By Ursula Brinkmann, PhD and Oscar van Weerdenburg

Culture’s glass walls can keep your team from making progress. In measurements of mixed-sex groups men invariably speak far more than women. A seminal study by Brigham Young University found that men speak 75% of the time in mixed-sex groups. And 11 years later things are no better – even in the fictional Game of Thrones, Swedish start-up Ceretai’s data showed male speech accounting for 75& of all speaking time across all eight seasons.

It sounds like one of the quaint eccentricities of our society. But silencing members of non-dominant groups causes serious deficits in decision-making by companies, and even by local and national governments and NGOs.

Competences in intercultural communication can offer surprisingly simple solutions even to problems with very deep roots.

About a year ago, I was chairing a meeting in a culturally diverse team for one of our clients. The company supported local youth in developing their artistic talent, and each year two young talents were awarded a prize for the greatest accomplishment. In the meeting, they were brainstorming about how to finance visits by family members to attend the award ceremony in their country’s capital.

In the beginning most people contributed, but after five minutes or so, only three of the fifteen people at the meeting were still talking. The others had become quiet and looked around, apparently accepting that this discussion as well would follow the usual pattern. I could see that one woman was clearly giving signals that she had something to say – signals being unconsciously ignored by her manager, and those still contributing to the discussion.

“Olivia?” I asked, “Would you like to contribute?”

Watch for the ‘I have a thought’ signals

Olivia’s contribution changed the tenor of the meeting and opened a new issue no one had considered. Suddenly great ideas were being poured out by everyone. I continued to watch for the ‘I have a thought’ signals and noticed others in the meeting also now turning to women who were clearly waiting to speak.

The unconscious silencing of women, and members of minority groups, is the kind of problem that is incomprehensible and unavoidable – unless you are interculturally competent and able to fine tune your intercultural communication depending on your audience, which is our company’s specialty.

Intercultural Business Improvement started out running training for international corporations. But then we realised that it was more important to first assess people’s intercultural competences, and then teach them to play to their strengths.

From the start, we worked with academics from the universities of Amsterdam and Groningen, Gent and Toronto to make a questionnaire, the Intercultural Readiness Check, which we refined into 58 questions and have continued to develop over the past 18 years.
This questionnaire assesses four competences:

• Intercultural Sensitivity
• Intercultural Communication
• Building Commitment
• Managing Uncertainty

The Intercultural Readiness Check has now been taken by more than 70,000 people worldwide. Its results – and the work of training and refining the respondents’ competences – have improved cooperation in numerous teams and organisations.

Some of the results of these years of research are revelatory. Here are some recent findings:

• The staff of companies with 30% or more women in top management score higher on intercultural competences than those of companies with fewer women bosses.
• High IRC scores are paired with positive attitudes toward diversity, which is to say the conviction that differences within one’s team are essential for performance. These positive diversity beliefs are known to enhance the effectiveness of diverse groups in organizations.
• Communication skills are key to navigate different styles in how people convey their thoughts, express their feelings or give feedback.
• Fault-lines within a team (where the team falls apart into two or more subgroups) are a prime source of conflict, with the team no longer being able to benefit from its diversity. People scoring high on IRC competence Managing Uncertainty report experiencing such fault-lines less often than people who score low.
• Developing a culturally diverse network of friends from other cultures is essential for developing intercultural competences. Spending time abroad is only part of the story – having such friendships is needed if we want to use the time abroad to develop all competences.

Opening ourselves to people whose (cultural) background differs from ours – and doing it using competences that are already native to us, not to mention hiring people with special competences in this area – can enrich us and our society in every way.

by Ursula Brinkmann and Oscar van Weerdenburg

There’s an assumption that by spending time abroad, we invest into our intercultural development and become 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 Programme 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 our 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 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 help him be 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 in his quest for intercultural development

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, 15,141 respondents have spent, just like Mark, more than two years abroad. Of these, 1840 (14%) score like Mark on Intercultural Sensitivity; a further 20% score even lower. Clearly, the popular assumption that by spending time abroad, we invest into our intercultural development 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 and focus on their intercultural development. 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.

