Case Study: Building country-specific cultural intelligence

BACKGROUND

Our client is the investment banking division of a top ten global bank. It provides large corporate, government and institutional clients with a comprehensive set of solutions for their strategic advisory, financing and risk management needs. The client has offices across the world and employs more than 20,000 people. It meets the needs of financial issuers and investors worldwide through its global reach, advisory services and distribution power.

CHALLENGE

The inherently global nature of the client's market, services, customers and alliance partners mean that a global mindset and cross-cultural working skills are a key competence for many of its employees.

As part of its commitment to the Chinese market, the client formed a commodities strategic alliance in 2007. This alliance combines the Chinese partner's strong relationships and market presence in China with the client's global commodity capability, risk management and banking expertise.

A crucial success factor for the alliance is the ability for executives on both sides to collaborate smoothly and develop deep trusting working relationships. For this reason the client sought to provide a blended learning solution to help UK executives understand the Chinese business culture and approach, and for Chinese executives to understand the specifics of the British business culture.

These solutions needed to address differences in working style around teamwork, leadership, communication, relationship-building, decision making, and time management, among others.

SOLUTION

To facilitate deep collaboration between the alliance partners TMA World developed two complementary programmes aimed at each key audience group.

Our client's executives undertake an online cultural assessment - the TMA Worldprism, which provides insight into their own preferences in terms of working style and approach. These are then reviewed in a half-day workshop session alongside common behaviours and approaches that we can see in the Chinese business environment. Differences are highlighted, discussed, and practical strategies shared on dealing with them. Participants have ongoing access to the TMA World Country Navigator e-learning tool, which provides a wealth of information on the Chinese business environment, in addition to 60 other business cultures.

The alliance partner's executives undertake a similar programme, but focused on the British business environment.

RESULTS

To date over 250 executives have attended these China and UK-focused cultural intelligence programmes, creating a major impact on the working relationships central to the alliance.

Average approval ratings include:

Course met objectives - 85%
Consultant skill & knowledge - 93%

A key element to the success of the programme is the blend of classroom and online learning resources, which enable participants to address their specific cross-cultural challenges in a live session, combined with ongoing access to key cultural learning resources about China and the UK online.

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