Regardless of the organization you join, you are likely to be dealing with people who come from various national, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. Communicating across language and cultural barriers at home will challenge your skills. Without leaving your own country, you're likely to come into contact with people from a variety of backgrounds who work in your company, industry, and community. Cross cultural differences are all around us.

How then can we access cultural understanding to help us in our day-to-day relationships? First, it is important to understand and identify aspects of culture that lead to creating the way we think and behave. Also, we need to understand that the cultural spectrum holds different shades for a person, a society and a nation, helping each of them adapt to a common collective identity. In the process of evolving this collective identity, culture transcends its traditional role of providing a set of beliefs, customs, norms, values, ethics, traditions, moral, social and legal codes, perceptions, and philosophy. It becomes the overall physical framework for the society to function - it becomes the institutions that govern and the schools that educate, for example. These are all manifestations of culture.

In addition, culture is strongly related with geographical setting of a place, religion, ethnicity and race, and explains why different countries have different cultures and also why places on a sea coast share common elements of culture that are quite different from the cultures of mountainous places.

Cultural understanding derives from dovetailing all these cross cultural differences and creating awareness about how these differences impact the way people think, speak and behave. One of the biggest issues to affect relationships is that of not understanding why one person has a particular viewpoint or approach. Their approach may simply not make sense to you. And what is worse, you have no language or framework with which to begin to discuss your differences. You cannot have a discussion about it because you don't know where to start...

Differences can be as small as having a different understanding about what time ‘dinner time' is; what a ‘family butcher' is, what ‘as soon as possible ‘ means, or even ‘when you have a mo can you do xyz'? So when exactly does that person expect xyz to be done?

Cross cultural differences can be the cause of many underlying problems that most people will not recognise stem from that. Often these differences are not brought to the surface and slowly build in to resentment affecting people's performance at work. It's important when you are working with multi-cultural staff to promote sensitivity to diversity, respectfulness and good intercultural communication. To explore how you can unleash the positive power of cross cultural differences in your organisation, click here.