By Lucille Redmond

By day, Antonie Knoppers is an actor, stalking the stage in Shakespearean drama or appearing in famous Dutch soaps as a corrupt lawyer or a villainous doctor. But by night – shazam! – Antonie is a multicultural shape-changer.

Well, not really by night:

Antonie – star of hit Dutch TV shows and the Richard Gere film The Hoax – also plays parts in seminars run by Intercultural Business Improvement, giving its trainers and licensees a personal taste of cross-cultural negotiation and influencing.

“It’s one thing to understand cultural differences – it’s much more vivid to experience them,” says Antonie. He should know: He grew up between the US and the Netherlands, with a Dutch father and a US American mother.

Antonie works between New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam.

In the Netherlands, he has starred in the police drama Flikken Maastricht and the long-running soap Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden (Good Times, Bad Times). “I play a lot of bad guys, for some reason,” he says, with an evil laugh. “Managers, lawyers, doctors.”

He was an actor with a solid background in Shakespeare and villainy when one of the big Dutch development banks hired him to act in training scenarios. He discovered a new talent. “I played a ghoul executive who had taken over the bank in the future: I came into the boardroom and told the managers how things were going to be different,” he says.

“I was doing it in a very American style – in a sort of nice way. But if you really listened to what I was saying it would give you pause to go ‘Oh! I don’t think he’s being that nice!’. It was my way or the highway.”

Oscar van Weerdenburg of Intercultural Business Improvement was one of the trainers in this course, and he was blown away by Antonie’s acting and its effect on people’s understanding of the concepts they were training. Oscar asked Antonie to work with him creating scripts to illustrate the core intercultural competencies involved in IBI’s own training.

The scripts are tremendous fun – and very culturally revealing. Antonie’s favourite scenario is a conversation between an Indian team member, and his boss. Antonie is the Indian, while the boss will be played by one of the professionals attending the seminar and learning about the cultural competencies.

The boss, in the scenario, wants the Indian staffer to come in on his day off. The rest of the people taking the seminar watch their conversation attentively, taking note of the cultural signals, and afterwards they can share feedback with the role-players on what has happened, how the two cultures have interacted.

“We briefly explain the situation: ‘You’re a manager; you’re about to have a conversation with Rajiv, one of your team members’,” says Antonie.

“You’re about to launch a new website and you need everyone to be there in case anything goes wrong. Have a little conversation to ascertain if he’ll come in on his day off, and then maybe ask him about his family – you’ve had dinner there before, and you know them’.”

The play lets have proved extraordinarily successful, opening out people’s feel for intercultural work.

“Oscar’s amazing, he has a dry, funny sense of humour – but there is a lot of theory, and so it’s very effective to say, ‘This is the theory – now, do it!’,” says Antonie.

“People are thrown in with the lions: They’ve been hearing about, say, intercultural communication, but now they have to apply it.”

Antonie was nervous of presenting this scenario before a group of managers from all over the world – including some from India. But the second he started speaking, in his character as the Indian tech support guy who’s being asked to sacrifice his day off, there was a wave of laughter – led by the Indian executives.

“It was interesting, because there were Indian people who knew this culture very well, and then there were Germans and Polish and Dutch and New Zealanders. There was a direct response in the feedback: the Indians were able to confirm the validity of the scenario.

“This manager was trying to get me to work on my day off, and I kept saying ‘Yes, I realise it’s very important’ – but I never actually said I would be there, because it was my son’s most important cricket game that day, and I wanted to go to the game to see my kid play.”

Afterwards, Oscar asked the participants:

“Do you think he’s going to show up?” Says Antonie: “The person who participated as the ‘boss’ said ‘Yeah!’. But everyone else – especially the people from India – said ‘No! He’s being polite, but he’s not going to show up!’

