Jessica Buck

Culture and the British Royal Family

April 20, 2020 by Jessica Buck Leave a Comment

Hofstede defines culture as a mental program, and he breaks the programs into three levels: universal, collective and individual (PSU, 2020). The biggest level is universal, and consists of things that all humans share, like a need for shelter, wanting to belong to a group, wanting to grow as a person. The next layer up is collective, which is had by some people, consisting of shared experiences that help guide a person, and culture falls in this realm.

The British monarchy was established in 1215 with the singing of the Magna Carta, requiring the king to rule only under law (Synan, 2013). Since then there have been many kings and queens that have helped to develop a culture in Great Britain, but the modern-day Royal Family has helped to solidify that culture through the use of the media. The middle level of Hofstede’s culture levels is collective, shared experiences that help guide a person, and the bottom level is wanting to belong to a group.

Historically, England was a very homogeneous country and developed coherent traditions, but, especially as the British Empire expanded and the country absorbed peoples from throughout the globe, English culture has been accented with diverse contributions from Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, Muslims, and other immigrant groups (Kellner, Thomas, 2019). But the British Royal Family, mainly the queen, is there to strengthen national unity and stability. By the end of WWII the media had started to take off in coverage of the Royal Family, propelled into action by Winston Churchill after turning the marriage of (future queen) Elizabeth and Prince Phillip of Greece and Denmark, as she was young, hopeful and the mother of small children (Williams, 2015). Prior to this public display, the Royal Family had been very private, with weddings and ceremonies reserved for upper class families. As the media grew, as did the eyes on the Royal Family.

In a 2016 study by the British Council, it was found that in a study of 5,000 people over five countries, 39% said that people in the UK are most proud of the Royal Family. But what are some of the characteristics of the Royal Family that make them so desirable to be a part of and make them the image that people want to portray in their everyday lives? Everyone knows they have a laundry list of strange things they can’t do, like not eating shellfish or rare meat, no wearing dresses without stockings or play monopoly (Lakritz, 2018), but the Family traits are much more reserved in their mannerisms.

Manners are everything, they cannot cross their legs at the knee and show their interest in politics, they must eat at the pace of the queen they are to be the most upright citizens of Britain. When looking again at the 2016 study done by the British Council on the perceptions of the best and worst characteristics of people in the UK, some of the top traits were polite/good manners, keep to themselves, and patriotism, all traits that the Royal Family is expected to portray at all times.

Perceptions of the best and worst characteristics of the people in the UK. Taken from Council, B. (2016, December 12) “Culture, attraction and soft power”.

Our need to belong is what drives us to seek out stable, long-lasting relationships with other people. It also motivates us to participate in social activities such as clubs, sports teams, religious groups, and community organizations. By belonging to a group, we feel as if we are a part of something bigger and more important than ourselves (Cherry, 2020). In a similar pyramid format, Maslow describes his hierarchy of needs, where belongingness and love needs are middle of the of the pyramid in the psychological section. The desire to belong is a universal human need that is found in all cultures. It’s a powerful motivator that dates back to our caveman days, when belonging to a clan or tribe meant the difference in whether or not you would survive. Maslow, in his hierarchy of human needs, places belonging on the third tier. He said that an individual must satisfy his or her physiological and safety needs, before being able to love and belong (Wilson, 2018). These needs are security and safety needs, the need to belong to a group.

When we look at the traits of Great Britain, they can strongly be compared to the traits of the British Royal Family. Privacy, honesty, consideration, diligence (Evason, 2016), all things that are portrayed as culture traits by the British people, and these are all things that are described as characteristics of the Royal Family. When looking back at the definition of culture by Hofstede, it is relatable to Maslow’s need to belong in the universal level, wanting to belong to a group, and further up, collective, shared experiences that help guide a person. The British Royal Family is widely understood as just a figurehead, and the Royal website describes the Monarch’s role as the “Head of Nation”. The Sovereign acts as a focus for national identity, unity and pride; gives a sense of stability and continuity; officially recognizes success and excellence; and supports the ideal of voluntary service (Oram, 2016). The creation of this national identity, unity and pride, is what helps to create and continue the British culture.

Cherry, K. (2020, April 11). How the Need to Belong Influences Human Behavior and Motivation. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-need-to-belong-2795393

Council, B. (2016, December 12) “Culture, attraction and soft power”.

