Overcoming Cultural Barriers in Business.

This workshop is suitable for anyone who needs to:

• build and manage multi-cultural business teams.
• manage sub-cultural differences between companies, industries and professional orientations.
• maintain relationships with diverse customers, project partners and suppliers.
• work in international business.
• promote supplier diversity.
• manage situations involving mergers or other cultural differences.

Registration: http://culturecustomers.eventbrite.com/

This is an interactive training workshop, not a presentation.

Facilitator: Glynis Ross-Munro, President of CPS.

Date: Tuesday, 21 February, 2012.

Time: 8 a.m. – 10 a.m.  Registration, breakfast and networking from 7.30 a.m.

Venue: The Centre Club, 123 South Westshore Blvd, Tampa, FL 33609. Free parking included.

Cost: $55.00. $6 discount for Centre Club members and TBIBC members www.TBIBC.org. (i.e. $49)

Breakfast and refreshments (full, English breakfast) are included. Free parking. Includes all training materials.

Queries: Hilton@c-psolutions.com or 813 598 9180.

Workshop participants will learn:

• How culture affects all business – national, international, different industries, professions and companies.
• Your own cultural matrix and why you should understand and appreciate it.
• The benefits of cultural fluency in a world of many types of diversity.
• How cultural barriers damage careers, teams, and bottom-line business results.
• Seven cultural barriers that are usually invisible. How to recognize, understand and overcome them.
• Ways to make cultural fluency part of your everyday working systems.
• Applications of team and customer cultural solutions.
• How to build a personal cultural fluency tool-box.

Facilitator: Glynis has many years of experience in international business, and is also an expert in training cultural fluency. She is the Vice President of the Tampa Bay International Business Council and a past Director of the American Association of Training and Development. She has three psychology degrees and a special interest in interactive, accelerated learning, and is internationally qualified in training assessment and competency-based instructional development through City & Guild of London.

• You don’t have to be Siemens or General Electric to looking ahead, and use that knowledge to know whether to tighten your business focus or broaden it.
• There’s plenty of information out there that can guide you when plotting a strategic course. For instance, you can make a very good, well-informed guess whether to customize more or commoditize more strictly, if you know your own differentiators.
• Larger guide-lines are emerging. For instance, when in doubt, given the choice between more product innovation or more process innovation, there is better ROI from process innovation.

At CPS, we nearly all have post-grad level statistics qualifications. We’ve spent our careers (longer or shorter) loving economics, strategy, projections and futurists.

As a growing small business, we see the following trends as we look into the near-to-medium future:

1. The continued rapid growth of technology and complexity. We are particularly interested in management of information overload, collaborative information crunching, and the growing crisis of information security. The other side of security is transparency: personal and employer brands will be significant in the search for both jobs and talent.

2. Globalization. Global economics, trade and global wages will affect all economies for the foreseeable future. The fall-out in ‘expensive cost of living’ nations, now competing with developing nation wages, will depend on many factors. One of these is the ability to keep educational development chasing tech development as closely as possible.

3. Multi-culturalism will be a major challenge for all nations in a global economy, but for different reasons. Diverse nations will need to learn to work with multi-cultural customers and suppliers at home as well as abroad, so their whole staff will need training. Less-diverse nations will be able to concentrate on training international negotiators, service agents and executives,  winning RFPs and contracts more effectively. “Culturally-similar” nations will have unexpected difficulty bridging invisible cultural gaps (e.g. USA, UK). Nations with recent proud histories (France, USA) will find cultural fluency harder to learn than many others, until the loss of international business hurts enough for them (us) to become sincerely interested in learning necessary skills.

4. The rising gap between education exit standards and the requirements of business. This includes (a) the application gap between college knowledge and working knowledge, (b) the “Boomer gap” where people of any age can’t keep up with the speed of change and (c) the “blue collar gap” where a gulf develops between the better-educated and those who become disenfranchised from a high-tech economy. We can add (d): the misalignment of economic needs with education outputs (e.g. the US’s graduating more visual arts people than engineers) which may create tension between business and immigration if China, India etc produce more engineers and technicians than they need internally.

