Cross-cultural competence refers to your ability to understand people from different cultures and engage with them effectively. And not just people from the one culture that you’ve studied for years. Having cross-cultural competence means you can be effective in your interactions with people from most any culture.
Being able to communicate and work with people across cultures is becoming more important all the time. People are traveling, reaching out, and mixing with others like never before. They do it for fun, but they also do it for work. In all cases, success requires developing a relationship. And doing this means bridging a cultural divide.
Cross-cultural competence helps you develop the mutual understanding and human relationships that are necessary for achieving your professional goals.
The center identifies a “globally connected world” as one of the six main drivers of structural change for the global workforce, among other factors such as a rise of smart machines and systems, the development of the world as a programmable system, and the rise of the new media ecology.
Innovation becomes more and more dependent on the collaboration between actors from very different backgrounds who combine their own expertise to create something new. This happens both on an individual and institutional level. Especially, in an economy where the large majority of the work can be done by computational systems and smart machines, the primary role of human beings is to use their creativity to solve problems in novel ways.
As such, the organizations of the future will be forced to work more and more closely with people and institutional partners from all over the world in order to bring as many different perspectives and areas of expertise together as possible.
Cross-cultural competence is the key enabling factor of working in diverse teams
The main problem with working in diverse teams is that it is a double-edged sword.
While it can increase the number of ideas generated due to a variety of different perspectives coming together to solve a single problem, it can also lead to higher levels of conflict than what is found in conventional teams.
If team members are unable to set aside their differences and communicate in an effective way that generates mutual understanding, bringing together all the best minds in the world simply won’t have a positive effect on the team’s creative problem-solving ability.
Conflict in itself may not be such a big problem if it can lead to the creation of mutual understanding.
In fact, it is productive conflict that allows team members to reflect on each other’s different points of view and ultimately find a way to create synergy between their different perspectives in order to create a novel solution to a problem.
The problem arises when team members lack the cross-cultural competence to:
put themselves into the perspective of the other side
understand the different values, beliefs and assumptions that are at play from the other side
communicate their point of view effectively to the other side
work towards an integration of the different perspectives in order to create a new solution for the problem
resolve conflicts in a productive way as opposed to leading to negative emotional reactions
When a group of people with a purely mono-cultural perspective on the world come together, they are likely to simply end up asking themselves:
“ what’s wrong with these people?”
When a group of people with cross-cultural competence come together, however, something amazing happens.
They help each other to question their assumptions about the issue at hand. They introduce each other to completely new ways of thinking. They work together in order to solve problems in ways that have never been attempted before.
Ultimately, they are able to “merge” their different worldviews into a “third” way of thinking beyond the constraints of each individual’s cultural conditioning.
Source: https://medium.com/@rettigtim/
Cross-cultural competence will no longer be something that is only important for expatriates
In the near future, it will be hard to find a work-team that only consists of people from a single cultural background.
Different countries have different specializations and their own areas of expertise. For that reason, it will become more and more necessary for companies to “import” expertise in certain areas of knowledge from people all over the world.
Furthermore, production lines will become more and more internationally integrated with one another, leading to the inevitable exposure of people to people from other cultural backgrounds.
I have written about this elsewhere, but it is important to recognize that this constant exposure to other cultures is actually something that goes against human nature.
Photo Credit: Racha Adit (Al Arabiya News)
Let’s face it: at the time when we were still living in tribes, nobody would have ever been happy about cultural diversity. At that time, it was either “fight” or “flight”.
Kill or be killed.
For that reason, “us” versus “them” thinking has been so strongly ingrained into our psyche.
When we meet somebody from a culture other than our own, we are more likely to unconsciously regard them as our enemies than as somebody to learn something new from.
Even if we are not consciously aware of this tendency, it nonetheless influences our thinking.
