Bridge the culture gap in your organisation - closer teamwork using the four principles of humanity to accelerate performance

Working in a global organisation, integrating people from different nationalities, can bring its own challenges. The way that diverse nationalities come together to lead, influence, persuade each other has a huge impact on the successful delivery of your end product or service to the customer.

There may be one corporate brand, one organisation, one mission, vision and value set, yet the people with the organisation have their own cultural heritage, behavioural preferences and contexts that seem to jar with others.

Each culture has it’s own subconscious system of communication and behaviour.

The work of Erin Meyer (Senior Affiliate Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Dept. at INSEAD) fascinates me when it comes to cultural awareness.

Erin’s works highlights 8 scales of cultural difference, plotting the inherent attitudes that different nationalities have towards traits such as Communication, Making Decisions, Scheduling Time and Leadership.

So it turns out that Dutch colleagues rate Honesty as very important and are therefore comfortable communicating directly when they give feedback. However, the Brits are easily offended with direct feedback, and prefer an altogether more indirect and subtle approach.

I used to work with a Danish guy called Vinni. We both worked for a UK retailer in similar leadership positions. For three years as a leader, he received a barrage of consistent ‘development feedback’ that his style was too abrupt and direct. Vinni couldn’t understand why he was being asked to ‘dance around the handbags’ when it came to communicating with British employees.

Why should he have to soften what needed to be said? Why was everyone so sensitive and easily offended?

He left after three years. It was a shame – he was a lovely guy, a wise leader, and we had become friends.

Nowadays, as a Leadership and Personal Development specialist, I am passionate about discovering the most transformational development tools and techniques, equipping people to achieve their absolute best at work and life.

I started out facilitating a few Culture Workshops for global teams, to bring remote people together on a learning journey that explores each nationality’s preferences. This worked well – simply by raising awareness. It was also enjoyable and interesting for delegates to finally understand why other nationalities were infuriating to work with at times!

But my curiosity led me to wonder – are there a deeper set of principles that unite humans, regardless of culture? Is there a way of working with each other that transcends geographical attitudes and behaviours?

After all, having to remember the communication preferences of ALL of the nationalities represented in an organisation could take some doing!

During my search, one culture tool stood out as a cross-cultural alignment system like no other. Because it’s based on the 4 universal principles of life, Heartstyles transcends geography and nationality. The model is used to life-changing effect for audiences ranging from village elders in Malawi to senior executives in Canary Wharf. The Heartstyles culture development tool provides a common language for ineffective and effective behaviour. It resonates at a human level, and compares peoples’ behavioural and communication intentions and impacts.

The Heartstyles team have neatly built a statistically validated measurement into their model, which means that something as ethereal as culture can now be measured and managed across the world. Fully visible wellbeing, stress and happiness ratings are also integrated.

The cross-cultural capability of Heartstyles has been tested and proven in becoming the preferred development system for the globally massive YUM! organisation (Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell) ($5.7bn turnover 2018).

If you’d like to unite your global team, and respectfully bridge the culture divide, please connect for further information and to find out how Heartstyles could help.

Simon Thomas (DHypPsych. ISMA CIPD)

https://www.regionalmanagerdevelopment.com/what-we-do

Tel: +44 (0)113 493 1886

Email: simon@regionalmanagerdevelopment.com