“It was a great experience for me, because we had people from so many different cultures, and they were able to confirm the validity of what we were acting out.”

Antonie says it is extraordinary when he sees the ‘light bulb moment’ – when people suddenly really, viscerally understand how another culture may have utterly different values from their own.

Even with companies that routinely deal with many varying nationalities, the realisation can startle people.

“There’s one scenario we do where I play an American. It’s lunchtime, in a cafeteria at work, and the manager wants to know if his new American employee is happy at his new job, and how his family is, and so he asks all these personal questions.”

Americans, Antonie points out, keep their personal life strictly separate from their work. “In one seminar, it was interesting to see people realise what was going on. People from the HR department were there, and they had been wondering why Americans who had very good resumes never got much further in the application rounds.

“It was because the Dutch interviewers wanted to get to know the person behind the resume, but Americans in an interview will only talk about their resume – in fact, in America the HR rules say that you can’t ask about someone’s age, the year they graduated or their sexual preferences. Personal questions are absolutely taboo.”

The HR group realised that the result of the cultural clash had been disastrous:

The Dutch were suspicious of these closed-off American jobseekers, and the Americans were astonished and offended by the nosy Dutch interviewers.

This seminar revolutionised the Dutch HR people’s thinking – now they understood that they needed to use different values in interviewing Americans. It was a classic light bulb moment.

It is intensely rewarding, Antonie says, to see people vividly understanding the cross-cultural misunderstandings, in a far stronger way than when they just talk about the known facts of intercultural competencies.

The scenarios are almost total improv, based on a skeletal structure; this gives a real chance to open out the meaning of how cultural interaction works, and how key skills are used in bridging the cultural gulfs. “You’ve got to be on your toes and be flexible,” says Antonie. “It’s exciting, a little nerve-wracking, but challenging.

It’s so different from theory.”

“It so energises the training, and it’s so exciting to see the moment when people absolutely understand – and it’s not just the people playing a part in the scenario, but also those watching who understand newly what cultural differences are. It’s absolutely rewarding.”

by Ursula Brinkmann and Oscar van Weerdenburg

Why invest into the Intercultural Readiness Check?

Do you work across cultural and national boundaries, and do you ponder about how to boost team performance in your culturally diverse organization? The Intercultural Readiness Check is a tool to assess and develop both your own intercultural skill set as well as that of your team.

Are you an intercultural learning professional and support clients and their teams? The Intercultural Readiness Check will help you help your clients to achieve more with less energy by assessing and developing their intercultural competencies.

Delighted to see the Intercultural Readiness Check rated as best in class right from the start (Wiersinga, ITIM, 2001), we never stopped improving it.

The Intercultural Readiness Check in detail

We’ve called in the help of statistical wizards to analyse the IRC database and monitor the quality that we promise our clients. The IRC is based on a massive statistical analysis of data from 13,000 respondents, with sophisticated checks and double checks.

We invested into an online dashboard that makes it easy for you to access the tool, generate feedback and monitor your client groups. Your data is in good hands: Contact us for result on our recent PEN test, our data protection measures in line with Germany’s requirements for Technical and Operational Measures (TOMs).

We’ve brought together teams of trained translators, native speakers and intercultural and HR professionals for high quality translations into eight languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.

Individual development and team performance with IRC

As a result, more than 80,000 respondents from all over the world have used the IRC to discover their intercultural competencies and develop them to be more effective in their jobs and contribute more to their team performance. Their answers make the IRC database one of the richest sources of information on intercultural competences world-wide.

In 2014, we published our insights, ideas, and concepts in Brinkmann/van Weerdenburg: Intercultural Readiness: Four competences for working across cultures (London: Palgrave).

To serve a global client base, we need a global network. From Sydney to Singapore, from Portland to Perth, from Tokyo to Tilburg, more than 700 certified professionals use the IRC to support their clients. We encourage them to network, cooperate and form mixed teams that can serve a global client base.

