Cultivating Multi-Cultural Diversity

Looking through the microscope, I can see the culture of our group forming. It has been growing for over three months now and is about to really come to life.

I’m not talking about some microorganisms in a laboratory here. Rather this is a view of culture that is a representation of a group’s behavioural norms. But, more than that, it’s the blending of people from a myriad of different backgrounds into one new modus operandi.

I was brought up in England and emigrated to New Zealand fourteen years ago. I’m British with a dose of Kiwi, though most of my friends would say I’m stereotypical British. It’s so easy to label people based on their cultural traits yet that really is a simplification. Once you start thinking about it more deeply you then get into the whole nature vs nurture discussion plus there’s also the concept of an individual’s personality to consider.

We’re a team of sixteen IBM’ers from eleven different countries, all of us expected to be high-performing on day one in Ecuador, a country none of us has worked in before. We’ll only physically meet each other for the first time around forty-eight hours before we start working with our clients. We’re expected to be a reasonably well-oiled machine working in harmony with each other and with our client personnel from the outset.

On reflection, it’s no surprise that the biggest emphasis in our preparation for our Corporate Services assignment was to prepare us to work in a multi-cultural team. There are so many things for us to consider, for example, from the way of doing business in Ecuador, to how individual people from different cultures relate to each other, to how decisions will be made, to how best to communicate effectively, to how our team will self regulate our work, to how deadlines will be treated, to how we’ll deal with pressure or conflict etc. Perhaps the most important consideration for the early interactions is how we’ll build trust, both with each other and with our client. Trust is such a key ingredient in any group setting.

I’m writing this on the plane heading into Ecuador. My mind is spinning thinking about the immediate work ahead. But one thing I’m certain about, is that if we embrace our differences as positive attributes in a multi-cultural team, we can deliver so much more value. Not only that, we can learn and grow as individuals, being so much more aware that our diversity actually gives us more to offer. There is no need to homogenize us, that would just dilute who we all are.

When I think about how I personally need to behave or adjust to do my bit in a multi-cultural team, the two most important considerations that come to mind are patience and listening. These will be critical. We’ll be working in an environment where timeliness and deadline management may be quite different to what I’m used to. We’ll also be working through a translator, so communication will take twice as long and nuances may be missed.

The risk of misunderstanding is high. This can lead to re-work, missed milestones, stress or even conflict. Going in with my eyes wide open and using patience and increased listening skills as a mitigation approach, for me, has to be how I adapt from the beginning. I naturally tend to want to take the lead and push things along. I’ll probably still bring those traits into our work, but they’ll be tempered by a deliberate emphasis on listening and thinking more before speaking.

What an opportunity this is to experience working with people from such globally diverse backgrounds and to learn to be agile and responsive in situations where people think and act quite differently and then use the power of the group to achieve great things. One thing is for sure, we all want to be here. We’re all self-motivated and excited. We’ve built working relationships remotely already. We’re culturally aware and can use our diversity to create a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

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