Did you know that an estimated 70% of international ventures fail due to poor cross-cultural interactions?
When individuals from different cultural backgrounds or environments don’t understand each other, it will inevitably lead to failed projects and suboptimal results. Culture forms the way we think and act – across all spectrums – often causing members of virtual teams to perceive reality very differently across boundaries and borders. If you work on a global team… or with diverse people from down the hall, you too are at risk of contributing to poor business outcomes.
On the flip side, although cultural diversity has a high potential for negative outcomes, it also has enormous potential for growth and renewal that can facilitate extraordinary results. Always keep in the forefront of your mind that your virtual teams likely have more talent and potential than other types of teams by the sheer force of their diversity – the question is, will they be able to leverage that diversity for individual, team and corporate success?
The answer is a resounding YES… if you can leverage that diversity to create synergy. Synergy will create a sense of joint purpose fueled by the knowledge that everyone brings unique experience and perspective to the team that is essential for success. As a leader, it is critical that you have the tools and perseverance to tap into the diversity of your teams to create an environment that facilitates success.
Virtual teams have the capacity to generate significant power for the overall organization. The collective experience and knowledge of a team from various backgrounds and cultures promotes the emergence of new and different ideas and perspectives, enables the rapid development of new products and services, and ensures the balance between local and global… just to name a few of the many benefits. However, in order to actualize the power of virtual teams, you need to invest in cultural integration from 4 critical angles:
1. Cultural Perspective
Cross-cultural principles and theories will provide team members with a mechanism to not only understand that we all see things differently, but also to understand that cultural values have an enormous impact on attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. It is not enough to simply tell your teams about culture, it is critical that they begin to gain a deeper understanding of why they are different from their colleagues in order to develop the capacity to leverage differences for success.
2. Cultural Assessments
Cultural assessment will provide insight as to how to best interact and leverage specific members of your diverse team – but more importantly, it will provide each member of the team with insight as to their specific cultural norms and preferences and allow them to better identify other cross-cultural angles. Once a leader and/or his team internalize and value why culture matters, they need to understand current versus future state – and the gap that resides between. The assessment phase provides a mechanism to evaluate readiness, as well as the potential for clear development as to how to improvebcultural integration. Cross-cultural assessment provides insight as to how to best interact with and leverage organizational diversity – but more importantly, it provides insight as to individual cultural norms and preferences while also providing a clear identification of cross-cultural norms and preferences amongst global colleagues. Assessments provide a mechanism to discover how communication across cultures can best take place, as well as how to best leverage multicultural virtual teams for organizational success. Once individual assessments are done, you may want to consider a team assessment to allow the team to discover how they can best leverage one another for mutual and organizational benefit.
3. Cultural Comprehension
Cultural Orientations will provide your team members with a way to understand their own cultural norms and their colleagues’ cultural norms. Work engagement is heavily influenced by the ability of team cultural gap bridging behaviors that facilitate intercultural collaboration in virtual teams. In this spirit, It is essential to achieving strong global business results that team members understand specific cultural orientations and how perceiving those orientations differently affects business and relationship outcomes. Once they can begin to understand specific components of culture that they see differently than their colleagues, they will gain the ability to begin building bridges between cultures.
4. Cultural Unity
Cultural Amalgamation will provide your virtual teams with a way to work together effectively. It will become a toolbox with the ways and means to help them build trust and sustainably evaluate and integrate almost any multicultural situation – national, functional, or organizational – in a respectful, insightful way. The role of Integration is to connect multicultural groups to shared and inclusive experiences as a strategic tool to facilitate long-term learning and organizational growth. Exploring alternative worldviews with relevant questions and support from global colleagues from diverse cultures and functions facilitates inclusion and equity in the global work environment. Through the incorporation of conceptual knowledge with engaged activity, diverse virtual teams can not only understand the necessity of cultural integration, but also practice the skills they have acquired to facilitate strong “muscle memory” while empathetically partnering directly with their multicultural colleagues.
One or another of these tools is not enough to equip your teams for their best chance at success. What few realize is that these tools build upon one another to enable organizational success across boundaries and borders. Perspective may provide awareness, but it will not uncover hidden motivations and biases. An assessment may provide insight, but it will not tell you what to do with that insight… cultural orientations may provide a foundation from which to go forward, but they will not help your team members begin to understand their colleagues… and while cultural orientations may provide inherent understanding of behaviors and perspectives, they will not provide a proven process from which to interact. Each step is necessary – and each step builds on the last. As you seek to deploy this process, identify a partner that has very specific skill sets and experience in each of the four areas above in order to enable your teams for virtual success.
Give your virtual teams the advantage – equipped them with the four critical angles of cultural integration.
Has your organization strategically invested in cultural integration?
Please engage the discussion and let us know how you achieve cultural integration. Always feel free to contact me at sherilmackey@gmail.com. Check back soon, when we will discuss how to create virtual vision.