Just like you, we can only stay happy if we stay curious. We continue to dig deeper, to support research with the IRC database, and to learn from the conversations we have with our clients and colleagues.

Read in English

 

Beste allen,

Hopelijk gaat het goed met jullie. Meer dan zes maanden na de Covid- 19 lockdown maatregelen zijn velen van ons gewend geraakt aan het thuiswerken, of in lege kantoren. Maar we missen het sociale plezier, de nabijheid van de mensen die we kennen, of de mensen waarmee we kennismaken.

De afgelopen maanden betekende ook dat iedereen die werkzaam is in het trainingsvak nieuwe manieren moest vinden om trainingen en workshops te geven. Velen van ons hebben onze diensten op een fantastische manier naar de digitale ruimte verplaatst.

Nu is het tijd om iets nieuws te leren.

Als jullie nieuwe manieren van werken met jullie cultureel diverse groepen en teams willen ontdekken, klik dan hier voor een gratis online-bron over interculturele hulpmiddelen:

CIT4VET Open Online Catalogue

CIT4VET staat voor open online Catalogue of Intercultural Tools for Vocational Education and Training.

De catalogus, die sinds oktober 2018 door Erasmus+ wordt gefinancierd, biedt interculturele instrumenten en materiaal voor zelfstudie waarmee jullie je trainingsmethoden kunnen aanpassen aan de behoeften van een steeds diverser wordende groep deelnemers. Je hebt altijd gemakkelijk toegang tot CIT4VET zonder registratiekosten.

Ontdek instrumenten om nieuwe ontwerpen te ontwikkelen voor je interculturele en je diversiteitstraining en om beter om te gaan met cultureel diverse groepen deelnemers:

Vind je ook tools die je online kunt inzetten? Ja!

Een van onze favoriete oefeningen, prachtig voor zowel offline als online gebruik, is de oefening Fast Friends, ontwikkeld door Elizabeth Page-Gould, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton en Linda R. Tropp.

Klik hier om er meer over te weten te komen: https://cit4vet.erasmus.site/nl/tool/?id=105

Na twee jaar intensief werken loopt het CIT4VET-project nu ten einde. We hebben erg genoten van onze Pan-Europese samenwerking met partners uit vijf andere Europese landen:

• Voor Duitsland: assist international Human Resources
• Voor Ierland: The Institute of Technology Tralee
• Voor Italië: Diciannove società cooperativa
• Voor Polen: Danmar Computers LLC and Centrum Kształcenia Edukator Sp. z o.o.
• Voor Bulgarije: Runi Center

Dank jullie allen voor de goede samenwerking!

Met vriendelijke groet,

Oscar van Weerdenburg en Ursula Brinkmann

Intercultural Business Improvement bv
van Hengellaan 2 | NL 1217 AS Hilversum info@ibinet.nl | www.ibinet.nl | +31 (35) 62 94 269

Reference:

Elizabeth Page-Gould, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Linda R. Tropp (2008). With a little help from my cross-group friend: Reducing anxiety in intergroup contexts through cross-group friendship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1080-1094.

Project n°2018-1-DE02-KA202-005051
oktober 2018 – september 2020

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This article reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Lees in het Nederlands

 

Dear all,

We hope this message finds you well. More than six months after the first Covid-19 lockdown measures were taken, many of us have gotten used to working from home, or in empty offices – but we still miss the social fun, the real closeness to people we already know, and to find new people to connect with.

The past months also meant that everybody working in the training profession had to find new ways of delivering trainings and workshops. Many of us have done an amazing job in translating our services into the digital space.

Now is the time to continue the learning.

If you want to discover new ways of working with your culturally diverse groups and teams, click here to discover a free online resource on intercultural tools:

CIT4VET Open Online Catalogue

CIT4VET stands for open online Catalogue of Intercultural Tools for Vocational Education and Training.

Funded by Erasmus+ since October 2018, the catalogue offers intercultural tools and self-learning materials that will help you adjust your training methods to the needs of an ever more culturally diverse group of participants.

