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.”

Lost in culture at the start of work life – what business schools try to do to help

Students heading out into a life in business can be lost in a world of clashing cultures. Even those from blended families or second generation immigrant families, or who have done the 21st-century Grand Tour taking in Nepal and Thailand and Interrailing through Europe, can live, without realising it, in a monocultural bubble. Business schools try to solve this problem by sending students on placements abroad, to China, the United States, etc – expensive, especially for students from less advantaged families, but valuable.

Is this effective? No

A four-year study of two business streams in Rotterdam University found that this stratagem can fail, unless it is enriched by work on intercultural skills. Cheryl Gerretsen, Jessica Shinnick and Christophe Van Puymbroeck, who conducted this study, are hoofddocenten, or in English, leading lecturers, in Rotterdam Business School, part of Rotterdam University of Applied Science. Their specialties are (Gerretsen) Master of Law, and Master of Arts in Indonesian linguistics; (Shinnick) Master of Social Work, and (Van Puymbroeck) Master of Art in Computational Linguistics, Master of Science in Business Economics, and executive MBA.

The university’s Trade Management for Asia programme leading to a Bachelor of Business Administration degree has two streams, one taught in Dutch, the other in English. There is a lot of cultural diversity in both streams, Van Puymbroeck explains. Around 40% of students in the Dutch stream come from a Chinese family background but grew up in the Netherlands; another 60% have various cultural backgrounds (Indonesian, Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, etc). In the English stream there are a lot of students from Eastern Europe, as well as Dutch people studying through English.

Contradictory developments in old program version

Twenty-five years ago the university started to send students in this course to Asia for a year. At the time, the course included a study career coaching (SCC) programme, and separately offered a course of intercultural communication in the first block of the first year. “The assumption was that they were going to be really interculturally competent,” says Gerretsen. “That was true for many, but there were also students who had hardly progressed. Some even regressed, returning from Asia saying things like ‘Aww, I never want to work with Asians again’, saying Asians were ‘so unreliable’, things like that. There were people who just had a bad experience, because it can be very hard to spend a year away from your parents in such a remote culture.” 

Insights gained from repeated competence assessment with the IRC

Gerretsen, Shinnick and Van Puymbroeck’s study of the effect of specific work on intercultural competence offered students a programme throughout both the Dutch- and English-language streams of the degree, integrating Intercultural Business Improvement’s Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC) into the SCC programme. The IRC is a questionnaire with multiple questions on cultural and attitudinal subjects. The revelations the answers provide of the respondent’s cultural competences, and the follow-up exercises used to hone those competences, make it a powerful tool for self-knowledge and change.

“We had them take the IRC for the first time some 15 weeks into their first-year studies,” says Gerretsen. “They repeated it five weeks into their third-year studies – just a few weeks before they were expected to go to study in Asia for a year. We had them retake it again approximately a month after they returned.”

As a measure they used a previous study of students whose intercultural skills had been assessed in their third year, and again in their fourth year, but who had not had the advantage of using the IRC in their first year.

Dedicated sessions on selected intercultural competence topics

“We decided to weave more intercultural competence development into the programme, because we wanted to make sure our graduates were more interculturally competent,” says Gerretsen. “So we inserted elements of intercultural competence and dealing with diversity into the existing SCC programme. In this SCC programme, every year the students would have eight meetings in small groups, with topics around competence development – making career choices, things like that – and we substituted the topics of two meetings per year with cultural topics.

“The very first meeting around culture, in the first block of four in the first year, in the seventh week, they took the IRC test for the first time, then wrote an assignment on what they thought of the outcomes, and what their intercultural experience was thus far; what they said the outcomes of the IRC said about themselves; did they recognise the outcomes or not.

“Another topic was dealing with the typical exclusion mechanisms you have in multicultural group work – of course our students always had to work in multicultural groups, because that’s the nature of our student population.” Exclusion mechanisms are very likely to occur when you put people of different cultural backgrounds together. They can seriously interfere with the quality of group work, driving people into cliques, excluding people and lessening the group’s effectiveness in its work.

