Multicultural Relationship Skills, Best Practices

The Business Case for Building Multicultural Relationship Skills

Just when American companies were becoming well-versed in managing diversity and building customer-focused organizations, the rapid pace of global sourcing has created a new landscape. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in his best seller “The World is Flat” writes of the new global interdependency of supply chains, human resources, and intellectual capital that has been created in a remarkably short time.

For business leaders and human resources professionals the ground has shifted!

FROM		TO
Customer Focus		Partnership Focus
Managing Diversity		Managing Munticultural Relationships

Managing Diversity has been primarily a domestic evolution from earlier affirmative action efforts that emphasized leveraging the diversity in the workplace to enhance outcomes. For the most part diversity operates within the context of a US centered workplace and workforce. Global sourcing requires that this scope be enlarged into Managing Multi-Cultural Relationships.

Managing multi-cultural relationships is the effective management of global sourcing and off-shore operations to deliver expected results. It places a greater emphasis on relationship skills and cultural understanding and operates within the context of both a US and off-shore centered workplace and workforce. It also cuts both ways as key employees in offshore locations need to interact effectively with Americans, often presenting a new level of development challenges.

Customer Focused organizations have devoted themselves to understanding and meeting the needs of the customer. This has relied heavily on an emphasis on process that focuses on how things are done and is frequently transaction based. It often views business as being a set of external and internal customers (everyone has a customer).

Partnership Focus places an emphasis on shared outcomes and focuses on why things are done. At its core is an emphasis on collaborative relations that views business as a set of partnerships necessary to meet customer needs. This includes the partnership between employer and employee. Successful practitioners understand the “view from the other side.” It also challenges the concept of someone wins/someone loses

IMPLICATIONS OF THE SHIFT

When business relationships are viewed as a set of partnerships, a new emphasis on relationship skills moves to the forefront. All partnerships require careful selection and attentive nurturing to produce the desired outcomes of the partners. Multi-cultural partnerships compound an already complicated set of relationship management issues…not unlike the added complexity of a multi-cultural marriage

Few American business leaders and even fewer middle managers and technical employees have been trained or exposed to cultures and business practices outside North America. In fact, we often encounter a reluctance to recognize that cultural influences play an enormous role in how we act and how others act in a business relationship. American’s knowledge, understanding, ability to adapt, even the willingness to learn, lags behind competitors from the EU, Japan, and an increasing number of developing countries, including China and India. It becomes a competitive issue.

RESPONDING TO THE SHIFT

Whether it is the global sourcing of markets, suppliers, or operations, the pace of change impacting American business is accelerating. What was known as “globalization” has come to encompass a wider range of activities, much of it significantly more integrated than even a few years ago. In order to be successful in the shift that is underway, companies will need the proper tools to do the proper job. They must update the company toolbox with two primary areas of focus.

Retool relationship management skills to emphasize managing partnerships. This includes not only the leadership team, but also middle managers, relationship managers and the technical and distribution staff.
Move the organization to one that understands and is effective in the multi-cultural world. This requires integrating multi-cultural training into team building and relationship management skills as part of employee development programs. Any leader, manager or employee who is involved with the global sourcing efforts needs to receive specific training designed to enhance their ability to perform in multi-cultural partnerships.

The investment in multi-cultural training programs must have as its outcome either the enhancement of results or the minimizing of risk. This is best accomplished by assuring that the curriculum includes specific business applications and has as part of the facilitation team a business leader who can speak from personal experience.

To borrow from Friedman, the world is flat. Those organizations that do not adapt to this new reality are in danger of falling off the edge.

About the Author

Ted Moravec is a leadership consultant with over thirty years business experience, half of which has been in international settings. He is used by IOR Global Services as a Business Consultant in multi-cultural training programs.