Evason, N. (2016). British Culture – Core Concepts. Retrieved from https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/british-culture/british-culture-core-concepts#british-culture-core-concepts

Kellner, P., & Thomas, W. H. (2019, December 6). Cultural life. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/place/England/Cultural-life

Lakritz, T. (2018, May 23). 10 surprising things royals aren’t allowed to do. Retrieved from https://www.insider.com/things-royals-cant-do-rules-2018-5

Oram, K. (2016, December 9). The role of the Monarchy. Retrieved from https://www.royal.uk/role-monarchy

Pennsylvania State University. (2020). Lesson 2: Leadership in Global Context. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2041071/modules/items/27977820

Synan, M. (2013, June 19). What is the Magna Carta? Retrieved from https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-magna-carta

Williams, K. (2015, July 9). Elizabeth II: the queen who saved the royals. Retrieved from https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/elizabeth-ii-the-queen-who-saved-the-royals/

Wilson, R. (2018, July 16). Longing for Belonging. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-main-ingredient/201807/longing-belonging

Bolsonaro v. The Amazon Rainforest

March 30, 2020 by Jessica Buck Leave a Comment

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Amazon Rainforest covers about 40% of South America with 1.4 billion acres of dense forests and 4,100 miles of rivers. Despite being almost half the size of the continent, the rainforest is subject to many issues, including Poorly planned infrastructure, illegal an unsustainable natural resource extraction, extensive cattle ranching and agricultural expansion, and climate change.

About 60% of the country of Brazil is covered by rainforest (Meyer, 2010). Despite being covered in Rainforest, Brazil has a rich culture and is the fifth largest country in the world. However, how does the 5^th largest country in the world handle its communications to the rest of the world when dealing with illegal logging of the Amazon Rainforest?

On January 1, 2019, Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro was elected. In a 2018 article from The Washington Post, it is stated that Bolsonaro is a powerful supporter of agribusiness – one of the pillars of his political platform – and is likely to favor profits over preservation. He has called for a new, pro-business approach to exploiting Brazil’s natural resources, insisting that overzealous bureaucrats have harassed farmers for simply trying to make a living by carving out patches of jungle. To further that, he served notice to international nonprofit groups such as the World Wildlife Fund that he will not tolerate their agendas in Brazil and has also come out strongly against lands reserved for indigenous tribes.

Bolsonaro ran on a campaign fueled by the “Beef, Bullets and Bibles” political caucus of rural politicians who partnered with evangelicals and law-and-order candidates to build a forceful alliance in the country’s legislature (Walton, 2019). But why would he focus on this section to run on?

If you go back to one of Bolsonaro’s campaign pillars, he is a powerful supporter of agribusiness. He is enabling farmers to go in and burn the forests, allowing them to farm the land, and create business. However, this practice is illegal in Brazil because of a 1965 Law, the Brazilian Forest Code of 1965, which mandated that private landowners, depending on the state in which they lived, set aside between 20 and 80 percent of native forests and savannas on their rural properties as “legal reserves” (Asher, 2019). But Bolsonaro is determined to make this a space that can be used to bolster the economy of Brazil.

Below is a video put out by The New York Times in October 2019. In the video, Journalist Brent McDonald, ventures into the rainforest with a local Brazilian Union Leaders who states “We will preserve the Amazon. But we will preserve the Amazon for our needs. Not the needs of the world.”

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcJUSMiKQyY

This mentality will be the end of the Amazon rainforest as we know it. In a 2019 article from Globo, it is stated that the deforestation was up 88% in June, compared to the June in 2018 according to the Terra Brasilis system of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe). If we continue down this path, where will the world end up? If the Brazilian leadership ignores the global outcry to stop the deforestation what will happen? Is this an error in decoding the messages from president to farmers, or is this an issue between the president and people of Brazil and the world, a global communication crisis? Is he doing what’s best for his people over the good of the world?

Below is an excerpt from the Encyclopedia Britannica on what would happen to the world if we were to lose the Amazon rainforest:

Even though burning the Amazon won’t have an appreciable effect on oxygen levels, burning will add enormous amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which will further strengthen global warming and produce more severe climate changes. And there are other very serious long-term consequences to destroying Earth’s most biodiverse region. Burning away the Amazon would condemn millions of living species to extinction and destroy their habitats. Many of these plants, animals, and other forms of life haven’t even been identified by science yet. It is thought that consumption of the whole of the Amazon by fire would change the region from a thick multilayered forest to a savanna composed of scattered trees and tall grasses. While this change might appeal to livestock grazers and farmers (at least for a few years, until the nutrients of the rainforest’s thin soil are exhausted), it will put a jaw-dropping dent into the planet’s biodiversity. Although some hardy plants and animals would survive to become part of this new ecosystem, millions (possibly tens of millions) of species of insects and other invertebrates and thousands of species of plants and vertebrates (mammals, reptiles, and native and migrating birds) would not.

