Danger and Opportunity

Bridging Cultural Diversity for Competitive Advantage

Lionel Laroche, Caroline Yang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138165090
• eBook ISBN: 9781135119379
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The Chinese characters for "danger" and "opportunity" form the word "crisis". Ancient Chinese wisdom sees an opportunity in danger. While cultural diversity brings challenges to the workplace, how do we turn these challenges into opportunities? Drawing on their extensive experience working with multicultural and multinational organizations, Lionel Laroche and Caroline Yang provide an in-depth analysis of cross-cultural dynamics in the workplace and offer practical suggestions at both the individual and organizational levels.

The book analyzes cross-cultural challenges in six areas: the relative importance of technical and soft skills; cross-cultural communication; cross-cultural feedback; hierarchy; individualism; and risk tolerance. It then provides a solutions framework that encompasses people, systems and environment to bridge the issues that arise from cultural differences. The analysis and solutions are applied in four business contexts: managing a multicultural workforce; competing in the global talent market; collaborating with joint venture partners; and working with offshore resources.

If you work with colleagues, managers, employees and customers from diverse cultures, if you are with an organization that has a multicultural workforce and/or global operations, or if your organization collaborates with joint venture partners or offshore resources from different cultures, then Danger and Opportunity: Bridging Cultural Diversity for Competitive Advantage is the book for you.

1


Introduction

“What is different, is dangerous” is the title of Chapter 5 of Geert Hofstede’s book Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. It is human nature to view unfamiliar things as a danger or a challenge. The Chinese word crisis consists of two characters: the first means “danger” and the second “opportunity.” As the workforce and customer base of North American organizations are becoming more and more culturally diverse, there will be many challenges, or dangers. There are also many opportunities for organizations that learn to manage cultural differences and increase the cultural competence of their employees. This book explores the challenges (or dangers) and opportunities brought by cultural diversity and discusses how to turn the challenges into opportunities.

Section 1.1: Key Messages of This Book

After delivering a training workshop, I was having an early dinner in a hotel lounge. This hotel is part of a chain that caters to business travelers. It was early, so the restaurant was not busy. There were three individual customers and a group of three at the bar. A staff member (a young white woman) went around the restaurant introducing herself: “Hi, my name is Amy. …” I overheard words such as reception, business card and a draw. She went around and talked to everyone except me. In the next thirty minutes, more customers came in and she went to talk to each new person or group. She did the draw and gave a gift certificate to someone.

She did not come to speak with me. I looked around; I was the only Asian, or visible minority, in the room. Was she afraid that I did not speak English? I was reading an English newspaper, so that was unlikely. I was reading. Did she want to let me read in peace? Yet she talked to a woman six feet from me who was reading a book.

I had never felt this visibly different before. I thought of three options:

• I could conclude that she was discriminating against Asians, never go back to this hotel chain again and tell all my Asian friends not to go there.

• I could ignore it because I had more important things to do.

• I could talk to her and find out what was going on.

I settled on the third option. I told the server that I would like to speak to Amy. When she came, I said that I wondered what she was telling others about and joked that I did not want to miss a good party. She introduced herself as the sales manager and said that the hotel was changing ownership and would be renovating in the next six months. She was very pleasant and positive. She asked what brought me to town and gave me her card, saying she would give me discounts for future visits. We parted on friendly terms.

(Caroline)

This situation illustrates how misunderstanding happens when people from different cultures interact with one another. Our guess is that Amy did not know how to connect with someone who looked different from her. It is easy for people on the receiving end to interpret this behavior as discrimination based on a visible or vocal¹ difference. One person has to take the first step to bridge the gap by giving the other the benefit of the doubt. Our hope is that Amy now feels more comfortable talking with Asians. But taking that first step is not easy. Caroline readily admits that she has chosen one of the first two options on many other occasions. It took thirteen years of working and living in Canada for Caroline to have the confidence to ask to speak with Amy and the skill to clear the air in a constructive way. Here are a few key messages we hope to draw from this story.

The first key message of this book is to give people the benefit of the doubt. We believe most people have good intentions at heart. Most people do not want to discriminate, to be unfair or to be disrespectful. They simply do not have enough knowledge or experience of interacting with people from different cultures to initiate a conversation or to recognize a certain behavior as cultural.