These mechanisms include stereotyping and stereotype threats – for example, fear driving you into living up to national or racial stereotype that other people might have of you. “These are processes that happen based on implicit bias,” says Gerretsen. “People are not aware that they treat people differently, mostly, and also it’s mostly well-intentioned, but the effect can be really powerful.” Tokenism is a hidden danger in multicultural groups – people can unconsciously set up one person to represent their whole type, so that the one black person in the group is seen as representing all of the good and bad stereotypes that you have of black people.

“All of these mechanisms can negatively impact the quality of the group work. So, we had students first study these mechanisms and then exchange experiences of them.” The students were taught to spot assumptions based on language command: for instance, if you’re very fluent in the language being used, you’re automatically seen as more intelligent just because you’re eloquent, whereas students that are quiet can be seen as being less intelligent or less well prepared.

They learned to spot and neutralise microaggressions – “those little remarks that people sometimes make – jokes, usually very well intended, no harm meant, but still, if you are a member of a minority group it becomes really annoying. An example is when people compliment others who have a certain appearance with ‘Oh, your Dutch is so good!’ It’s meant as something nice, but if you’re in a minority group and you hear this every two weeks it becomes really annoying, because it means they’re not seeing me as one of them, they see a foreigner.”

Van Puymbroeck says, “We also measured the intercultural competences of students who did not take the intercultural competence programme, and this allowed us to compare these two groups. The measurement showed that students who took the new intercultural competence programme outperformed students who did not – so much that students who had returned from their year abroad in Asia, but had not taken the intercultural programme prior to their stay abroad, were outperformed in every single dimension of the IRC by students that had not gone to Asia yet, but had taken the IRC programme.”

Learning from IRC feedback

In effect, the students who had taken and repeated the IRC and worked on its findings about them, who had consciously learned about how intercultural groups can form into cliques and exclude others, were far more sophisticated and practised in their intercultural negotiations. “And the students who went to Asia and who had taken the programme progressed in that one year, whereas students that had not taken the intercultural competence programme, there was no significant difference in their scores on the IRC when they came back compared to before they went to Asia.”

Reflection was an important part both throughout the intercultural competence programme, and in the year that followed (Year 2). “Students had to reflect on their own behaviour and things that happen in their personal life and also in their school life. Being aware of your own stereotypes, for example, is very important if you want to progress,” says Van Puymbroeck.

Students report that the IRC really helped them

 In their final assessment, students had to produce a written portfolio. “One of the assignments in that portfolio was to explain the development that the IRC gave them, comparing their scores in year 1, year 3 and year 4,” says Gerretsen. “One of the questions they had to address was specifically what they thought of the IRC instrument. Many students reported back to us that they felt the IRC had helped them, because it gave such concrete feedback.

“The most interesting thing is that very clearly many students had not agreed with their score in the first year – they thought that scores were too low. Only after having returned from Asia and having lived the experience of spending a year abroad in such a remote culture, they came to the conclusion that they’d overestimated their own abilities in years 1 and 3.

“Out of 21 students whose final reports we analysed in detail, some 18 wrote about how they overestimated their own ability in year 1. We asked them to analyse why their style developed the way it did, and the IRC really did help them to give vocabulary to the stage of their developments.”

“The IC programme was a catalyst for students’ intercultural competence development”

Surprisingly, says Van Puymbroeck, “we showed that you do not actually have to go abroad to develop intercultural competences. And the intercultural programme prior to the stay abroad actually worked as a catalyst for their development during the year – so students that took the programme prior to their year abroad developed their intercultural skills a lot more than students who had not taken it.”

Gerretsen sees this programme as unique. “Up to now we have not encountered any other bachelor’s programmes where they integrate a measurement instrument all through the four years of study and have students continuously reflect on that, so it’s one ongoing learning line all through the four years.”