References:

Anthony Faiola, M. L. (2018, October 28). Analysis | Who is Jair Bolsonaro, the man likely to be Brazil’s next president? Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/28/critics-are-afraid-jair-bolsonaro-heres-where-he-stands-issues/

Asher, C. (2019, July 18). Brazil’s New Forest Code puts vast areas of protected Amazon forest at risk. Retrieved from https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/brazils-new-forest-code-puts-vast-areas-of-protected-amazon-forest-at-risk/

Fund, W. W. (n.d.). Amazon. Retrieved from https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/amazon

McDonald, B., & Times, T. N. Y. (2019, October 7). Meet the Ranchers Who Claim the Brazilian Amazon is Theirs to Burn | The Dispatch. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcJUSMiKQyY

Meyer, A. (2010). Rainforests of Brazil. Retrieved from https://www.brazil.org.za/rainforests-of-brazil.html

Moreno, A. C. (2019, July 3). Desmatamento na Amazônia em junho é 88% maior do que no mesmo período de 2018. Retrieved from https://g1.globo.com/natureza/noticia/2019/07/03/desmatamento-na-amazonia-em-junho-e-88percent-maior-do-que-no-mesmo-periodo-de-2018.ghtml

Rafferty, J. P. (n.d.). What Happens to Earth If the Amazon Rainforest Is Completely Burned? Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/story/what-happens-to-earth-if-the-amazon-rainforest-is-completely-burned

Walton, A. (2019, November 4). Why the Amazon Is Really on Fire – and Why It’s Going to Keep Burning. Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vb5n54/why-the-amazon-is-really-on-fire-and-why-its-going-to-keep-burning

Planning for Disruption

March 1, 2020 by Jessica Buck Leave a Comment

In Schein’s 1980 three stage planned change theory, he discusses unfreezing, “creating the motivation to change what was previously mentioned”, changing, “The actual changes in behaviors and attitudes to the new desired behaviors and attitudes”, and refreezing, “freezing the new behaviors into the standard behavior”. But why is this important to business, and us as leaders, leading the business? Planned change aims to prepare the entire organization, or a major part of it, to adapt to significant changes in the organization’s goals and direction (Rao, 2009). I would like to focus on the unfreezing part of this planned change theory, as sometimes it is very overlooked. As leaders, we need to be open to learning, even if it means unlearning something first.

When looking back at the Organizational Change definition, “adapting the group to meet changes in the environment” (PSU, 2020), we realize that change is inevitable, and our companies need to be adaptable and agile to move with new problems and challenges. Disturbance to businesses will always be around. There will always be something to create disruption and change, whether it’s a natural, technological or manmade disaster. When you are the business that is getting disrupted, it’s easy to fall ball back on what you know.

In her 2015 TedX Talk, Liz Wiseman talks about starting at Oracle and being put in charge of building Oracle University. She talks about being a total rookie, just a year out of business school, but always asked a lot of questions, even naïve simple questions, just to keep it simple and not over complicate the building process. After the success she had with the program, the company decided that they needed to bring in someone more experienced to run the program she had built, so they brought in an experienced manager who knew all the steps. But we must remember how Wiseman got to this point, she was adaptable, and changed with her environment, questioning everything so she could learn and grow. If she hadn’t been constantly learning and growing, what would have happened?

She and her team would have hit a wall, they would not have been able to move as quickly as they needed to get to their next point. Wiseman needed to unlearn (unfreeze), her usual way of working to be able to move quickly and be what she describes as “scrappy”. If she had just gone back to her original ways of not being agile, not slowing down to remember the small things, and not just asking the simple questions, do you think she would have gotten to answer the question she asks “what’s the most important thing for us to get right?”.

She goes on to state, “because I had no real agenda of my own, I sought guidance, I stayed close to my stakeholders, I needed their feedback. What my team and I lacked our experience we compensated for and our willingness to learn to think creatively, and to deliver quick wins.” When looking back at the definition of planned change, adapting the group to meet changes in the environment, Wiseman did just that, her team was agile, always taking feedback, always being creative, moving with the environment around them.

I’ll leave you with one final quote from Wiseman that stuck with me:

“When we’re experienced, we gain knowledge and confidence and credibility, but once we have seen a pattern, once we know that pattern, we can be blind to the other possibilities. We stop asking why, and we just do. We build up scar tissue and we learn to be afraid of going down certain paths, and we now have a reputation to protect, and so we don’t let ourselves make mistakes or fail essentially. We acquire a set of adult-onset learning disabilities, and once we stop learning. We stop having fun, and we stop finding success.”

When we’re experienced, we freeze patterns, going back to what’s comfortable, it’s been successful for us, but we have to get to the next level as leaders, we have to unfreeze. We have to change.

Living and working with child-like wonder. (2015). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN1V8Y_kOEI

Pennsylvania State University. (2020). Lesson 05: Planned Change. https://psu.instructure.com/courses/2041071/modules/items/27977845.

Rao, S. R. (2009, January 28). A Planned change is needed. Retrieved from https://www.citeman.com/4820-a-planned-change-is-needed.html.