Most immigrants in North America come from homogeneous societies, where 90—99 percent of the population look the same and speak the same language. When we visited Beijing together, Lionel mentioned that he expected to see more foreign tourists, as in Paris or New York City; Caroline joked that the few foreign tourists like him are drowned in the human sea of 1.3 billion Chinese. While immigrants are learning how to interact with Americans, Canadians and other immigrants in North America, Americans and Canadians are also learning how to interact with immigrants and the rest of the world. Giving each other the benefit of the doubt and not assuming people are discriminating puts us on a positive path toward mutual understanding.

The second key message is to make it safe to discuss cultural differences in a constructive way. In many workshops, participants say it is their first opportunity to talk about cultural differences because they are concerned about offending people inadvertently. Many human resources (HR) professionals and managers² do not feel comfortable discussing cultural differences with their employees; if you do not say anything, you cannot say anything wrong.

When people do talk about cultural differences, they spend a lot of energy on semantics or political correctness. Caroline was interviewed by a social studies student doing a project to analyze the negative impact of the term visible minority. Caroline, a visible minority who has no problem being referred to as one, did not understand why this analysis was valuable. “I am visibly different from most people in Canada, and I am a minority. When Lionel goes into a Chinese supermarket in Markham, he is a visible minority.” Unfortunately, focusing on semantics makes people even more uncomfortable and reinforces political correctness. It does not foster an environment where people are looking for constructive ways to work together. We want to promote discussion of cultural differences in a constructive manner.

The third key message is to focus on what we can each do to bridge the gap. We have attended workshops and conferences where the focus is on identifying who discriminates against whom under what circumstances. By the end of the day, everyone feels down because they either feel someone discriminated against them or someone considered that they discriminated against others. At one conference, the entire closing keynote address reviewed studies analyzing why immigrants were earning less than the rest of the population and concluded that discrimination was the main reason. How do participants feel walking away from such a message? Are they going to do anything differently the next day? Chances are many people feel powerless because they are relying on others to change.

Similarly, in internal workshops or meetings, employees often complain that management or other departments are not doing what they should. We have heard managers complain that “senior management” needs to change. We have also heard managers in the same meeting say that “we are part of the management; we must demonstrate leadership and initiate the change.” We want to focus people’s attention on what they can do differently to improve the situation, as opposed to waiting for others to change. Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Let us empower ourselves and lead the change.

The fourth key message is that HR professionals and managers need to lead changes at the organization level. Within any organization or any group in North America, there are a few people who are very knowledgeable and interested in cultural diversity and inclusion. There are probably also some who have a narrow, fixed view of the world, openly discriminate against people who are different from them and who think their cultural positions are always right. The majority of people are probably not aware of cultural differences in the workplace or do not have the skills to manage them, like Amy in our opening story. Focusing on discrimination will shut down not only the minority that discriminates, but also the silent majority. We want to help HR professionals and managers bring the silent majority on board by teaching people how to manage cultural differences and develop cultural competence. When the overwhelming majority of an organization embraces diversity and is actively involved in building an inclusive environment, it becomes socially unacceptable to discriminate.

The key is to take the analysis of cultural differences to the organizational level. Let us return to the situation described at the beginning of this chapter. After her encounter with Amy, Caroline looked on the career Web site ofthat hotel chain and reviewed the job descriptions of sales and guest service positions in culturally diverse metropolitan areas. There was no requirement for the ability to service customers from diverse cultures. Shouldn’t such a requirement be included in the job description? How does the organization decide whether candidates have that skill or not? What kind of training does the organization offer its employees to develop those skills? Many organizations already have effective talent management systems and processes. We discuss how to build cultural diversity and inclusion into the existing system throughout this book, and specifically in Chapter 4.

Section 1.2: Structure of This Book

The following is the approach we take in this book:

1. First, we describe the cross-cultural challenges that professionals³ and organizations experience as they work with people from diverse cultures. We focus on real-life situations that we have experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Cultural Factors and Concepts—Part I
• Chapter 3 Cultural Factors and Concepts—Part II
• Chapter 4 Managing a Multicultural Workforce
• Chapter 5 Working with Offshore Resources
• Chapter 6 Collaborating with Joint Venture Partners
• Chapter 7 Competing in the Global Talent Market
• Chapter 8 Conclusion
• Suggested Readings
• Index