The university has now reworked its programme and offers an International Business degree, with an intercultural competence track integrating the most effective elements of Gerretsen, Shinnick and Van Puymbroeck’s study.

The webinar dilemma.

The great dilemma when moving from face to face classes to online video-based tools is how to project what works in a classroom, what we know from years of developing our own style, and engagement methods, and yet take the time to reflect on and abandon poor practices.

The difficulty with this is that there is much good practice, but so many poor practices in classrooms that are rarely challenged, and the temptation is to use compulsory attendance rules, to project poor practices onto the webinar. However, a learner or participant has many more strategies to ignore you, and to appear present but be zoned out, when they are participating online. So, whether you like it or not, this is the time to critically reflect on your teaching and facilitation practice.

So, to ensure reasonable engagement from your learners here are my priorities for Do’s and Don’ts. Rest assured though, there is much more to ‘doing a good job’, and most of the clues about that, rest with you and your audience.

Do’s;

1. Take time to introduce the group and understand the situation.
2. Confront participatory styles and allow for difference.
3. Encourage the use, even emphasis of new and old nonverbal cues, including hand gestures, perhaps even create a lexicon of gestures for your participants to use. Ensure you are aware of all the tools your webinar software offer and make an active choice to use or ignore them.
4. Be organised, AND agile. Overemphasise structure. Email each person before and after the webinar, and discuss their needs. Treat the session like a movie script and make each session an adventure.
5. Make it interactive, use polls, give research tasks, and use exercises/discussions in breakout rooms where they are available, but only for 3–4 people, with a convenor and scribe appointed. Allow plenty of time and call the roll before starting on return.

Don’ts;

1. Don’t bully or belittle the lurkers, listeners, or the over-sharers. Just as in a normal classroom, all voices and learning styles belong. It’s the teacher’s job to ensure they’re included through structured management.
2. Don’t overuse PowerPoint or screen sharing. Presentation content must be concise, and support activities and assessment outcomes. Consider scripting your voice over, rather than commenting “off the cuff”.
3. Don’t make the sessions too long without a break. If the full-day or half-day session is called for by the situation, break it into one-hour slots with a pre-scheduled 10-minute break. Make sure everyone knows when the break is coming. Suggested teacher input is 8–15 minutes per hour only. Keep strictly, very strictly to the scheduled time.
4. Perhaps these tips are self-evident for you. They are not comprehensive; they are a bullet point list that represents what I prioritise. Every circumstance is different and requires you to consider your priorities. If you would like some more rationale for my current thinking, then read on.

Beyond

Effective online e-learning, whether synchronous or asynchronous, ignores the ‘e’ and is fully informed about the intrinsic pedagogy for learning. The pedagogy that relates to human self-determination. That is, it is truly learner-centric. This is rare, as rare as can be. Described by Stuart Hase as Heutagogy (Hase and Kenyon[1] ), this rare instructional design state has never found more meaning than in the new ‘cloud’ located learning framework in which we find ourselves.

Paying attention to emotion, to feelings, to context, to culture with all it’s meanings, to individual needs, and the wonder of the intrinsic human curiosity are the keys to successful learning.

The need for connectedness can be artificially stimulated by the media and graphical design ‘tricks’ you use. But so many infographics and visual cues lack substance on further examination, and it is the substance that matters.

The way to avoid this is to offer real connectedness, vulnerability, inquiry, curiosity, discovery, and relationship as learning devices. Offering information is easy, and often (but not always) redundant. Relevant, contemporary, and authentic information on any topic can usually be found easily with a few good research rules and the ability to type Google.

Educational leadership is about ceasing the role of ‘sage on the stage’. Seriously, the old models of “Master and Apprentice” have little relevance these days. I have thought a lot about it, and Confucian, Platonic and Socratic models of learning are over-quoted and over-relied on as theoretical justifications for education relations, sadly as are Piaget and Knowles these days I think. What do you think?