Schein, E. H. (1980). Organizational psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Using Temperaments in Communication

February 10, 2020 by Jessica Buck Leave a Comment

Communication is defined as interpersonal acts that exchange meaning and information (Schneider, Gruman & Coutts, 2013), and Leadership Communication consists of those messages from a leader that are rooted in the values and culture of an organization and are of significant importance to key stakeholders (Toastmasters, 2020). In my opinion, this is missing the emphasis on the actions that leaders bring to the table to make the influence. My definition would be more along the lines of leadership communication is the actions and efforts that show how the leader will influence the group to a common goal. I focus more on the actions because the leader must be a chameleon and recognize each person’s traits, and nurture them to bring forth the best work to assist the team.

For example, I work for a small company where there are 8 total people. We are very siloed in each of our departments, but each of us has been selected for our different traits to make one whole team. When a new person is hired, they go to both established levels of our programs, and in one level we get a session from Tracy Spears with the Exceptional Leaders Lab. Tracy’s session is about temperaments, and how teams interact and communicate with each other. Once going through this session, we can then as a team know how to best communicate with one another to get the results we desire. For example, my coworker, Marissa, is a connector, so she focuses on relationships to get her places. I know she is very passionate and know that if someone is in need and she cannot help, that it will overwhelm her. So in order to work best communicate with her if I need her help with one of my tasks, I know not to go to her on the week of a program, as the message and decoding of the message could be misunderstood, and to either ask her earlier or later to get the best results. This session has enabled our team to lead each other, but it also allowed our boss insight on how to get our best results, because leadership communication is not the same for a global organization consisting of many cultures. With these different temperaments, we can see each problem from a different perspective, which allows us to tackle challenges more easily.

A country that our company travels to frequently for programs is The Netherlands. According to Cultureatlas.com, in comparing the communication styles of The United States and The Netherlands, both styles appreciate verbal direct communication where getting to the point quickly is common and enjoy the ability to keep their personal space in a non-verbal communication style. However, when looking at the speaking style more in depth, the Dutch generally avoid over exaggerating on compliments, and the Americans tend to speak on their own behalf and compliment themselves. With these different communication styles just between Dutch and American communication, as a team we need to be very aware of how we are treating our program participants, so we do not offend anyone. As a company, we often bring in regional speakers, as opposed to keeping our American based speakers. When we bring our American speaker set to some European and Asian cultures, it is seen as us trying to teach them the American culture. When we bring other speaker sets to different cultures, this allows the participants of each program to feel that they are custom creating each program to them.

Relating temperaments to global communication is certainly a high task, given each culture has its own specific communication styles, but what is common throughout most cultures is maintaining personal touch, so each person, regardless of culture or communication style, feels recognized in your organization. Industrytraining.com states “Employees need to feel not only accepted, but valued, in an organization. By attentively listening to the concerns and viewpoints of others, employees will start to feel confident in the workplace. Active listening means paying attention to both verbal and nonverbal cues.” While we can’t always ensure that people will decode our message properly, if we remember that people from all cultures have feelings, we have a good chance to build a relationship in the business world or personal setting.

References

Evanson, N. (2016). American Culture – Communication. Retrieved from https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/american-culture/american-culture-communication#american-culture-communication

Neo, S. (2019, April 3). Strategies for Effective Cross-Cultural Communication within the Workplace. Retrieved from https://trainingindustry.com/blog/performance-management/strategies-for-effective-cross-cultural-communication-within-the-workplace/

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2013). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Los Angeles: Sage.

Scroope, C. (2017). Dutch Culture – Communication. Retrieved from https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/dutch-culture/dutch-culture-communication#dutch-culture-communication

Toastmasters, W. (2020). Chapter 1: What is Leadership Communications? Retrieved from https://westsidetoastmasters.com/resources/communication_secrets/ch01.html

Introduction

January 17, 2020 by Jessica Buck 2 Comments

Hello Everyone!

My name is Jessie Buck, and I am now located in Atlanta, GA after relocating from Philadelphia last year.

After spending many years in Executive Assistant roles supporting multiple C-Level Executives, I am now the Program Manger for a company that works to promote female leadership to the next level. We have two levels of established programs, one for the director level, and the other for those who are at the senior level. We host about 15 programs a year all over the world and have about 1300 alumni, so I am usually traveling! I am the sole program manager of our first, yearlong, membership-based program where members focus on their legacy within their companies, have access to events and speakers, and have the ability to use our personal board of advisors, who have been in their respective C-Level roles for many years, to seek advice as needed. My long-term goal is to grow this program into different sectors of the business world or to bring my knowledge to another company and work to grow a leadership program for individuals within the company. I am working to complete my Bachelor’s degree in Organizational Leadership and Development.

When I’m not traveling, I enjoy being able to see family and horseback riding on weekends!

I look forward to working with all of you.