5. The need for leadership. Flatter, more networked and collaborative leadership delivers better results in business today, yet these skills are difficult and learned, not inborn. [US society itself is tending to becoming more hierarchical (fitting millenia of anthropological patterns).] The work of training leaders with all the skills they require is mind-boggling.

6. The reorganization of large business.  In a transparent, networked world, knowledge workers will always engage with each other. Any large, vertically-structured or hierarchical organizations will need on-going reorganizations. Where employees have valuable talent and knowledge, this will accelerate change if barriers to entry for small business are low (e.g. software).   Capital intensive industries (hospitals, defense, transportation etc) may take a longer time to evolve.

7. The on-going rise of small/medium business. Small and medium sized enterprises will continue to grow in number and competitiveness. One effect will be a tension in the struggle for talented leaders and innovators with large organizations. Many hard-to-retain services (such as IT) will simply be outsourced. As always, the price of such services will measure the scarcity of the resource.

CPS applies our view of the future: We like our field of custom, interactive training and consulting because our differentiator is breadth of knowledge, width of business experience, and a passion for training the skills of the New Economy.

For instance, we can take a cluster of problems with IT implementation, leadership, sales and teamwork and resolve them all together (including writing new documentation for field- and Boomer-users of the problem technology. We write English not Geek).

What’s your differentiator(s)?

1. What is your future?
2. Which client do you want? Which market should you try to service? What isn’t and shouldn’t be part of what you offer?
3. What process should you improve? What skills do your people need?
4. Check……what three factors do nearly all futurists agree will impact all businesses in five years time?

Call CPS for a free discussion about your business, and how we can make your life easier and a lot more profitable. Google us (Greg Ross-Munro has been killing a few trees with the St Petersburg Times recently).  Talk to us about how we frequently get 50% funding for our affordable programs. As us for references. You won’t be disappointed.

Glynis Ross-Munro

President, Competency & Performance Solutions

glynis@c-psolutions.com 813 598 9184

It is hard to change an elephant if you live on the elephant permanently. Handy saw the usefulness of external partner that can create change in an elephant without being trampled – they hop on and off like fleas.

Flea-partners are useful for many building diversity, cultural fluency and OD issues such as mergers etc. They also make great partners for many training situations.

They have some specialized skills or niche experience, or manage tasks that no-one has time to do, but the big saving in time, money and frustration may come from the “flea” nature of the relationship.

Here are six situations in which your training people, management or HR/OD should shout for a good flea.

These situations are based on work done with BMW, HSBC, Volkswagen-Audi, Coca-Cola and many other large and small organizations that have training and OD departments, but know the value of externals in training.

1.         Objectives are not clear enough, and time is of the essence:

You’re in internal training. You’re pushing a training project but meeting lack of clarity and fuzzy objectives. This includes:

•  “I’ll get back to you” (especially from senior staff when asked questions like  “what business outcome(s) do we need here”)
• Moving goal posts
• Scope creep
• Multiple departments trying to get in on the action, or everyone has an opinion (often changing opinions)

If you bring in an external consultant, even for an initial consultation, there is more focus. Cell phones are off. The decision makers are present. They apply thought to what learning gaps exist and why these need to be addressed.

If there is a new business opportunity, and new capacities are needed, that is on the table too.

It is easier for a consultant to get ”conditions of satisfaction’ for a project in writing, with metrics and a price attached.  One manager usually owns the project (i.e. the person whose budget is funding the training). Suddenly the project is moving.

2.         When there are non-training (process etc) problems that need to be solved:

You have a good idea that the situation behind the call for training is not merely a skills-and-knowledge gap.  Someone needs to  assess the process and performance factors around the “training-plus-something-else” issue. You smell politics.

An external is usually better positioned to tackle a front-end analysis, and report on them as part of the project. The issues are neutralized, minimized, and can be fixed much more easily if you have someone between you and the problem. The training is much more likely to be successful.

Sometimes,  the problem is not a training issue at all. Your external can then take the heat, present an analysis of the problem and a solution. Everyone saves time and money and avoids applying the wrong solution to the problem.

3          When the project is likely to run into resistance:

All organizations (elephants) resist changes to some extent, but some are resist more strongly than others. Kurt Lewin’s model  is a great way to understand how this maintains the status quo in any organization.

