Unless you work at your family owned and operated Italian
restaurant, chances are your workplace is going to employ people from a variety
of different cultural backgrounds. There
are very few places these days that you can go without encountering someone of
a different ethnic, religious, cultural or gender orientated background. I am a strong believer that diversity is
something that everyone should rejoice in because even if you might not agree
with someone else’s way of thinking, the chance to interact with people from
other backgrounds is an eye-opening experience and a great learning opportunity
that allows us to look at the world from a different perspective.
Cross-cultural training is becoming the focus of many
multinational companies and even some smaller ones. Ideally, organizations want to hire people
that already have these skills, especially for managerial positions. However, is culture sensitivity training
enough? The following is an excerpt from The Rise of the Global Employee,
published by the Australian School of Business:
Cross-cultural
training and fluency in a new language are expected parts of the armoury of
most multinational managers prior to being dispatched to work in foreign
subsidiaries. Typically, they set out confident that they know what to expect
and, importantly, that their behaviour will not offend. But preconceived ideas
of how local staff members – host-country nationals – might behave in the
"new" territory and how the manager might behave towards them are
risky.
"People
think every local working in a multinational organisation is a representative
of the local culture, but that's not the case," says Dan Caprar, a lecturer in Organisation
and Management at the Australian School of Business. "In China, for
instance, foreign managers tend to assume all of the local staff will behave in
a way that matches common stereotypes about Chinese people."
Back when all this globalization stuff was becoming
mainstream, (a.k.a. managers finally realized that cultural differences needed
to be addressed since they were offending people left, right and centre)
companies were under the impression that they could lump all their employees
into one big lecture hall, feed them some cultural stereotypes on what sorts of
behaviours are deemed normal and acceptable and assume that everyone would get
along just peachy after that. After all,
this was the Age of Information and Technology and you could take whatever golden
piece of wisdom you found on Wikipedia to the bank.
Their newly trained employees remained ill-equipped to work
in a multinational company. This was
due to a number of reasons however the main reason was that for all their
cross-cultural training, employees were still unable to look at each individual
as a person and not just a stereotype.
When people work for a multinational company, they too
become multinational. The Asian
employees are taught to see things from a global perspective much like the
Americans are. According to the Business
Spectator, “they see themselves as ‘global citizens’ – modern, cosmopolitan
and sophisticated.” They integrate
themselves into a more diverse culture and become atypical of their country in
many senses. These employees will then
proceed to get frustrated when they are labelled and treated as something other
than what they are.
So is cross-cultural diversity training bad? No, of course not. Is it enough?
Once again, no. An article
from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) actually outlines a situation where
diversity training actually made a situation worse. If not done correctly, it can actually
promote prejudices and stereotypes instead of teaching people how to work well
with others from another background.
People begin to be seen by their culture instead of their
individuality. The article, which is
titled “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work”
goes on to suggest that instead of cross-cultural training and diversity
session, corporations promote communication training as an alternative and
teach employees how to listen and speak with each other as people.
My recommendation falls in line with HBR’s suggestion. Communicate.
Talk to other people. Go out in
the world deliberately to meet new people and talk with them. Chances are you will find it immensely interesting
and rewarding as you travel the world simply to have a conversation. Whether you are a student, a professional or
recently retired, consider participating in some sort of international exchange
program or internship. You are
guaranteed to learn at least a little bit about a certain skill and a lot about
what makes people and their cultural backgrounds unique. These unique
experiences will prepare you well for the globalized workplace no matter what
industry you pursue.
