FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Services to organisations with a global workforce

a) Why does anyone in my organisation need cross cultural capabilities?
If you are a multinational organisation, one of the major challenges is how to ensure your expatriate staff successfully adjusts to working and living in foreign cultures and then make a valuable contribution to their particular area of work. Working with colleagues from many countries is much more the norm in today’s multinational organisations. (Mobley, Wang and Li (2008). Advances in Global Leadership, House, R., and others Culture, Leadership, and Organisations)

b) Do teachers who are posted overseas, need training in cross cultural capabilities?
Once in the classroom there is nowhere for teachers to hide if their cultural competencies are not strong! To be successful, teachers have to understand how students learn in a different culture and adapt their teaching styles to suit. Better still, to achieve even better learning outcomes teachers and students may need to collaborate on how to work with each other, given their different styles. This is called creating a shared culture, and the skills to achieve this are not hard to learn.

c) I work in a bank in Australia and we send staff overseas to the Asia Pacific region. How do we identify candidates with strong cross cultural communication skills when we select them?
The Global Competencies Inventory (GCI) has taken the guess work out of the selection process. It will tell you whether your candidate has the cross cultural skills to understand and work successfully with people from other cultures. It takes the guess work out of selecting the best all round candidate for the job. Used consistently, GCI helps to improve the performance of organisations in global operations.

d) Our mining company works in remote regions of Australia and overseas. How would cross cultural training help our mine workers?
Mining sites usually are home for people from different cultural backgrounds. Mines are often surrounded by communities that speak a different language from the miners and have different cultural values. Relationships between miners and local communities are critical for mines to operate successfully. Miners with appropriate cross cultural skills and leadership styles can ensure better outcomes for their companies as well as for communities.

e) Many of our aid workers work in difficult communities. How would cross cultural training help them?
Typically, aid professionals are working with communities in difficult conditions, for example where there is extreme poverty or great inequity, high levels of unemployment, malnutrition and poor access to basic education. There is plenty of research to confirm that the success of aid programs depends largely on the quality of relationships that are built between aid workers, their colleagues and local communities. Cross cultural training will assist aid professionals to explore how relationships are forged in culturally different communities and develop strategies and skills for building effective cross-cultural partnerships. It is important to understand that rules for establishing trusting relationships are different from culture to culture. The ways to form relationships in one culture will not always work in another culture and in fact some approaches could have a directly opposite outcome from what was intended.