WHEN AND WHY SHOULD YOU INVEST IN INTERCULTURAL TRAINING?

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Culture influences almost every aspect of how we do business.

How we communicate, negotiate and collaborate. How we conduct meetings, make decisions and develop strategies. How we buy and sell. And how we recruit, manage and retain employees.

As more and more activities take place at a global level, it is increasingly important that each of your managers and employees possess strong intercultural skills in order to reach your organization’s business goals.

This is where cultural training makes a difference. Sometimes it can mean the difference between success and failure: A lost customer. A failed relocation. An unsuccessful strategy. Other times, it can mean the difference between just scraping through – or taking full advantage of the opportunities that diversity has to offer.

Examples of when cultural training makes a difference:

  • You are a manager in a Danish-based company where you’re about to expand your global activities.
    You want to be at the forefront so that your cooperation with the increasing number of global customers, suppliers and employees is not based on ’trial and error’. Global leadership training for the management team gives you the tools to communicate, collaborate, and manage more effectively, and equip you to handle the complexity and the uncertainty that exists in the global arena.
     
  • In the HR department you need to relocate a manager.
    He will live and work in the USA for the next three years, and his wife and two children are going with him. Cultural training for the entire family prepares the manager for the professional challenges ahead, and ensures the expectations that he and his wife have about the stay are aligned – making the relocation a success for the family and your organization.
     
  • You’re project managing the construction of a new factory in China.
    You need to deal with the local authorities and the suppliers, and you need your Danish-Chinese team to start delivering from day one so that you can meet project deadlines. Danish-Chinese cultural training ensures that project team members work together effectively, so that you don’t waste time handling cultural misunderstandings. And intercultural coaching gives you the tools you need to communicate and negotiate with Chinese stakeholders.
     
  • You manage a cross-cultural team where most of the cooperation takes place virtually.
    You feel that confidence levels are low, and you’re not benefiting from the opportunities presented by the team’s diversity. Training in global virtual collaboration teaches you to build relationships and trust, and to become aware of each other’s cultural make-up, so that you take advantage of the team’s diversity and encourage drive and innovation.
     
  • You work with Indian colleagues in your department every day, but you often experience that cooperation can go wrong.
    Deadlines are not met. Emails are not answered. And what you understood to be agreements were not agreements at all. A workshop in Indian cultural understanding gives you the tools to understand what went wrong – and how to prevent misunderstandings and frustrations in the future.

The facilitation and the tools that C3 brought to us, helped us understand, acknowledge and openly discuss the issues where difference is a factor we must learn to work with and not against, because we are a global organization.

Mette Bjerrekær, Director, Development & Engineering China, Grundfos

How can we create value for you?

The above scenarios are examples. Do you have another type of challenge where you think that cultural training could help?

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