CIT4VET will give you easy access at any time and at no registration costs.

Discover new tools to develop new designs for your intercultural and diversity training, and to better deal with your culturally diverse groups of learners: https://cit4vet.erasmus.site/

Will you also find tools that you can use in digital space? Yes!

One of our favourite tools, wonderful for both offline and online use, is the exercise Fast Friends, developed by Elizabeth Page-Gould, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Linda R. Tropp. Click here to learn more about it and discover the social fun it brings:

Fast Friends – English Tool

After two years of intense work, the CIT4VET project is now coming to an end. We very much enjoyed our PAN-European co-operation with our partners from five other European countries:

• For Germany: assist international Human Resources
• For Ireland: The Institute of Technology Tralee
• For Italy: Diciannove società cooperativa
• For Poland: Danmar Computers LLC and Centrum Kształcenia Edukator Sp. z o.o.
• For Bulgaria: Runi Center

Thanks everybody for a great time of working together!

And if you have any questions about the project, or would like to receive more information, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you.

With our best regards,

Oscar van Weerdenburg en Ursula Brinkmann

Intercultural Business Improvement bv
van Hengellaan 2 | NL 1217 AS Hilversum info@ibinet.nl | www.ibinet.nl | +31 (35) 62 94 269

Reference:

Elizabeth Page-Gould, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Linda R. Tropp (2008). With a little help from my cross-group friend: Reducing anxiety in intergroup contexts through cross-group friendship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1080-1094.

Project n°2018-1-DE02-KA202-005051
oktober 2018 – september 2020

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This article reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Read in English

Merkt u ook dat de culturele diversiteit in uw trainingszaal steeds groter wordt?

Ursula Brinkmann, PhD, and Iliana Docheva

Merkt u ook dat de culturele diversiteit in uw trainingszaal steeds groter wordt?

Neem dan eens een kijkje in de openbare online CIT4VET-catalogus.

CIT4VET staat voor open online Catalogue of Intercultural Tools for Vocational Education and Training. De CIT4VET-catalogus is onderdeel van het CIT4VET-KA2-SP-EU-project en wordt daarmee gefinancierd door de Europese Commissie. Wij werken samen met partners uit vijf EU-landen – Bulgarije, Duitsland, Ierland, Italië, en Polen – aan de ontwikkeling van deze catalogus. De CIT4VET-catalogus biedt u interculturele hulpmiddelen en zelfstudiemateriaal waarmee u uw trainingsmethoden kunt aanpassen aan de behoeften van uw deelnemers wanneer culturele diversiteit een rol speelt. De CIT4VET-catalogus zal op elk gewenst moment eenvoudig toegankelijk zijn, zonder registratiekosten.

De beroepsbevolking in de Europese Unie is cultureel steeds diverser geworden. De voordelen van een cultureel diverse beroepsbevolking zijn algemeen bekend, maar welke vaardigheden hebben we nodig om in een interculturele werkomgeving effectief te zijn? Het belangrijkste doel van CIT4VET is beroepsopleiders te helpen inzicht te krijgen in hoe culturele factoren hun werk beïnvloeden en hoe ze hierop kunnen reageren door ze toegang te bieden tot een uitgebreid informatiesysteem met interculturele kennis en tools.

Met meer dan 160 verschillende nationaliteiten behoren steden als Amsterdam en Rotterdam tot de cultureel meest diverse steden ter wereld. Van de 9,2 miljoen mensen die in Nederland werken, hebben meer dan 2 miljoen mensen een migratieachtergrond. De kans is dan ook groot dat bij een reguliere training voor een Nederlandse organisatie – bijvoorbeeld verkoopvaardigheden, verandermanagement, webdesign of communicatieve vaardigheden – uw trainingsgroep cultureel zeer divers is. Werkt uw favoriete introductie-oefening in dat geval voor hen allemaal? Hoe verhouden de deelnemers zich tot elkaar? Wie zal er vrij deelnemen aan discussies of zich vrijwillig aanbieden voor een uitdagend rollenspel? In de CIT4VET-catalogus vindt u elementaire interculturele kennis en tools om u aan het denken te zetten over de uitdagingen van het opleiden van cultureel diverse groepen. U kunt browsen in innovatief of juist beproefd materiaal, dat altijd praktisch is en specifiek is geselecteerd om u te helpen uw trainingsvaardigheden voor cultureel diverse groepen te updaten. Wanneer u groeit als professional, groeien uw interesses met u mee. Daarom zal u, zodra u met CIT4VET kennisgemaakt hebt, steeds weer naar de website terug willen keren om meer gebieden te verkennen waarop u verder wilt ingaan.