Organizations need externals to get through this resistance barrier. Your external is like a pointed tip – with authority to complete clearly-defined task completed. S/he can therefore take a quick charge at a small section of the normal resisting forces, and achieve a breakthrough.

This is a great strategy is people are anxious about “naming, shaming and blaming” or very protective of their territory. The resisting forces are weaker against an external person, who is uninvolved in company politics, or has no interest in who has (or has not) been following procedures or leaving things undone. The neutral fixer is not with one or another political camp. Ethics is always the best tool.

You need to soothe fears and save faces, so tell the consultant which “hot button topics” to avoid.  This way, the past can be left behind, and project goals can be reached quickly and effectively.

4          When there are hidden problems which need to get solved, or innovative ideas going to waste.

This is a related problem, and also easily solved by using an external consultant: Good people know that there are various “cans of worms” which need to be opened and repaired, but they keep quiet about it.

An external stands outside the political structure of a company.  The good consultant can gradually handle several projects ethically and confidentially for the company, and then be seen as a trustworthy and undramatic problem fixer. Such a flea can become a reliable resource to fix problems as they occur.

The idea here is to keep things calm.  The problems come to light, are solved, and melt away. Often, with hindsight, no one can remember why these were ever hot-button topics, or why no one saw the solution in the first place.

External can also find out where systems or processes are not working, simply by listening. Many people in an organization have great ideas about how productivity and profitability can be improved. The consultant is often in the right position to tap into creative solutions and innovative ideas that already exist in the company. The result can be nurtured into improvements in systems, capacities, products or services in ways that use the intelligence of the whole organization. (Avoid externals who want personal glory for this. Prima donnas and glory-hungry externals are a problem.)

5          When there is a lot of “heavy lifting” hard thinking work to do:

Use a external when the knowledge needed for a new program is hard to get at. If the SMEs are busy or difficult to deal with, an external can do the heavy lifting.

Most people with valuable knowledge are busy, and usually dislike getting down to the job of handing over their knowledge. It is hard work to systematize it, even with expert help, and they will avoid it, if they possibly can.

Any WLP/Learning Project developer needs to:

• Find who has what knowledge.
• Persuade them to part with it.
• Assess what is  best practice.
• Find out what practices make the most difference (identify the key pay-off behaviors).
• Document the agreed processes, practices and procedures that will be used in any training.
• Get to grips with task sequences, guidelines, and compliance issues.
• Understand where things go in a pyramid of knowledge: e.g. what is basic knowledge, and what needs to be added later at a higher level.
• Specify the criteria to which any task will be performed, the circumstances under which that performance will be required, or the proficiency levels.
• Describe training outcomes in the form of behavior, or give performance measures using observable or measurable terms.

Any learning project developer also soon finds that:

• People do not know certain things.
• Most people are not motivated to work out complex information when they are busy.
• People disagree on information.
• Most people do not like tasks that require rigorous thinking.

The external usually has many templates or resources from which to do this work, as s/he has done it many times before. If an organization is creating a new workshop, an internal developer may have to “reinvent the wheel” by creating a whole process from scratch.

6          When management does not like to share details and numbers:

Externals are a big help when management holds on to information and is unwilling to share it with less-senior staff, or with people outside their departments.

Senior management usually has the key business metrics that training wants, for metrics-based outcomes.

The VP of Learning or Knowledge Management might be able to get at this information, but s/he isn’t developing workshops, which is often done further down in the organizational hierarchy. Senior managers often resist handing over their business results to in-house trainers.

There’s the disconnect. Training needs to evaluate cost/benefit ratios, ROI on training programs, and results. These often relate directly to business unit goals outputs, quality control, sales, costs, customer satisfaction, employee retention, engagement absenteeism or marketing effectiveness.

One way to avoid unhappiness from the heads of business units, and still tie training outputs to metrics, is to use a training external. The answers are then often quite easily available, because the clock is ticking for the project, and the results are achieved.

