One size doesn’t fit all; six tools for intercultural communication and intercultural conflict resolution

A Canadian and a Kenyan walk into a bar. A Canadian woman and a Kenyan man.  An older, Canadian woman with a disability and a younger, gay Kenyan man…..

Hang in there with me.

Have you ever felt like a cauldron of doom was boiling when it seemed like a colleague was speaking to you in Greek, despite your very best effort to understand them?

Have you ever felt like a dog chasing its tail trying to get your message across to a so-called difficult staff person?  Or perhaps you can remember a time working in a team when things were simply not working and every minor issue felt like climbing Mount Everest.

Intercultural communication and conflict resolution skills are central to our success at work and at home but add culture into the mix and you’ve got a real cauldron that can threaten to bubble over.

Culture can be defined as the ‘collective programming of our minds that divides us into groups’ (G Hofstede)

And when we realize it includes age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more than without even being aware of it, 99.9% of communication and conflict issues have a cultural root.

So back to a Canadian and a Kenyan walk into a bar. Hang in there with me.  A Canadian woman and a Kenyan man.  An older Canadian woman with a disability and a younger gay Kenyan man….. We have a multi-layered cultural conflict in terms of passport country, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, and more.
Yet we ignore those roots at our peril and tend to keep doing more of whatever it is that’s not working.

The cost of intercultural miscommunication and conflict is high.  It can:

• Undermine creative thinking
• Decreases individuals’ effectiveness at connecting ideas from disparate cultures (source).
• Have negative impacts on our stakeholder’s experience
• Reduce available talent
• Give us and our organization a bad name (source)
• Prevent valuable input from being heard
• Increase prejudice and stereotyping
• Pit individuals, teams, and organizations against one another (source)

As discourse seems to grow more inward-looking and divisive. We must continue to think inclusively and globally (source).

Sounds good right?  But how do we do that when resources and time are tight?

In this free workshop on May 26th, with me, Lee-Anne Ragan, you’ll learn six skills including:

1. Discovering the surprising way your brain tricks you into making cultural mistakes and how to get around that
2. How to identify your areas of how cultural communication and how to stretch
3. Uncovering your tendency towards magical thinking and what to do about it
4. Learning how to get to certainty by first dancing with uncertainty
5. Discovering how to stay out of the ICU by using my intercultural communication and conflict resolution I.C.U. tool
6. How identifying how you feel about conflict instantly moves you forward in your cultural communication and conflict resolution
7. You can count the workshop towards your annual UN-Mandated training (If you’re a UN staff)

RSVP using this link by May 24th. Then watch your inbox for our agenda and how to participate online.

Please note the dates and times alternate each month so as to reach more people in various time zones at their request.

• 7-9 am Vancouver
• 9-11 am Mexico
• 10 am-noon Montreal/New York
• 11 am-1 pm Rio
• 5-7 pm Nairobi, Beirut
• 6-8 pm Abu Dhabi

Click here to convert to your timezone if it’s not listed above and to double-check the times as they can sometimes change due to daylight savings times.

Take action now –> Join the mailing list to receive invitations to the monthly meetings, and get access to all the meeting resources (including time-stamped recordings in case you can’t make it in real-time).  And don’t forget to  RSVP for this roundtable by May 24th. And click the button below to add the event to your calendar.

Now go on and learn, laugh and lead

Learn

• Find more resources here – Lost in translation; what to do when you’re swimming in an intercultural current and here – Intercultural communication- When up is down & down is up

Laugh

• Culture includes familiarity with tech, for example, those who are digital natives and those who are digital immigrants, like these adorable seniors who don’t know they’re recording themselves.

Lead

• Share this post and the resources with a friend and/or colleague and chat

P.S. Want to join our community and receive regular invitations to my monthly Learning and Development Roundtables plus get access to all nine-plus years of Roundtable resources? Easy peasy. Sign up here.