equalizer’ teams, which destroy or fail to create value). ‘Creator’ teams are those that not only deeply understand each other’s differences, practices and perspectives, but are happy to entertain, live with and celebrate those differences, deliberately integrating them in the way they communicate and work together. They are comfortable with the conflict such differences may occasionally create and use such conflict creatively to explore different perspectives and ideas. This kind of intercultural resilience clearly calls for investment in training and development.
2. Thinking way beyond national stereotypes
The second reason why problems in intercultural working still dominate many workplaces is because much of the investment in this kind of learning has been too narrow, focusing exclusively on national culture differences and / or offering rigid ‘how to work in x country’ guides.
While interesting, such training often leads to stereotyping individuals rather than offering true understanding, let alone developing behavioural agility. For one thing individuals from the same national culture don’t all exhibit exactly the same beliefs or behaviours, etc. For another, individuals are not just representatives of their national culture. Each of us is shaped by multiple cultures, including our education, profession, team, location, religion, the various places we have lived in and organisations for which we worked. You may learn about how the Chinese prefer to communicate or manage or make decisions, but what exactly does this tell you about an IT colleague who is of Chinese origin, grew up in France has American nationality and has extensive experience managing teams in differing sectors in both Asia and the Middle East?
How to build effective working relationships across cultures
The way forward? A different approach to developing intercultural effectiveness is needed. One that learns from what we know about national cultural differences (for example different cultures have very different approaches to communication including a preference for directness vs indirectness when giving critical feedback) but it does not stop there.
It uses these insights as a springboard to encourage better understanding, not just of the cultural perspectives of others, but significantly our own cultural filters and blind-spots and the behavioural preferences and possible misjudgements they may drive.
By refocusing training on complex understanding rather than simplistic rules, and learning from reflecting on and sharing lived experience as well as expert insights, we begin to create the environment in which diverse teams can develop real intercultural empathy, begin to build cultural agility and the potential to take full advantage of their diversity.
Three actions to take
Were we to advise on how to begin to build this effectiveness we would say:
Slow down: reflect and question: What judgments are you making about your colleagues and how they work; what assumptions and beliefs are leading you to make these judgments; where (culturally) do your assumptions come from?
Reach out: Seek to understand; ask questions; explain your point of view and explore others’ viewpoints (including the assumptions and beliefs that drive these) with an open mind; build bridges; seek common ground.
Lean-in: Understand your comfort zone in a particular area (for example speaking candidly, managing time, being directive or relational as a manager) and practice to extend it so that you expand your behavioural flexibility, but not to the point where you lose your authenticity.
How Axiom can help
At Axiom we’ve been helping multicultural, in the broadest sense of the term, teams and organisations deliver outstanding performance through the actions of their own better engaged, equipped, aligned and inspired people for decades.
If you’d like to find out more about the diagnostic tools that can be applied to help your business thrive, or explore the workshops and programmes that Domna has evolved and leads, simply reach out.