Facilitator, friend, guide, peer, listener, and encourager are the new roles of educational leaders. It all changed when Tim Berners-Lee proposed this wonderful web of learning, the World Wide Web, where all knowledge can be shared knowledge, and instantly accessible.

Mays Imad, quoting Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error[2], reminds us, “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”

Imad offers excellent tips for teachers of remote students in this time of crisis. I suggest you read her article for context, however, I have repeated them here for your convenience.

Reference: Hope Matters. M Imad Inside Higher Education 17 March 2020.[3]

• Email your students to remind them that you are still there for them.
• Tell them how you are shifting your schedule to deal with the new situation and that change is part of life. Humanize yourself and make it casual and lighthearted. For example, you might talk about how, in between reading their discussion posts, you decided to start your spring cleaning, which you’ve been putting off forever.
• Reflect on the notion of rigor and continue to challenge and support your students. As instructors, we often must balance rigor and support, and this situation might be one where students will need more support than rigor. Establishing continuity doesn’t mean you increase the amount of work required of them. I say this because I worry that some of us might be fixated on the rigor of the materials presented. Let’s face it — the rigor may suffer, and that’s OK considering the situation.
• Repeat some of the lessons you taught in class. Especially for those students who are missing the classroom environment, this will probably help activate their memory of being part of a community and remind them that they are still part of one. For example, in your email you can say something like, “Remember when we talked about this and …”
• Use hopeful and optimistic language, such as, “When you come back this fall …” This will help students look forward to coming back to the campus.
• Offer students an opportunity to exchange phone numbers and, for those who are interested, help them create a WhatsApp chat group. It can sometimes be difficult for a student to ask for a classmate’s phone number.
• Don’t ignore the elephant in the room. If possible, talk about COVID-19 and fear. This is an opportunity for you to remind your students to consider the sources of their news and to beware of the large amount of misinformation.
• Remember that students have left behind more than just their classes and academics. On both residential and commuter campuses, there are important spaces where students meet and talk about their non-academic lives — sports, upcoming concerts, recently discovered shows and so on. Consider creating a community discussion board for them to share what is happening in their lives, especially given the stress, fear and strains in these uncertain times.
• Let your students know that you are there for them and that if they need help to reach out to you. Let them know that you are (I hope) in touch with counselors or mental health experts that can help them should they need to speak to someone. Most important, ask each of your students how you can help them. The Persian poet Rumi says,

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”[4]

Likewise, in times of uncertainty and unknowing, we can create a space where our students’ voice and insights can illuminate the path we are carving out for them — and us.

The role of emotion, of feeling in learning, is grounded in studies by Shen et al and Um et al[5]

These are inspiring and worthy of your attention, as is Mays Imad’s excellent article written at the commencement of the Corona Virus crisis for Inside Higher education.

Summary

Covid-19 has forced everyone active in society to examine what it means to ‘meet’ online. As we project our selves into this space, it is a great opportunity to re-think our approach.

[1] Hase, S. and Kenyon, C., 2000. From andragogy to heutagogy. Ulti-BASE In-Site.

[2] Damasio, A.R., 2005. Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain, London: Penguin.

[3] (https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/03/17/10-strategies-support-students-and-help-them-learn-during-coronavirus-crisis#.XsxIvf351FA.link)

[4] Barks, C., 1995. The essential Rumi, San Francisco, CA: Harper.

[5] Shen, L., Wang, M. and Shen, R., 2009. Affective e-learning: Using “emotional” data to improve learning in pervasive learning environment. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 12(2), pp.176–189.

Um, E., Plass, J.L., Hayward, E.O. and Homer, B.D., 2012. Emotional design in multimedia learning. Journal of educational psychology, 104(2), p.485.

This article first appeared in:

https://medium.com/@keough/5-dos-and-3-don-ts-and-beyond-for-webinar-teaching-d918ece78ae6

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.