The meeting was going brilliantly. Everyone was on the same page. The Americans closed their folders, delighted. “We’re all agreed, then?” There was a polite murmur of assent.

The Americans went back to their headquarters, and prepared to complete the deal. But there was a problem. When their new colleagues had said “Yes, of course,” they were being polite. It didn’t actually mean “Yes, your price is agreeable to us, we can deliver that amount of goods, and we’re going to go through with the deal”. It meant – in their culture – “We’re prepared to talk, to start dickering over the details”.

Intercultural relations are a minefield strewn with flowers. Learning to work with people from other cultures can be so rewarding – but if you’re not listening carefully, it can also blow up in your face.

Direct versus indirect communication is one of those horribly unexpected Jack-in-the-Boxes. Sometimes it has to do with time: for Germans, “I’ll see you at 2pm” means 2pm sharp, and it would offend to rock up at 2:15 or 2:30. Other cultures may vary; traditionally, in England, you’re exactly on time for lunch, but around half an hour later for a party, to give your hosts time to relax and prepare.

Learning to swim happy through different cultures, and not get stuck in an attitude of “what we do in my country is right”, is as valuable a skill in business as in diplomacy.

Uwe Napiersky, a German psychologist and academic who is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in Business Psychology at Aston University/Business school in the city of Birmingham in the north of England, has been helping people to develop their intercultural competence for many years. “Before I went into academia I was doing intercultural courses with global corporate clients,” Uwe says. He searched for the right tools to help him. “Some of the available tools are over-engineered – very interesting, very good – but not fit for purpose in a teaching environment.”

He found the IRC, the Intercultural Readiness Check, in 2012. “I like using the IRC because it is evidence-based; however, it has simplicity. The IRC is grounded in research on more than 45,000 people who were in the studies that developed the tool; the research was very robust.”

Uwe uses the Intercultural Readiness Check to teach his MBA (Masters of Business Administration) students at Aston University about intercultural competences.

The IRC enables Uwe’s students to sharpen their soft skills in terms of developing their intercultural antennae. It is a practice as well as a process. Uwe compares this learning to the way that we learn and internalise physical skills. “I can learn how to drive a car, and learn it well. But if you don’t apply it for a couple of years you will unlearn it. The same with intercultural competences.”

Using the IRC, he says, is the start of a structured process, making it easy for him to talk about communication. “You are dealing with cultural uncertainty, you help people to realise ‘You must switch on your antennae – you are in another culture; there are maybe different rules – how to dress, how to behave, how to write a letter, how to approach things’. People come from different learning systems, and once they are here two or three months, they realise that this is done differently from the culture they come from.”

The college in Birmingham has a huge range of cultural backgrounds in its students, who come from every continent to study there.
The IRC opens the door for understanding of intercultural issues, Uwe says. “The story for me is that teaching in a setting like this, you have the ingredients, you have the tools, and you put them together and make it a success for your participants. When someone is assessed, we look in the reflective writing to see what are the key insights that people have.”

Uwe’s students keep a journal, taking the findings on their own intercultural competences as measured by the IRC, and setting them against their daily experience and learnings as they study for the MBA. This reflexivity – the reflective journaling of their experience and thoughts – brings them deep into an understanding of their own attitudes and competences as they change and grow.

For MBA students the learnings are generally about how they behave in teams, within business situations. “I try to translate the knowledge gained through the insights of the IRC into learning. What we are doing is experiential learning. We want to create this reflexivity for people, and in looking into self-leadership – where one uses the doing, energising and thinking self – we want to push the thinking button, develop the thinking muscles, and let us say, to experiment with behaviour.

“In learning in a university, you are allowed to make mistakes. And sometimes we do these little exercises, fun exercises, where students can behave in a culturally affronting way – the opposite of the typical behaviour – and let’s see what we get out of this, for instance deliberately queue-jumping to see the English reaction.”

One of the favourite exercises is to spot political bloopers by world leaders, a rich source of wisdom on how to avoid intercultural gaffes.

Uwe points out that a lot of people have anxiety when they are working in different cultures because they do not actually know how to behave correctly. “As [Geert] Hofstede [the Dutch specialist in organisational culture] says, culture is a mental programming of people [1]. What we are working on is fine-tuning the mental programming. I don’t know if that’s the magic zone, but that’s where we try to place our focus in teaching, to train these mental muscles.”

Year after year, Uwe has gained feedback from his students that the ability given to understand their own intercultural competences is a useful one. “There are multiple examples of that enlightenment feeling, where you see the smile on a face – that the penny has dropped. And for some people learning has to do with anxiety to overcome. People are afraid, if they don’t understand the cultural implication of things, because they come from within a different culture,” he says.

“Under the umbrella of soft skills, we are getting our students to gain more intercultural competence. We are proud that we are here very diverse in terms of nationalities. Giving students an insight into intercultural aspects helps our students to learn and to develop.”

