In an international context, smart business decisions depend on the ability to bridge cultural differences. Your employees need to be able to understand these differences and how to work across cultures. We put together four types of cross-cultural training formats and other support services for expatriates and global leaders to help international top talent in bridging the gaps between cultures.
What are some of the indicators that a company could benefit from investing in cross-cultural training initiatives? There are several scenarios where business can be at risk when poor cultural competency is involved: Companies who are expanding overseas or opening new facilities abroad can benefit from increased cross-cultural skills just as much as organizations who are sending key employees overseas. The same is true for businesses whose workforce is becoming more diverse, either because they are integrating more foreign employees, or because they are working with virtual or remote teams which are spread in different locations around the world.
Expats
Sending key employees on overseas assignments comes at a significant cost. If your expatriates fail to adapt to the work style of the new location as well as to the norms and behaviors of their cultures, these assignments are at risk: You will lose business due to miscommunication and you will miss out on international growth opportunities. Protect your investment in expat talent. Our Cultural Training & Coaching programs have helped our clients save millions in potential losses on failed global assignments.
Cross-Border Business
Whether you are expanding your business into new markets, or you are importing/exporting to and from abroad, or negotiating deals with foreign partners – everybody in your organization should have the relevant information about the countries and cultures your company is dealing with, in order to be successful. Training & Coaching programs by The Culture Mastery will help you break down barriers to understanding so that you can outperform your competition in international business.
Multicultural Teams
Do you work with employees who have diverse cultural backgrounds? When multicultural teams want to collaborate efficiently, communication is hampered by a lack of language skills and even more so because of cultural misunderstandings. Our clients have been successfully improving company morale via team development programs. Once multicultural teams understand each other’s values and motivators, productivity and efficiency reach new levels. People work better together when they decipher cultures and are aware of them in daily operations.
Global Executives
As you are working on foreign assignment, your ability to speak and understand the language of your host country improves steadily. Although you are an expert in your field and know how to lead, you feel self-conscious. During meetings, you sense that you are not getting through to some of your team. So now what? To succeed abroad, global executives need to learn how to inspire and motivate in a foreign culture. They need to redefine what effective communication means in various cultural contexts and adapt to different ways of building relationships.
Cultural and Personality Assessment Tools
Even experienced, well-traveled global professionals sometimes have oversimplified notions about how people from other countries and cultures work and make decisions. This is usually because in their assessment they focus only on one or two components of intercultural interactions, e.g. leading, communicating, or negotiating. Cultures, however, are more complicated constructs which don’t lend themselves to single-aspect comparisons. In order for global professionals to get a correct picture, they want to measure relational, cognitive, and behavioral contrasts and similarities along several dimensions on which cultural gaps are most prevalent – and to assess themselves in those areas. In order to enhance the experience of our clients and program participants we are offering different measuring and assessment instruments for cultural comparisons as well as personality profiles.
If you are interested in learning more about cultural competence and foreign language skills, we invite you to sign up for our newsletter, The Culture Reflections. As a token of our appreciation you will receive a series of complimentary white papers on cultural competence from us!
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