Effective Leadership: Cross-cultural Training

By Author: Lance Tavares
Total Articles: 4
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While culture is learnable, it is not intuitive. Learning culture is a critical aspect of creating the Global Mindset, and being able to assess or develop an effective cultural training course is crucial. Cultural training courses begin with teaching recognition of what culture is, where it comes and how to recognize cultural behaviors. It goes on to define the values and beliefs that underlie the visible actions.
Garnering an appreciation of culture enables the participant in a cross-cultural training program to more fully appreciate the culture of a specific country or countries and further enables them to identify a context and alternatives for what might be assumed as insurmountable cultural challenges.
Everyone in the workplace needs cultural training and enlightened managers make sure that this type of training is available for its workforce. Online culture courses are the most effective way to reach the entire organization because they are uniformly available at any time. Creating blended learning programs that use online tools and some face-to-face ...
... learning programs, enrich the process and address the learning styles of certain individuals and cultures that thrive on interactive, more personal learning. Some organizations also provide a culture coach, which is especially useful to help manager unravel the cultural puzzles they often confront.
The fundamental challenge to the training program is the participant’s desire to get into international tactics (such as etiquette) before fully understanding the basics of culture—what it is, where it comes from and how it manifests itself—in other words, before understanding a cultural model. But this is critical. Think about how difficult it would be to learn about culture on a country-by-country basis. You’d have no context into which to put the new information, and would very quickly become confused as to which behaviors are appropriate to which country. As a result, an effective intercultural program must begin by providing a basis for understanding culture and an ability to practice recognizing and adjusting to culturally based behaviors.
The basics of culture needs to be the cornerstone of a cross cultural training program. The other elements are built to achieve specific tactical objectives, either in the foreign country or with