A typical example: somebody arrives fresh from another continent directly from the airport into a classroom in Birmingham. “With all its charm, Birmingham UK – what the city and the country and the society stand for, what work culture is there – students come maybe from the middle of India, Africa, Asia, the United States, and it’s a different culture they’re diving into.”

Uwe is by background a business psychologist who has worked in more than 50 countries. “In psychology we talk about four stages: you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, and then you come into the higher stages of becoming more aware of the skills and applying them. At first you may be a bull in a china shop – you don’t even know when you make a mistake.”

Awareness-building, he says, is central to learning processes. You learn where is your comfort zone, and what is outside that zone. “A typical cultural mistake is when a man holds out his hand automatically for a handshake with a woman and she says, ‘Oh no, in my culture it’s not allowed’.”

This awareness typically comes in the students’ reflective writings – when they use their insights into their own cultural competences from the IRC questionnaire to probe how they feel and act. “I say to them, ‘Soft skills will make your hard skills shine.’ It is in the mid-term and long-term you will gain from this, to be good in communication, or in leading a team.

“I think where the penny drops is often in the team situation. I’ve heard people saying ‘Ah, now I understand why people behave differently.’ A concrete example I’ve seen in some individuals is, once they get the key for this intercultural perspective, they can unlock the reason for dysfunctionality in their teams. They realise – stop a moment, we have two, three, four different cultures here; oh, in this culture their way of communication is more indirect, whereas in that, it’s more direct; that’s why we have tension, maybe we need to slow down the process. The price of working in intercultural teams is that you need more time.”

The IRC opens the door for understanding of issues like these. “The story for me is that teaching in a setting like this, you have the ingredients, you have the tools, and you put them together and make it a success for your participants. “Some get more out of it, some less – because for them, it’s not relevant. But when someone is assessed, we look in the reflective writing to see what are the key insights that people have.”

When did you last enjoy being part of a (culturally) diverse team?

Diverse teams have three options: They may end up in conflict, they may perform like regular teams, or they may outperform such teams in creative and cooperative potential. What do (culturally) diverse teams need to avoid conflict and to unleash instead their creative potential?

At IBI, we have developed a process that helps diverse teams to cooperate and to succeed. We call this process Team Readiness. Team Readiness builds on a set of four interlocking competences that secure and increase performance in diverse teams. We’ve done research into these four competences for the past two decades, analyzing data from more than 50,000 respondents to determine how these competences enhance individual and team performance, and how they develop.

The first two competences are Intercultural Sensitivity and Intercultural Communication. Team members who are good at this perceive and appreciate differences in their team, and empathize with others regardless of these differences. They also pick up the verbal and nonverbal signals that indicate the need for turn-taking and listening. Team members who score high on Intercultural Sensitivity and Intercultural Communication are attuned to the needs of others, and feel strongly about making team members feel comfortable and accepted.

The third and fourth competences are Building Commitment and Managing Uncertainty. People who score high on Building Commitment invest into relationships with a range of different people and stakeholders, inside and outside the team. They can confront and contrast the different perspectives in their team, and push for solutions that integrate those perspectives.

Managing Uncertainty is a game changer. It is of unique value to (culturally) diverse teams. Managing Uncertainty helps to deal with mounting pressure and the downright painful social dynamics diverse teams may experience. People scoring high on Managing Uncertainty are less bothered by these pressures and dynamics, and they can keep the team together just when you need it.

Team Readiness workshops are compact and to the point. We start with individual competence assessment and feedback, followed by a one-day session with the team. Team Readiness workshops are suitable for teams that just get started, and for teams already well under way.

Would you like to try out Team Readiness to help your team help itself? Do get in touch with us via e-mail to info@ibinet.nlor give us a call at +31 35 62 94 269.

There’s an assumption that spending time abroad makes us more interculturally competent. Given this popular belief when people, with experience abroad, take the Intercultural Readiness Check they are likely to expect high scores, and might find it hard to accept lower scores. 1:1 feedback is recommended with all assessments, but even more so in cases when there are unexpected results. We recently had experience of this with a senior manager at a European specialty chemicals company.

Mark had spent more than half his life abroad, first as a Third Culture Kid, then as student and expatriate. During an International Negotiations program we were facilitating, we came to appreciate Mark as a sociable, open-minded and friendly person – he simply got along well with people. Prior to the program, he and the other participants had completed the Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC; © Intercultural Business Improvement Ltd.), the questionnaire we’ve developed to assess competences that make us interculturally more effective. During the program, participants received their IRC results, an in-depth written report, and 1:1 feedback by an experienced IRC licensee.

Given Mark’s experience abroad, and his general way with people, we had expected him to score fairly high on the IRC. He did indeed score well on Building Commitment and Managing Uncertainty, two of the four competences the IRC assesses. Surprisingly, however, he didn’t score high on Intercultural Sensitivity: a score of 4 on a 9-point scale.

