When we think about global communication, we think about large companies doing business on a global scale. My experiences have taught me that this type of communication is much closer to home than I had even realized. My last engagement afforded me the opportunity to work with diverse group of individuals. What I did not realize until more recently however is that the communication issues that existed were rooted in something deeper than a person being shy or not wanting to rock the boat. Rather it has more to do with their cultural background. According to Business Insider.com (2015) my field was predominantly female with a 61.10% of workers being female. Additionally, the organization employed several different minorities in varying departments. “McKinsey Global institute estimates that gender parity could add $12 trillion to the global economy, and suggests gender diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers. Similarly, ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to do the same” (Salesforce Essentials, 2018). As a smaller organization we tried to work with other companies who were smaller to promote growth in our sector though as we grew, we needed to expand our vendor pool. Dealing even locally with vendors this day and age you run into a lot of diversity. Two of our vendors that we retained were domestically sourced but ended up having employees that worked remotely from both India and Canada. Needless to say, my working world was littered with cultural communications, and I didn’t even realize it. It is only now looking back I realize some pretty large errors on my part. Being aware of cross-cultural communication could have helped me better understand my staff and my business partners.
Several of my staff were from Columbia, approximately 1/3 in fact. Some were immigrants and some were first generation Columbians. In our most recent lesson Moran et al. (2014) discuss the concepts of high and low-context communication. Columbians are a high-context culture, and this made for some incredibly interesting conversations that only now do I completely understand. You see, as a low-context communicator I gave instructions as such. This would lead to some issues, one of them being I would frequently walk away wondering if I was simply going to be ignored as the level of engagement did not seem high to me. Frequently though, the work was not only completed properly but more efficiently than I had laid out. This was fantastic and, in the beginning, I thought I had finally inherited a great staff. I assumed my predecessor had simply done an amazing job at training the employees, so I corrected my behavior and did not give as much detail in my instructions. What I would realize later was that my team members who were native to America would begin to underperform. That was because I was no longer communicating with them the way they expected.
Unbeknownst to me at the time I had an incredibly polarized staff. The staff had grouped themselves by culture and interacted with other members as little as possible. At first, I thought perhaps it was a language barrier issue. This was not the environment that I was looking for, I needed my people to work together, be supportive and learn ways to get along. “The benefits of diversity in terms of greater collective access to relevant information, more creative solutions, and reduced conflict, can only be achieved when problem solving and decision-making groups are tightly integrated” (Moran, Abramson, Moran, 2014 p.183). My teams’ integration impacted productivity by 10%. The environment itself became more pleasant and the workers seemed to enjoy coming to work more. If only dealing with outside organizations was as easy.
As we grew and began to expand our business it was necessary to implement new systems and technology. We looked through many organizations that could fit our needs and settled on two, one was local and the other was based in Delaware. This being our first foray into this type of an engagement we did not realize that much of the work would be done on foreign soil. We would soon be negotiating contracts with Indians, no one had ever had to perform this function before, so the learning curve was steep. Moran et al. (2014) discuss the framework applied to Indian negotiators. Up to this point all negotiating had been done domestically. What I found interesting is that many of the items discussed in the framework model hold true to conference calls and daily interactions. Such items as “when Indians say “no problem” this is not to be taken literally” and “highly centralized with only modest responsibility delegated to lower levels” (Moran et al. 2014). I can tell you when you do not factor in the cultural differences in business the outcomes can make for some bumpy relationships.
In conclusion, I felt it was important to show that though we are focused on a global and seemingly large scale of business models within the scope of this coursework. Cross-cultural communication can exist both within and without of even the smallest organizations. Leaders need to embrace these other cultures to enhance the existing body of work and work to understand the difference in communicating with business partners to negotiate the work that needs to be done as well as the day to day interactions.
Works Cited:
Moran R.T., Abramson N. R., Moran S.V. (2014) Managing Cultural Differences. Ninth Edition. New York, NY: Routledge
Small Business Trends.com (2018). Why Equality and Diversity need to be SMB Priorities. Retrieved from. https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/03/small-business-equality-and-diversity.html
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