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Cultural Co-Creation and Global Team Performance
What kind of cultural training is best for multicultural business teams? Training for teams in managing cultural difference has grown in popularity. If teams are only provided with what I perceive as 'traditional' cross-cultural training they are not being taken far enough in the drive toward creating collaborative advantage.
Typically, cross-cultural training will raise awareness of differences and provide tools and techniques for helping to bridge the gaps, facilitate communication, and generate mutual understanding. Does this go far enough?
Over the past two years, I have experienced running multicultural team-building sessions after the participants attended cross-cultural training. Participants told me the cultural sessions were interesting; that they learned useful things about each other. The challenge they gave me was the "Fascinating, but so what, who cares, and what do we do now?" problem. In this paper, I hope to stimulate a discussion about taking multicultural team training beyond cultural awareness and simple behavioural adaptations and into the territory of cultural co-creation.
Multicultural teams can be outstanding because of differences among members. Business teams need a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and styles to be vibrant, alive, and responsive to complex challenges. Like other healthy systems, however, they also need stabilising forces that provide a sense of cohesion and organisation; too often, this it what cultural team training doesn't provide.
What cultural training did my teams receive prior to my working with them? Discussions with team members suggested the following:
- Information - historical and current - on cultures represented on the team
- Insights into the different belief systems
- Insights into underlying value orientations and their impact on working styles
- Tips on effective cross-cultural communication and adaptation
Sound familiar? This approach is usually based on statistical national culture research supplemented with general tips and taboos which often reinforce stereotypical thinking about team colleagues. Europeans on my teams were told, for example, that the Japanese have a long-term orientation to time whereas, in fact, the Japanese on my teams were extremely short-term oriented.
In the programme design phase, I was asked to continue examining national cultural differences on the team, and to further increase mutual understanding of each other. One question that kept troubling me was, "Who is 'each other'?" While I could recognise some characteristics of the men and women on the teams from the research and models I was familiar with, the insights didn't really connect me to the specific individuals looking to me for guidance, nor to the concrete conditions under which they were trying to collaborate. Instead of taking a research-based and explicit approach to cultural differences in the team-building session, I took an implicit - though more operational approach - by working with them to:
- Analyse the different business practices of those represented on the team
- Negotiate shared operating agreements as the basis for a working team culture
The first part of the session involved participants working in their organisational groups - one with roots in Europe and one in Asia. Each group formulated 5-10 questions to ask the other: "What criteria do you use for . . .?" "How often do you . . .?" "How do you go about making decisions on . . .? Questions were exchanged, answers generated, presentations made, additional questions asked. Rather than make a direct assault on cultural differences ("This is how the French or Chinese tend to do business" - what I call cultural downloading) the approach taken was far more emergent and indirect. When business practice differences emerged that suggested divergent cultural value orientations, the culture discussion took place. We didn't have the cultural discussion and then look for the likely challenges. As facilitator, I could always help participants draw general insights and conclusions about the impact of cultural difference, but the intent was to begin with and stay close to a very concrete reference point - a business activity, methodology, policy, procedure, process, etc.
The second part of the session aimed at culture-building. Clifford Geertz suggested we see culture as "a set of control mechanisms - plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call 'programmes') - for the governing of behaviour." My goal was to help write the recipes and programmes for how my teams would operate as teams. No one wanted to eliminate the cultural differences among members, only to generate a basic cultural framework for collaboration.
The culture-building or cultural co-creation segment focused on negotiations in four basic areas:
Purpose: Negotiating a commonly understood (and agreed to) statement of why the team existed. The purpose statement was to be the central reference point in the team's operating culture. The simple act of working together on the statement raised many perceptual and interpretive differences that could be explored through a cultural lens.
Roles and responsibilities: Negotiating clear expectations about the primary roles and responsibilities on the team. Mapping actual (not theoretical) roles and responsibilities on the team triggered negotiations about which roles could be globalised, and which needed to be shaped more by local, sometimes cultural, factors.
Communications: Negotiating shared operating agreements about who communicates what to whom, when, how frequently, and in what formats/styles, etc?
Operations: Negotiating shared operating agreements about business practices such as coordination, decision making, reporting, strategising and planning.
During negotiations in the multicultural groups, issues rooted in cultural difference emerged, e.g. expectations about the flexibility of a deadline. The issues and cultural discussions were not imposed on the group by any pre-existing assumptions I had. Some differences that emerged were related to national cultural differences, others were more organisational or even functionally-based. When differences emerged and seemed to stall the negotiations, it was my task as facilitator to highlight and explore the underlying cultural differences, seek mutual understanding, and help the group find a way forward that would work for them all. The team had various strategic options here: members could adapt, accommodate, assimilate, blend, create . . . and so on, but always with the question in mind, "Given our assignment, what approach or mix of approaches will enable us to add value as quickly as possible?"
Some might say, I am only helping the team at a superficial level. Will participants leave the session understanding enough about the national cultural differences that could pose challenges for them? My experience points me to what I'll call the superficiality paradox of global teamwork - if you want to go deep, go shallow. This approach is related to the tools of appreciative inquiry and solutions-based therapy which focus effort on the desired future. My intent with the teams described here was to help them build strong working relationships and achieve deep collaboration, fast. I can help them do that not by focusing on national differences per se - which may or may not pose problems for the team - but by working with them to negotiate some common ground, while weaving discussions of cultural difference into the negotiations as and when appropriate. There is so much I would love to share with them about the fascinating world of cultural difference, but there is knowledge I need to know to do my job as a multicultural team-builder, and knowledge they need to perform collaboratively.
In sum, what do I see as some of the primary differences between the performance-driven approach I'm describing above and 'traditional' cross-cultural training for teams?
| Performance-Driven | Traditional |
| Culture-Making | Culture-Downloading |
| Consultative/Facilitative | Instructional |
| Process-oriented | Content-driven |
| Culture Backgrounded | Culture Foregrounded |
| Implicit | Explicit |
| Dynamic | Static |
| Concrete | Abstract |
Terence Brake - tbrake@tmaworld.com
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