De website is ontworpen om het browsen voor u gemakkelijk te maken. U kunt op verschillende categorieën zoeken en de tools beoordelen, zodat andere gebruikers van uw feedback kunnen profiteren en u van die van hen. Op die manier krijgt iedereen de kans om bij te dragen en van elkaar te leren. U kunt in de database browsen en selecteren wat het beste past bij u, uw team en uw trainingsgroep op basis van verschillende expertise-niveaus. Aanvullende informatie, zoals een verklarende woordenlijst van sleutelbegrippen die worden gebruikt in het interculturele veld, helpen u uw weg te vinden op dit complexe, maar immer interessante terrein.

Project n°2018-1-DE02-KA202-005051
oktober 2018 – september 2020

Picture by Daniel Chung on Unsplash.

 

Parents’ Values and Behavior at Work (© Douglas Stuart, PhD)

The Parents’ Values and Behavior at Work exercise was developed by Dr Douglas Stuart, an intercultural professional based in the USA. With this exercise you can initiate a constructive and stimulating dialogue between participants about cultural value differences, and how they influence behavior at work. Its key advantage is that participants engage in this conversation without starting to feel defensive about their own cultural values, and resistant to other people’s cultural values.

Objectives

Dr Stuart developed the exercise to make participants aware of their cultural background, and how it has influenced their expectations about the behaviors, skills, and attitudes that they need to succeed at work. This insight, together with the interaction dynamic built into the exercise, they discover how their cultural background has influenced themselves and their work organization; and realize that people from other cultural backgrounds have learnt to consider other behaviors, skills, and attitudes critical for success at work.

Intercultural Readiness competency: Intercultural Sensitivity

The Parents’ Values Exercise allows participants to reflect on their own cultural background, and to express their appreciation for it. As a result, they become more curious about their fellow participants’ cultural background, expectations, and perspectives, and how this has influenced them.

Group size: 4 – 40
The exercise works best if the group composition allows you to have participants from the same country work together during the first part of the exercise. It is therefore important that you check the group composition prior to the training.

Delivery mode: Offline and Online

Materials

Offline use: Parents’ Values Exercise handout, flipchart paper and pens for each group

Online use: Parents’ Values Exercise handout. Breakout groups, ideally with possibility for each group to share their screens with the plenary (you may check the settings of your meeting platform).

Time: Approximately 30 minutes

Instructions

Offline: Ask participants to work in mono-cultural groups

Online: Create mono-cultural breakout rooms for participants

Part One

Ask each group to write down the values their parents tried to pass on to them. Address that participants may discover also regional and/or generational differences and should describe these in the plenary session. Allow 10 minutes to complete the task.

Part Two

Ask each group to write down the behaviors, skills, and attitudes that they should display at work to be successful in their job. Decide ahead of time whether you want to have them focus on expectations that hold across organizations in their country, or rather to expectations applying to their own organization. Again, allow 10 minutes to complete the task.

Discussion

The exercise allows you to debrief the results in several ways.