For that reason, there are several factors that are really important for people who want to be successful in the globally connected marketplace of the future:
having extensive experience in working with people from other cultural backgrounds
shifting our mindset from national to international — redefining which groups we belong to (“I am an international citizen” as opposed to “I am German”)
developing intercultural empathy — i.e. the ability to put ourselves into the perspective of somebody from a different cultural background
understanding how cultural systems work — the values, beliefs and assumptions underlying the behavior of people from any particular culture
having a high degree of cognitive complexity — the ability to hold seemingly opposing ideas in your head and integrate them into something new
Rasmussen and her team interviewed cross-cultural experts about their experiences interacting in foreign cultures. These experts were military personnel who had a great deal of cross-cultural experience. They were also nominated by their peers as being especially effective in their interactions with members of other cultures.
The researchers did not ask about the opinions of the cross-cultural experts. Instead, they used cognitive task analysis in which they asked questions to get at the interviewees’ actual, lived overseas experiences. From these experiences, Rasmussen and her team uncovered the skills and knowledge the experts drew on as they interacted with people from other cultures.
Principles for Effective Cross-cultural competence
But what exactly makes up cross-cultural competence? What are the specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes that make someone cross-culturally competent?
Louise Rasmussen and Winston Sieck conducted a study to address these questions. They described their model of cross-cultural competence in an article published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Rasmussen was also granted an award from the Defense Language and National Security Education Office to further study and validate the model, which describes 12 elements of cross-cultural competence.
Rasmussen, Sieck, and their colleagues identified 12 core aspects of cross-cultural competence. These competencies were frequently found in the thought processes of the experts. They are listed here as a set of principles that can help you be more effective on your next sojourn:
Stay focused on your goals: If you’re overseas for work, then building intercultural relationships is not just for fun. Building relationships will help you get your work done.
Understand the culture within yourself: Keep aware of the fact that you see the world in a particular way because of your own background, personal history, and culture.
Manage your attitudes towards the culture: You don’t always have to love the culture. But you do have to keep an eye on your reactions to values and customs that are different from your own. The first two principles can also help you manage your attitude.
Direct your learning of the culture: Don’t expect a book or training course to hand you the answers. Try to make sense of the culture for yourself, using the information you come across as clues.
Develop reliable information sources: Find two or three locals to get answers from about the culture. Build relationships so you feel comfortable asking about most anything. Check with more than one and compare their answers in your head.
Learn about the new culture efficiently: You can’t learn everything about the culture before your trip. It’s unrealistic. Focus on learning a few things that fit your interests, and use those to make connections and learn more while you are abroad.
Cope with cultural surprises: No matter how much you prepare in advance, you will find yourself faced with people acting in ways that you find puzzling. When you do, try to find out why. Doing so will often lead to new insights.
Formulate cultural explanations of behavior: Routinely try to explain to yourself why people act as they do in this culture, differently from your own. Using things you know about the culture to explain behavior will help you build a deeper understanding of the culture overall.
Take a cultural perspective: Try to see things from the point of view of the people from the other culture. By taking a cultural perspective, you may gain a whole new understanding of what’s going on around you.
Plan cross-cultural communication: Think ahead of time about what you have to say and how you want the other person to perceive you. Use what you know about the culture to figure out the best way to get that across.
Control how you present yourself: Be deliberate about how you present and express yourself. Sometimes you’ll be most effective if you’re just yourself. Other times, you have to adapt how you present yourself to the culture you are in to be most effective.
Reflect and seek feedback: Continue to reflect on and learn from your interactions and experiences after they occur. After an interaction, you can think about whether you got the message across as intended. You can even ask a local how they think you did.
These twelve principles give you some pointers about how to think about the experiences you have in new cultures. They are essential to cross-cultural competence.
Reading through the principles, you may be asking yourself, “do I really need to do this much thinking when I go abroad?”
Rasmussen consistently found this thoughtful approach among those with high cross-cultural competence. Keep these principles in mind and use them. You will be more capable and confident in engaging people from any culture.
So, what are the next steps?
For individuals: make a plan on how you yourself can develop cross-cultural skills. Even if you do not have the ability right now to move to another country, there are always ways to get more exposure to other ways of thinking. Have a look at the list of skills outlined in this article and think step-by-step on how you can develop them yourself.
For companies: I recommend developing a strategy on how to increase the cross-cultural competence among your existing workforce and including it as a skill in your hiring strategy.
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