Kisses land on either my left or right shoulder, moreover a gentle touch in passing each other and me. Their engagement shows even more when nodding affirmative ‘yes’ as a reply on my questions if they speak any English at all. Their enthusiasm is contagious, all being elated until the moment I make the gesture of shaking hands. The islanders, they suddenly disappear jumping in between the chairs like startled game. Blaming myself for this bluntness:’ this introduction could have been so much smoother’. They feel as scared as I feel confused. 

Luckily this is just a setting during an intercultural simulation game, I’m participating in and need to investigate so called ‘local islanders’. Nevertheless this might as well be for real international business settings.

Agree, probably your foreign business partner overseas wouldn’t run away from you scared because of your lack of intercultural sensitivity, yet in a more subtle civilized manner they would. How to mind the intercultural gap. Culture Matters.

What stupid simple thought crossed my mind assuming that a western handshake would be accepted as a universal greeting. It makes me ponder how often we just assume every one else looks at the world just like we do. This might be out of laziness or just simplicity.

As if we are all watching this world through the same set of sunglasses. Don’t we mind the gap? Not only do we assume our colleagues working overseas watch the world just alike, even so our international business partners.

 

 

What do you actually know about their set of norms and values?

Returning to the simulation game: I do realize, even this being an intercultural simulation game, carrying out any kind of assignment is quite challenging. Imagine real life!

Upon following the instructions of the game I return to my own team, sharing with them the following observations:

• Their English is poor.
• Upon greeting they start kissing your shoulder, but they fled when I wanted to shake hands.
• In passing they continuously touch each other.

Nervously crossing my mind on what my team members will think of my clumsiness and incapability to do some simple investigations on islanders. How will we ever be able to completing our assignment with all this ‘yes’ nodding folks. This won’t work! How to mind the gap? It is impossible to get this job done! It will just be a lack of expertise which eventually will turn into a complete disaster!

Spontaneously followed by my ‘split – second- strategy’:

• We must separate them.
• Only when separated, we can to teach them, individually, the necessary skills.
• Since their English is poor we need to simplify our language.
• We do have a strategy, we do have a plan -my plan- and so we are ready to roll…..and off we went…

 

Valuable insights from this game

Now with hindsight we learned during the evaluation of this intercultural simulation game that exactly these rushed, careless bluntly insights of me colored the sunglasses of my team exact identical as it had colored mine.

 

Emotional dust settling

After the emotional dust had settled and the levels of frustration had lowered the islanders all were able to draw the following conclusions.

 

 

7 Ways to Mind the Gap

1. Prepare your trip carefully. Take the time to assimilate and adjust to unfamiliar habits. Apparently / seems to take precious time, which will surprisingly be captured back during the course of the process.

2. Really try to sympathize which unknown and unfamiliar cultures.

3. Interesting enough the touching of each other while passing was comforting and lowered the levels of frustration.

4. Superiority : unconscious sense of superiority that creates a dynamic where one is believing they bring the best expertise, knowledge and practice meanwhile during the process is unconsciously neglecting the local input.

5. Be more resilient: act more flexible to adjusting to unfamiliar situations. It is never to late to adjust to a new situation. This is a much better coping strategy than walking away from it leaving the situation unresolved.

6. Due to the assumption of poor English there was hardly any communication at all. Even is communicating at times difficult try to seek a way, be inventive and creative about this.

7. Aim of your trip is doing business which is always time constraint. These two ingredients in itself already jeopardize working internationally effectively. Chances are one just focuses on the outcome taking culture during this process for granted.

 

 

What observations and lessons learned within my team?

• My reporting back to them biased the visiting team, unconsciously they adopted my view on the islanders: they looked through my eyes and listened with my ears.
• A tunnel vision was being created this way, it hadn’t crossed their minds to investigate by themselves.
• Also my assumptions like on their poor English, weren’t checked. How often are assumptions, especially from superiors taken for granted.
• Touching lowered the levels of frustration.

 

On a separate note

During this intercultural game about 11 nationalities participated, all of which randomly divided over the groups, there was no predominant nationality. Nevertheless the sunglasses of all team members colored the same based on my biased observations. None of them was aware of choosing a ‘colorblind’ perspective.

Just out of curiosity I’d like to ask you, dear reader, many nationalities you have in your team?

To what extend do you recognize minding this intercultural business gaps?

Love to read your contributions to this.

Warmly,

Henriëtte