1. Invite each group to present the results of their work (parents’ values and expectations at work), then ask them how their parents already prepared them for the workplace. Then guide the group to explore the differences between the subgroups.
2. Invite all groups to explore the similarities and differences between their parents’ values first, giving participants time to talk about themselves: their own responses to their parents’ value messages; changes within their country across generations; potential dilemmas between generations.
3. Invite all groups to explore the similarities and differences between the work-related expectations: How does this influence their co-operation and effectiveness? Do some of them find it more difficult than others to adjust to the current organizational expectations because of their cultural backgrounds? How could the organization and/or teams benefit from the different perspectives that participants bring to their job?

Download Handout

Parents Values and Behavior at Work (c) Douglas Stuart PhD.

By Ursula Brinkmann, PhD

 

Groups in our Lives (© Intercultural Business Improvement b.v.)

Promoting Diversity

Drawing on social identity research, we have developed this exercise to make participants aware of how identification with a group can have positive and negative outcomes, and to encourage them to use the underlying dynamic consciously and constructively to promote the values of diversity in their own social life..

Intercultural competencies: Managing Uncertainty and Building Commitment

Participants better understand how stereotypes of out-group members develop and perpetuate. They learn how our need to belong to and identify with a group reduces uncertainty; and how they can use these same mechanisms to better relate to others, enjoy diversity and create trust between individuals, and within and between groups.

Group size: 4 – 40

Delivery mode: Offline and Online

Materials

Offline use: Groups in our Lives handout (see below), whiteboard/flipchart, black, red and green markers

Online use: Groups in our Lives handout (see below). Display of comments and colored marking via shared screen

Time: Approximately 30 minutes

Instructions

Offline: Ask participants to work in dyads with the person sitting next to them (with one triad if uneven number of participants).

Online: Create breakout rooms for two participants, with arbitrary assignment of participants to groups

Part One

Ask participants to identify five groups of which they are both members, and five groups of which neither one of the two is a member. The groups may be both formal (e.g., a professional association) and informal (e.g., dog lovers) groups. Allow five minutes to complete the task.

Part Two

Ask participants to find properties for both types of groups. For example, a property of dog lovers could be that they go for a walk every day regardless of the weather. Make sure you give a neutral example of a group and its properties, that is, the example should neither suggest something positive or something negative about the group. This is to ensure that participants are not influenced in their search for properties when completing the exercise.

Participants may list one or more properties for one group, and also properties that apply to two or more groups at the same time. That is, no property needs to apply to all the groups on their lists. Be clear about this since otherwise participants will find it very difficult to list any property.

Allow again 5 minutes to complete the task.

Part Three (large group)

Ask participants to only name the properties they have identified for the groups of which they are both members, and the properties of groups where none of them is a member. State clearly that you are not interested in the groups that they found, only in the properties.

Write down the properties, using two separate columns (on the whiteboard/flipchart/shared screen) with a black pen. Then take a red and a green pen and announce that together, you’ll now mark the properties according to their positive and/or negative connotations (red for negative, green for positive).State clearly that a property can also be neutral or undetermined; in that case, leave it unmarked.

Discussion

Start out by asking participants what insights they have gained.

In most cases, the in-group descriptors on their lists will tend to be positive whereas their out-group descriptors will tend to be neutral or even negative. This reflects the famous Similarity Attracts bias, a widespread tendency of individuals to feel attracted to those who are similar to themselves in terms of attitudes, values, beliefs, activity preferences, attractiveness, and personalities. The Similarity Attracts bias needs to be understood and managed if we want to include people who are not like us, if we want to increase, enjoy and benefit from (cultural) diversity at work and in our private lives.

As a trainer, use this insight to explain how in-group affiliation and a sense of belonging build our social identity; explain the emotional nature of in-group versus out-group distinctions, the development of stereotypes and the need/motivation to establish and maintain a positive self-image (via the groups to which we belong).

Then move on and invite participants to explore how they can pro-actively use the insights from the exercise to connect to people who don’t seem similar to them at first, how they can actively look for similarities with people who seem different and therefore less likeable at first – to make the Similarity Attracts bias work in the favour of diversity, and not against it.

Download Handout

Groups in our Lives exercise IBI 2020