Mark, too, had been expecting a higher score. During the feedback, we looked more closely at the strategies he had developed for getting along with people from different cultures: To focus on what they all had in common, and to downplay their differences. The conversation helped Mark to realise that this strategy might not be sufficient for being interculturally effective. He came to consider that in order to understand colleagues and clients from other cultural backgrounds, he might need to complement and reflect upon the differences rather than adopt a disinterest.

Mark was no exception

Many people spend time abroad without strengthening their intercultural competences.

When completing the IRC, respondents also provide biographical information. Of all respondents who completed the IRC in its current form, 13,049 respondents have spent, just like Mark, more than two years abroad. Of these, 1840 (14%) score like Mark on Intercultural Sensitivity; a further 19% score even lower. Clearly, the popular assumption that spending time abroad makes us interculturally competent is incorrect: We also need to have strategies to turn this experience into an intercultural learning opportunity. We get a suntan or a sunburn by spending time in the sun. But we do not get intercultural competences just by spending time abroad.[1]

Many people are like Mark, with years of experience abroad but with strategies that did not strengthen their intercultural muscle. But given popular beliefs, they are likely to expect high scores, and might find it hard to accept lower scores. It is therefore even more important to have time to guide them through the result and its implications.

As intercultural professionals we need to carefully think about how we structure the feedback session. We need to bring across general information about the instrument, what it assesses and how scores are calculated. And we need to encourage people to look at their results with a pro-active attitude, so they are curious about the feedback and see it as a service designed to give them new ideas for their next steps.

How important it is to provide 1:1 feedback has also been shown by Dorothea Schnabel (2015) in a study involving 820 students about to start their ERASMUS semester abroad. 351 of the students were in the control group, receiving no feedback or any other treatment between the two measurement points of the study. 396 students received only written feedback, and 73 students received both written feedback and 1:1 feedback by a trained assessor. Students in this last group showed the biggest advancement when tested again: Their competence scores increased, as did their general motivation to change. They could also more readily see a benefit in being tested in the first place. Conversely many of the students who received only the written report did not get motivated to change, but rejected the test instead.[2]

When delivering group training, try and schedule an additional 30 minutes on the phone with each participant, and be ready to explain why your proposal might be more expensive than that of other providers.

Giving 1:1 feedback to each participant may, however, not always be possible. For these cases, we have developed a special process, which we call IRC Action Planning. The IRC Action Planning is designed to help respondents take a pro-active rather than a defensive stance on their results, and to welcome the feedback as a service for them designed to help them decide on their next steps.

How would Mark have responded if we hadn’t been able to explore his strategies together? Both Mark and the study by Schnabel remind us of how carefully we need to design the feedback phase when working with an intercultural assessment tool.

References:
[1] Ursula Brinkmann & Oscar van Weerdenburg. 2014. Intercultural Readiness: Four competences for working across cultures. London: Palgrave
[2] Dorothea Schnabel. 2015. Intercultural Competence: Development and Validation of a Theoretical Framework, a Cross-Cultural Multimethod Test, and a Collaborative Assessment Intervention. PhD thesis, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen.

Spending time abroad – Does it make us interculturally competent?

A key goal of study abroad programs is to enable students to develop their intercultural competences. Global organizations likewise assume that international experience predicts intercultural effectiveness and expatriate success – which is why they are so keenly interested in hiring graduates who studied abroad. But how much does Time Spent Abroad actually contribute to intercultural competence development? Our data show that its importance is overstated and its effects still ill understood.

Our research draws on data from 40,000 respondents who completed the Intercultural Readiness Check (www.interculturalreadiness.com ©Intercultural Business Improvement BV), a valid and reliable questionnaire assessing four intercultural competences. Respondents come from 180 countries, all major industries and professions; they differ in seniority, management level, and international experience. From the start of using the Intercultural Readiness Check some 15 years ago, we’ve always asked respondents to also tell us how many friends from other cultures they had. By now, our database is probably the largest source of information on intercultural friendship – a topic of growing interest to research on intercultural development.

So what matters most – Spending time abroad or Having friends from other cultures? The answer is clear and simple: Intercultural friendship is far more important to intercultural competence development than Experience of living and working abroad. People with many friends from other cultures have vastly better scores on Intercultural Readiness than those with few friends from other cultures. Importantly, if people stay abroad for more than one year and still have not found a way of making friends across cultures, their competences shrink back to the level at which they started before they went abroad (Brinkmann & van Weerdenburg, 2014 Intercultural Readiness).

We cannot, then, simply assume that students return home from their study abroad as interculturally competent citizens of the world. Nor can companies assume that expatriates who have worked abroad before will do a better job than those who have not. What organizations can do, however, is assess intercultural readiness before the move, coupled with level-specific coaching and guidance before, during and after the move. For more information on how we support universities and companies, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at info@ibinet.nl.