In a recent piece in Minnesota Business by Beth LaBreche, she outlines suggested questions for an annual customer survey. Perhaps one of the most important is “Does our external perception—if you believe one exists for us—match up with what you experience?” This is a thought worth exploring that touches upon many levels within a business. How does your customer see you? Is the image you are conveying through branding or any type of communication true to who you are? For example, look at diversity and the often-claimed status of being an Equal Opportunity Employer. On many company home pages there are the standard issue stock photo images showing various ethnicities to imply that the company actually has people just like that working there. This is a tired practice that needs to go away – unless that is a true representation of what’s inside the company. Most of the time it’s just wishful thinking. How many companies can really say they hire with an awareness of diversity – and that means generational, age, gender, culture, race or any other area of difference you can think of? Would you hire a person with a disability? A person who has a strong accent? A female engineer? A late-bloomer or career changer? If you want to be perceived as a company that supports diversity the best and simplest strategy is, well—to actually do so—authentically closing the gap between perception and experience.
Over the last few decades our workplace has drastically changed: diversity abounds, technology rules, M&A’s are the norm and change happens every few minutes! This new environment calls for superhero leaders with a more robust set of competencies. We believe that two crucial sets of competencies that are a must-have for effective leaders today are Cultural Competencies and Emotional Intelligence Competencies. Want proof? Here’s some good research to back up our claim:
- An analysis of more than 300 top-level executives from fifteen global companies showed that six competencies distinguished the stars from the average. Two of those were intercultural competencies, the remaining were emotional competencies (Spencer, L. M., Jr., 1997)
- Research by the Center for Creative Leadership has found that the primary causes of derailment in executives involve deficits in three primary emotional intelligence and diversity competencies: difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a diverse team, and poor interpersonal relations.
- According to a study conducted by the Southwest Institute, 37% of previously successful leaders fail within the first year of being given a role leading a global, intercultural team.
So how do you build these competencies? Start by checking out our website and the tools we use.
You thought it stopped at Y, didn’t you? But no, the next generation will begin entering the workforce in only about five-eight years. Who knew? Apparently Dr. Larry D. Rosen did, and thankfully he’s letting us know what he’s found out so far about what to expect from the multi-tasking generation. You can find his book Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn. You can also listen to a fascinating interview with him from back in January, thanks to the magic of Public Radio. Though the book’s focus is on educating this generation successfully, it doesn’t take much to extrapolate to the workplace. Time to start working on my next training program…
A colleague of mine recently attended a presentation by the head of a Fortune 500 company. A solid Baby Boomer, he was speaking to a crowd of mostly recent or soon-to-be college graduates, trying to sell them on his company’s use of cutting-edge technology. They were pretty interested until he turned things inspirational and decided to impart “how-to-make-it” wisdom to this crowd full of Gen Y faces. There—right there—he began to lose them.
His intentions were good, and he spoke passionately from his own experience about “paying dues,” “showing up early and staying late,” and “sacrificing for your career.” The thing is he was, for this audience, largely speaking a foreign language. When he started out on what had obviously been a successful career, rigid organizational hierarchies were the norm—the whole paradigm he described was supported by society, and believed in by his generation, as a natural manifestation of a particular set of cultural values. The problem was, this wasn’t his generation he was talking to.
Baby Boomers were a boom indeed—80 million strong. But Gen Y is also a boom, though largely silent up to this point.—75 million, with only approximately 10% currently part of the workforce. It’s not that Gen Y doesn’t want to work or build successful careers—they most certainly do! But they’re going to do it on their own terms. The world is increasingly fast, networked, social, and non-linear. “Paying your dues” is giving way, more and more, to “Can you do what needs to be done?”, regardless of tenure or traditional education; the idea of working at a single company for 40 years until you retire has almost become an anachronism. This vital, restless population isn’t bemoaning these facts—they’re embracing them. They will change the way we work. Ready or not, they want to be heard.
President Obama is in the news a lot. Actually, more than a lot. This fact, coupled with close media analysis of the things he’s doing, makes him a fascinating study in leadership. I mean, in this country, the President is really the Leader, capital “L”; when he struggles or, conversely, handles something well, we can all learn from it, especially compared to the comments of his critics. Right now President Obama is traveling through Asia, and I want to look at two of his stops through the lens of culturally proficient leadership.
In China, the President spoke to an audience of college students in Shanghai. He pushed for greater uncensored access to the Internet, saying that a little criticism wouldn’t harm their leaders. Now stop for a second: does that opinion make sense to you? If it does, and you’re American, that’s not surprising. The open challenging of authority is a baseline of our culture---it’s what the Declaration of Independence is all about! However, it’s not the norm in Chinese culture. To openly challenge someone in authority is to cause them to lose face or, putting it another way, cause them to suffer public humiliation. From a general American point of view, well, if someone deserves to be publically humiliated then they should be. Case closed. It’d be considered a normal action to take, and if you were the target of the humiliation, you’d be expected to either vigorously defend yourself or apologize, whatever your status. In China, though, if you’re in authority, you don’t normally openly admit to wrongdoing, and you don’t usually get called out in a public forum. Note that this doesn’t mean that Chinese officials aren’t ever censured or punished---they are. It just doesn’t often happen in public.
When the President pushes for open criticism of Chinese leaders, he’s actually asking for something quite foreign to the Chinese way of thinking. In a culture used to indirect communication, criticism is often best handled through an intermediary, or by analogy, rather than straight confrontation. So here the President is acting out of a cultural assumption---projecting his culture onto another. A message framed this way, while possibly embraced by some of the college crowd to whom he spoke, is likely to be summarily dismissed by Chinese leaders. This is a tough place to be in as a leader---Obama has a message to deliver, a message he believes in, but it’s going to be ignored by those for whom it’s intended because of cultural confusion around how to deliver it.
Even more interesting, at least in terms of the furious response, was the President’s bow to the current Emperor of Japan. Many of those who commented on the bow found it to be demeaning---they didn’t think America’s President should be bowing to anyone. They saw the bow as submissive. Now, I think it’s fairly common knowledge that in Japanese culture, bows are seen as a sign of respect; not to bow would be insulting. What’s fascinating is that I don’t doubt many of those who criticized the bow knew that fact---they just didn’t care. To them, the point was that America’s leader-in-chief shouldn’t bow to anyone, no matter who they are. The American value-norm of a firm handshake and straight-on eye contact are viewed as superior, and somehow the President should expect the Emperor to conform to American culture, even though the meeting took place in Japan.
So, once again, here’s a leader in a tough place. He’s trying to convey a message to a colleague in a culturally appropriate manner, and voices are raised because of cultural confusion about just what message he was delivering.
Around deepSEE, we’d say that in the first example the President is acting out of an orientation of Minimization---he’s assuming that everyone understands and appreciates criticism in the same way he does. In the second example he’s acting more out of an orientation of Acceptance---recognizing the difference at hand and attempting to frame his response through the perspective of the other culture. His critics, however, are tending to react more out of an orientation of Defense---uncritically viewing their own cultural practice as superior, with no regard for context.
If this seems a little complicated, well, it is! Building cultural proficiency is a developmental process, like any sort of growth, and there’s no skipping over the messy parts. The President, like any leader, is only human and subject to both success and failure---the thing to watch is how he builds on those cultural successes, and learns from the failures. Oh, and the terms I used above: Minimization, Acceptance, and Defense, are three parts of an assessment tool we use a lot around here: The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Check it out!