Please check the Forbes study of Diversity and Innovation here: http://www.forbes.com/forbesinsights/innovation_diversity/index.html

Diversity in business generally means tolerance and acceptance of differentness, often with evidence that business employs diverse people in jobs of all ranks. Diversity usually means people who come from disparate racial and ethnic groups and are of different gender, age, religion, national origin, gender orientation, ability/disability, veteran status etc. These characteristics are usually related to regulations of some sort.

Diversity is valued because it contributes to harmony, teamwork, innovation and entrepreneurship (email me for studies like this one), but feared because prejudice, (real or perceived) can lead to HR problems or lawsuits. It’s a very useful word because it often implies metrics, and (as you know) what gets measured, gets managed.

In the late 1990s, studies started to show that ye olde style mandatory diversity training reduced diversity within companies, instead of improving it. Large studies have confirmed this.

Inclusion and inclusion training take a new, wider and more complex look at diversity, and start “eating the elephant” of  climate and culture. Here we ask more than “how many Latino/gay/over 60s/disabled/veteran/Hindu employees do we have? We asks: do they feel included in the team and are they, in fact, included? If not, where are the blockages, and how can we remove them?

Think of a non-mainstream group in your organization (e.g. senior black women managers). Do they feel welcome? Are they as included in communication loops as other people in similar positions? Do they receive just as much training, mentoring, development and performance coaching as everyone else? Do they speak up at meetings as much as their peers? Do they bring their diverse and different worldviews and knowledge sets, fully, to bear on problems and opportunities? Do they bring their whole selves to work and feel as if they are settled, accepted parts of the team?

You can have a “token” Jew/paraplegic/woman director and still have a diversity program. You don’t have “token” anyones with a successfully inclusive culture – you just have people with skills and passion and knowledge repositories who are bringing their whole heads to the table.

Training for inclusion

1. Look for ROI. You’ve probably heard me say that no one should train unless it impacts the bottom line. All good training actually impacts the bottom line, and good diversity-inclusion training will give you huge ROI.  Know your objectives, and expect your trainer to help you refine these, and see results. Read on…

2. Go slow, customized and interactive. The rules of training always apply. The training must be interactive and customized. Also, as with any cultural change,  this is a process not an event. Expect your trainer to provide a route to implement change slowly, collaboratively and effectively over time.  It’s not an expensive process, but stay the course. It is a process.

3. Keep the compliance element. Companies need to train for compliance. It keeps the record straight, defines standards, specifies acceptable conduct, avoids litigation, and is essential if you run any kind of union shop.

Compliance precedes values. Immature people of any age do what is right because they cannot do what is unlawful. They behave properly because they can’t behave inappropriately without being sanctioned in some way.  Young employees need guidelines at the start of their careers. There are also some people who (for one reason or another) never seem to “get” values-driven behavior.

In maturity,  values overtake rule-based behavior. People ask, “how should I act” instead of “what can I do” (or “what can I get away with” or “what is the minimum standard I must produce to comply with this set of rules”). They commit personally to the values and vision of the organization.

4. Celebrate,  share and grow the narrative. You can still measure. As you grow your values-based, inclusive climate and culture,  collect the stories. Never forget the power of narrative. Look for wins between co-workers, suppliers and customers. Are you providing better service to your diverse customers? Do they react to differently? What happened, where, when and how? (Ask your trainer how to measure the growth of communication and cooperation if you need new ideas, and create ways to capture the new organizational narrative.)

5. Add up the wins on the bottom line. (Add these to  your narrative too.) Studies have shown that some companies spend up to 60% of the costs of cross-cultural international trade in multiple extra safeguards because of misunderstandings,  mistrust and mis-communication. You could save going through the pricing process on everything every year if you develop trust and transparency with international suppliers. You might be able to  cut out middle-men because of your great multi-lingual staff. (And the Chinese American Chamber of Commerce got you both those USF grads for free? Both with fluent Mandarin and the one is a blond kid from the Mid-West!)

6. Demand innovation and creativity! The 21st century is a world  where most wealth creation is through mobilizing knowledge and relationships between people. A company’s culture and climate must promote mutual trust, communication and collaboration. An inclusive culture supports this.   America ranks 40th out of 40 countries on innovation! You can change this by  gathering your diverse team around a table and letting them give you the ultimate competitive edge.

