Bridging the cultural gap: Executives learn to be cross-cultural
Today's employers and employees are learning how to embrace diversity
Gone are the days when everyone looked the same, talked the same and — in many cases — thought the same way about how to get things done in the American workplace.
Today’s workforce is a melting pot of people, cultures, ages and languages, and corporations are being forced to figure out how to deal with the changes both internally, and externally, as they train their managers how to work with various cultures when they travel abroad.
“We know that companies are growing more and more diverse,” says Dr. Victoria Jones, Diversity Officer Vice President at Apollo Group. “We have five generations in the workplace. All have different values, and how do you bring all of that together and not have chaos?”
Experts in the area of diversity say corporations need to prepare their workforce to handle cultural differences both inside the company and out. “It is clearly seen as a business imperative, because of the growth of the global market,” Jones says.
Most companies have realized the need to bridge the cultural gap, and as a result offer diversity training and awareness programs, Jones says, citing IBM Corp., American Express Co., Microsoft Corp., McDonald’s Corp., and General Motors Co., as companies that are on the forefront of dealing with this challenge.
Apollo Group Inc., parent company to University of Phoenix, has offered a diversity awareness training class to faculty and staff members, where cultural differences are addressed along with issues such as helping employees and leaders understand diversity “beyond race and gender.”
Sources say employees need to understand how to not only talk with people from other cultures but to respect the differences in how others think and how they do business.
University of Phoenix graduate Guillermo Ciudad is a self-made expert in this area. Born in Chile, Ciudad received a Master of Arts in Organizational Management and is now an operations manager and business development leader at Automation EZ LLC and Assembly-Flex LLC, a Tucson designer and fabricator of custom-made automation equipment. He’s currently working toward a doctoral degree at University of Phoenix and should finish by the end of 2011.
In his current job, Ciudad travels frequently to Mexico and meets with both customers and suppliers, and tries to bridge the gap between the two cultures.
Ciudad says it’s important that business leaders who travel abroad are “bicultural,” and understand the differences between various cultures and how they do business.
“The U.S. way of doing business is very assertive,” he says. “They have time limitations, agendas and they want answers. In the Mexican culture, in some cases people don’t want to say, ‘No’ to something because they will feel that they won’t meet certain expectations.”
Ciudad acts as the middleman and helps both sets of businesspeople get on the same page, via written commitments and communication. The most important thing businesses can do is to communicate “with the objective of gaining the trust of the different players on the team,” he says. Without that trust, things will move too slowly or not move at all, or people will be difficult.
Wanda Moore, lead faculty and area chair in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Phoenix Dallas Campus, says patience is key. “With some cultures you have to build a little trust before they are ready to do business. In the United States, it’s ‘Let’s move it and shake it,’” she says.
Moore says today’s workers also need to do their homework when interacting with people from other cultures. They should read books, get coaching and simply realize that people from other countries have different values and ideas.
“If you really want to know the culture,” Ciudad says, “Listen to their music, go to eat their food and read their books — and you will have a very interesting idea of their society.”
