How many of us wish we could sometimes have an easy recipe for dealing with culture differences, for communicating smoothly and effectively with people from other countries? Many people feel disconnected from others because communication is not as ‘sensitive' or ‘effective' as it could be. Experience shows that misunderstandings and difficulties arise not only through language but also through the impact of culture. To ensure you are effective in cross culture communication, remember these five essential elements when communicating interculturally. They are the keys to overcoming difficulties and avoiding misconceptions:
- Questions: be courageous and ask incisive questions. Why courageous? Because many people feel stupid when they need to ask questions - as though they were not clever enough to understand. Courageous because many people are wary of being politically incorrect; they feel inhibited about asking the kind of questions that could be interpreted wrongly. Take courage and ask because only questioning will drive understanding to help to make connections and forge good working relationships. In reality you are testing your understanding.
- Attention: give full attention with all your senses. Be alert to the nuances of verbal and non-verbal communication which have vast and varied differences across cultures. Listen with your eyes and hear with your heart.
- Clarification: check for understanding by summarising what you think you have heard or understood, even at the risk of someone being affronted (or thinking you're stupid). Remaining silent and being faced with the consequences of being misinformed or uninformed is worse. If necessary, consult other people for clarification. Most people are only too pleased to help when someone shows a genuine interest to learn.
- Limitations: openly acknowledge your relative ignorance or limitations about other people's beliefs, values and cultural norms and explain how this might make you appear clumsy in your communication. If you don't, you're either hoping that your ignorance doesn't exist or it won't be noticed! Experience dictates that neither will be the case. Most people will accept and respond to your discomfort with consideration and respect and will use the situation to illustrate something about their culture.
- Value: recognise that diversity is a source of abundance and a cause for celebration. To create synergy and value from cross-cultural interactions is the approach of all effective intercultural dialogues.
Remember: there is no communication in a dialogue until each party understands the other. Effective cross culture communication is about testing understandings and assumptions, and about managing each others expectations. It is a craft, a skill, that can be learned, which is about relating to people in a respectful way, no matter what their roots or where they come from.
It's important to be able to really look at a company's specific needs when it comes to cross culture communication and implement a very specific plan to develop the right communication. To find out more about communicating interculturally and how you can implement a cross culture training programme to enhance the skills of your employees click here.