7. Go to it. An inclusive climate obviously delivers other benefits to an organization, including employee job satisfaction, retention, being an employer of choice and attracting the best talent. This is inclusion, but it is also part of being a happier, more cohesive team. Great companies can spiral ever-upwards to synergy: lower absenteeism, fewer accidents as people have an increased tendency to look out for all of their co-workers. Inclusive companies mean happier, healthier people making a life, as well as a living, together.

Glynis Ross-Munro and the CPS team can be contacted at glynis@c-psolutions.com or 813 598 9184.

Tampa Bay Medical and Technology Expo: 2:15 pm – 3:15 pm: 15th July 2010.

This workshop reviews the challenges that arise at the interface of healthcare and information technology, and points the way towards realistic and cost-effective solutions.

• Glynis and Greg Ross-Munro will offer research and insights into the cultural gap between the healthcare clinical world, and IT world, and the position of Medical Informatics, caught between two different occupational cultures.
• ‬The presenters will focus on the occupational cultures of each stakeholder, and the ways in which this affects interactive processes, assumptions, communication, innovation and other factors.
• The workshop considers how these factors influence project and process outcomes, including collaboration, satisfaction, safety, project success, failure, or abandonment, costs and employee retention.

In July 2009, the BBC World Service reported a $180 million cost to United Airlines, when Dave Carroll’s viral video “United Breaks Guitars” led to a share price drop of approximately 10%. www.longislandexchange.com

Carroll’s band and other passengers witnessed guitars being thrown on the tarmac by careless baggage handlers before take-off, and reported this to United staff. Three people showed no interest in their plight, and United dodged his $1200 claim for a $3,500 guitar for a year before denying it completely. Carroll’s song (complete with the badly-mutilated guitar) is apparently destined to become a United training tool. Enjoy it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Disengagement is a major business problem, with many causes. These include a lack of skillful management, selection/succession procedures that do not put the right person in the right job, and inattention to climate and culture. And, of course,  measurable, affordable and effective learning interventions.

CPS is privileged to work with some truly excellent companies, who drive engagement from the top, and have a strong awareness of the cost of disengagement, and its consequences.  They have put the real numbers on retention,  productivity, service, quality, innovation, on-going process improvement, collaborative intelligence and the on-going development of competitive advantage.

Those who want to drive change in the engagement issue do best when they produce the numbers. No one gets out of their comfort zone without a compelling case for action, and many of the people who make key decisions have a background of thinking in terms of numbers, not on whether their people bring their whole selves to work.

Give them the real, hard numbers, plus the basis on which those numbers were derived (c-psolutions has things like how to calculate the cost of turnover etc if anyone needs them). Show them the hard research on why people go through the motions at work or leave their jobs. Give them valid metrics on the impact of disengagement on sales, service and customer retention.

Theory speaks to some people, but the business case is the best and most compelling reason to take the action needed to engage our workforce.

And to stop people breaking those poor guitars.

CPS is eligible to provide custom solutions to clients with state funding assistance, and helps our clients to source these. As a values- and ethics-based small business, CPS specializes in affordable, lasting solutions to people and business challenges.

A competency is (per Rodney Rogers of Portland State University) a persistent pattern of behaviour resulting from a cluster of knowledge, skills, abilities, and motivations. The persistence of those behaviors is an essential part of their being a competency.

Three tips:

Tip One: You are likely to run into a very specific problem, unless you are working with a fully-qualified competency expert. (Look for an international qualification, specifically in competencies, like City and Guilds of London, such as CPS has.)

Here is the problem: as you discuss competencies, you become very familiar with the information. You therefore take the material to higher and higher levels of abstraction. You also start to clump the competencies together, so you end up with about 12 broad abstract statements, covering a whole position. These are no use at all.

You don’t want a laundry list of 1000 things that your people know or can do, but a few 30,000 foot statements that only you truly understand will simply be filed and forgotten. (I’ve seen it often). There is a happy medium, usually because the competencies are backed up by assessment documents. (See point 2 – you don’t even have to write these – they are already written!)

