An IT organisation has grown rapidly in its global diversity. But some individuals are clashing. Is this behaviour personality-led or does it have a cultural basis?
THE ISSUE
A relatively new software technology company has experienced rapid growth, from five employees a year ago, to more than 50 today. Many come from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Chinese, Italian, German and Indian. Inevitably, there have been problems and complaints with some individuals, including accusations of dishonesty, selfishness and lack of willingness to work with the team. For example, one employee is accused of talking behind other people’s backs, while another has been called excessively aggressive in their dealings with others.
Like most companies, this business wants to be culturally sensitive, and not alienate people simply for coming from other cultural backgrounds; while still finding an effective way to resolve these issues. The company’s head of training recognises that cultural behaviours are 100% learned and hopes it should be relatively easy to enable employees to adjust, adapt and work with such behaviours. Personality, by contrast, is usually a combination of both learned behaviour and natural biological programming, and can be tougher to resolve. The dual challenge is, how can they coach their staff to both be able to differentiate between cultural behaviours and personality, and to find effective solutions when the problem is cultural?
How can coaching support people to manage cultural diversity, including being able to differentiate cultural behaviours from personality behaviours?
THE INTERVENTIONS
John Lombard
President, The Language of Culture
One of the biggest mistakes made in multicultural work environments is to ascribe personality values to cultural behaviours. A combination of cultural intelligence training with one-to-one coaching would significantly help employees tell the difference between cultural and personality-driven behaviours.
We are programmed by our own cultures to interpret certain behaviours as reflecting certain personalities, which generally works within the context of our own culture; but in another culture, the same personality may be expressed in an entirely different manner.
For example, in North American culture, if someone in a higher position makes a mistake, you should talk to them directly about it (or say nothing at all). But in many Asian cultures, talking to that person directly is completely wrong, it shows a lack of respect, and makes that person lose face. The correct way to handle it is to talk to another person (usually someone higher up), and get the situation resolved more indirectly.
The problem is that when they do this in a Western work environment, they are often branded with personality labels such as ‘dishonest’, ‘back-stabber’ or ‘disrespectful’. While those labels would be fairly accurate for someone from their own culture exhibiting such behaviour, it may be wrong in another culture.
Coaching should focus on getting employees to ask more questions, rather than make assumptions. In particular, instead of asking “Why did you do that?”, ask them something like “In your country/culture, what do people normally do in such-and-such a situation?”, and then, “Why do they do this?” It puts the discussion on a more neutral level, so they are talking about their culture, rather than themselves.
If such behaviour in their culture would be appropriate and proper, the conflict is a cultural one; if inappropriate and improper, then it is more likely a personality issue, which can be worked through in coaching, too.
Phillipe Rosinski
Author of Coaching Across Cultures
I wrote the book Coaching Across Cultures (2003), precisely to help coaches and leaders systematically integrate a cultural perspective into their approach.
The first goal is to become aware of our inevitable cultural biases (how we view power and responsibility, manage time, organise ourselves, communicate, think, etc) and to go beyond our cultural limitations when necessary.
The second goal is to recognise cultural gaps and discover how to bridge them, ideally by leveraging cultural diversity, by making the most of cultural differences (achieving a synthesis ‘and’ versus a trade-off ‘or’).
The second part of the issue concerns the duality of ‘nurture’ (what we have learned along the way) and ‘nature’ (what we are born with). Our behaviours depend on both nurture and nature.
While we can expect certain group cultural characteristics (eg, Germans are more direct than Chinese, Italians more affective than Germans), we won’t always know for sure if a behaviour originates in culture or biology.
We have multiple cultures (nationality, profession, generation, etc) that affect our behaviours. What is more, reality is a complex fabric of inseparably associated heterogeneous constituents. As I have argued in Global Coaching (2010), coaches need to move beyond the mechanistic paradigm (believing that what is interconnected can really be separated) and embrace complexity.
Noticing a certain behaviour, eg, a direct way of communicating, you may choose to interpret the behaviour as a cultural manifestation rather than as a psychological or biological phenomenon. This can allow you, for example, to reframe a personal conflict into a cultural misunderstanding that can now be resolved with nobody losing face.
If you obtain such a positive outcome, you will be comforted with your initial hypothesis that the behaviour was cultural. It still does not prove that the direct communication was actually cultural or solely cultural, but it does not matter in practice.