The best book on this common trap  is actually a book about how to make a good presentation, because the same thing happens there. The presenter studies the material and then delivers the 30,000 foot level speech while audience members can’t  match this with their less complex understanding of the issues.

Buy “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It has a crystal clear explanation of this issue. The Heath brothers will repair both your presentations, and your thinking about competency formation.

Another check: ask yourself “can I write an assessment document from these competencies?” If the answer is no, get a competency expert to give you a lesson on how to write them, before you waste time or money on getting it wrong! S/he should be able to find international assessment documents for you to work from too.

Tip Two: Don’t reinvent the wheel. US competencies do exist (e.g. the CUNA ones if you are in finance) or you can begin with the international ones for your industry. Then customize them. Then customize the assessment documents.

I gave you these starting points last July, so here is a reminder:

• The National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in England & Wales
• The Scottish Vocational Qualification (SVQ)
• The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) of New Zealand
• The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) of South Africa (SAQA)
• The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF)
• The European Qualification Framework (EQF)

Some newer systems, like the one in Singapore, have some great stuff.

Everything is there. My son/partner Greg got an extra half-letter for his MBA thesis by using one of these. What’s more, he needed only 30 minutes to find and download the competencies and assessment documents for every task in running a tanker-washing company (Aussie documents). These provided a complete training plan for his client. USF was filled with amazement. These things are also free.

Tip Three: In the case of competencies, the dictionary definition applies. The word competency means “having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge, experience; properly qualified”. It means that your people know, and can do, everything necessary to do the job properly.

Competency is the standard you need. Someone is either competent, or not yet competent.

So we train towards the standard (competency) and we assess against the standard (competency). We manage to the standard (competency).

For some years, I worked in international ultra-precision engineering. I’d work with a SME, and create a protocol of competency (in Tampa, but with the UK, EU etc competencies in hand). If the person trained was not competent, the lathe slide would crash, the diamond tools would be ruined, and an engineer would have to go to the site (maybe the Far East) to fix the mess. The damage might cost $50,000. So the standard was competency.

If your employee does not know, or cannot do, what is required, you lose customers, reputation, team spirit, maybe materials and equipment. Your productivity and retention suffers. Maybe the damage is also $50,000. Your international competitors are all using competency-based learning and performance standards for that very reason. Clarify your competencies and use them!

We build:

1) Our clients’ “IQ”, or conscious abilities to use a toolbox of various thinking skills, alone and with other people.

2) EQ or social and emotional intelligence: the competencies in the intrapersonal, interpersonal, cultural and communication skillls.

3) “TQ” or technological intelligence, the group of skills, knowledge and attitudes that are an essential part of managing information sharing, and executing collaborative work in the technology-based Age of Knowledge.

As our clients meet the challenges of the new economy, CPS supports them in retooling their people with the skills, knowledge and approaches that create success.

We also arrange the funding (from workforce development funding sources) to finance this work.

CPS does not only facilitate collaborative intelligence, we practice it. We partner with our clients to stay ahead of the curve, looking at how to build and maintain long-term competitive advantage in a new, uncharted economy.

IQ+EQ+TQ=CQ by Glynis Ross-Munro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.c-psolutions.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.c-psolutions.com.

CQ, or collaborative intelligence, combines the ability to think well, and to think collaboratively with other people. It is a key to innovation, corporate earnings, individual wealth and national success in the 21st Century.

CQ is also a core factor in managing knowledge workers, nationally and internationally. High collaborative intelligence often includes skills for managing different generations, as different cohorts interact differently, share knowledge in different ways, and have differing ways of using technology.

CQ often has hard skills components too. These include the ability to write clearly and quickly, and to use communication technology easily and confidently. For instance, your business may have a very valuable,  knowledgeable, and highly-skilled thinker. This person might, however be a Boomer or older GenXer who is seriously under-performing simply because s/he lacks training and confidence in using in web conferencing or use of wikis, on-line project  management etc.

CQ and other ‘New Economy” skills developments are well-funded by local government programs in the Tampa Bay counties. CPS is ethically committed to help any company seeking funding for either “new” and “old” economy skills training or career retooling, whether CPS is a supplier of the training for the required skills or not. Please email glynis[@]c-psolutions or call me at 813-598-9184.