Tag Archives: Education and Training

Resource Review: GDI Benchmarks

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We tend to get a lot of phone calls asking us to recommend a cross-cultural assessment instrument. Usually I ask what  seems to me a very logical question: “What is it you are trying to assess?” I am then often shocked to hear that the caller is not able to answer my question!

As an organizational effectiveness practitioner I am concerned with individual and interpersonal effectiveness as well as that of the overall organization. We all live and work within systems, and if that system rewards and encourages us NOT to be cross-culturally competent, we are going to nurse burnout if we try to demonstrate and develop that skill. Organizational systems and structures need to support and reinforce individual and interpersonal competence. That is why “Global Diversity and Inclusion Benchmarks: Standards for Organizations Around the World” is one of my favorite assessment tools.

Written by Cultural Detective Global Diversity and Inclusion co-author Alan Richter, along with the very talented Julie O’Mara, the tool is available for use free of charge, though the authors ask that you submit a written request for permission (julie@omaraassoc.com or alanrichter@qedconsulting.com).

Newly updated in 2011, the 32-page booklet is based on a core model of 13 categories arranged into four key areas: Foundational Factors, Internal Abilities, External Benchmarks, and Bridging Competencies (you can already imagine how well this blends with a Cultural Detective approach!). The assessment instrument involves rating the organization at one of five levels for each of the 13 categories. Thus, it is very easy to use and educates as it assesses.

The GDI Benchmarks are based on extensive contributions from 79 experts around the world, and were developed from groundbreaking research in the early 1990s. Please contact Julie or Alan to learn more. And please share with us your organization’s progress with these benchmarks as you use Cultural Detective!

Every Organization Needs Intercultural Competence

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Nearly every organization these days, even the smallest and most local, works with diverse customers, team members, vendors, and service providers. A corner grocery store serves people from different age groups, ethnicities, and spiritual traditions. So, which holiday greetings should the grocery store use, if any, so as not to offend or exclude? Why do some of the regular customers talk only to male employees? Could the store increase profits or attract new customers if it started offering halal meats or Latino grocery items?

What about the graphic designer who puts up a website or Facebook page designed to attract local clients, only to find that the first inquiries come in from overseas? The mere fact that you have an online presence can mean you offer your products and services worldwide. And what about the free clinic that finds itself dealing with patient care issues of recent immigrants from places halfway across the planet? Or disaster relief agencies attempting to coordinate aid from around the world, getting it to the places it needs to be, quickly?

Cross-cultural competence, the ability to communicate effectively across cultures, is a mandatory skill in today’s interconnected world. It will help you:
  • Service diverse customers in the ways they expect.
  • Attract, retain and make the most of the talented professionals your organization needs to succeed.
  • Sell more products or services, to the people who need them.
  • Achieve success in your negotiations.
  • Discern the “right” mergers and acquisitions for your purposes.
  • Get more productivity and satisfaction out of your local and virtual teams, projects, and vendors.
  • Jump start the outcomes of study abroad and international education, as well as expatriate assignments.
  • Ensure you get the most out of the time and money you invest in international, cross-country and regional business travel.
  • Develop mutually respectful relationships with clients, employees and other stakeholders.

Cross-cultural competence is a needed skill for all of us, and it helps improve our family and social lives as well as our work lives. But amidst all the competing priorities for our time and attention, how can we develop such competence? To most of us, going back to school or even taking a few days off work for a class isn’t doable. And besides, like physical fitness, cultural fitness requires ongoing, structured practice, not just one trip to a training room.

If only there were an online cross-cultural coach available to us anytime, anywhere, at low cost. One that didn’t make us memorize lists of dos and don’ts, that didn’t promote stereotypes but rather encouraged dialogue and critical thinking. An online coach that would provide a process for recognizing cultural differences, helping us to understand and leverage them as assets rather than as roadblocks. Better yet, an online coach that could help us make sense of our everyday experiences, learning how to transform obstacles into opportunities, and frustration into innovation. A tool we could navigate freely, according to our needs and interests, not some online talking heads or narrated slide show. A tool that would be available on our time — when and where we want it…

I am very excited to be able to share with you just such a solution, yours free for three days, no strings attached. It is a brand new online system based on the proven Cultural Detective Method used by governments, NGOs and for-profit organizations around the world.

Free 3-day trial to Cultural Detective Online!

“Cultural Detective is directly responsible for a 30% increase in our customer satisfaction ratings.”

“Cultural Detective sped up my learning curve; it allowed me to become a part of the team and have an impact on the business more quickly.”

“I have received kudos from my managers and the Vice President for having chosen the Cultural Detective. But the kudos should really go to you. Cultural Detective is a rock solid methodology.”

Pass this offer around; the 3-day-free trial offer is good from now through December 31, 2012.
To redeem:

  1. Log on to http://www.culturaldetective.com/cdonline/orders/trial
  2. Enter your name, email address and the code: Promo3
  3. You will receive a verification email from cdonline@culturaldetective.com. Click the link in the email, follow the instructions and you will be ready to go!

Enter your learning goals, explore 50+ fully integrated packages including full Values Lenses and 400 Critical Incidents, or upload and debrief your own real-life situations. Your customers, partners and employees, even your family members, will notice the difference!

Improve your ability to understand and collaborate across cultures, and help your friends, family members and colleagues to do the same! Let’s create a more inclusive, creative, collaborative and productive world out there! Get a clue!

A Gift for You from Thorunn and Avrora

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eimskip_1930.jpg

Photo credit to Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, https://fornleifur.blog.is
Used with permission.

The power of social media and online networking just keeps amazing me. Since starting this blog we’ve had soooo many great examples of how you all build on one another’s work and generously share with each other! It is our privilege to hold space here that helps do that.

You will remember our recent post entitled, More Cultural Appropriation: The Swastika? Well, a good friend and respected colleague of mine read it and said, “You know, Dianne, the swastika held a prominent place on a huge building, home to a major Icelandic shipping company, for decades. It’s gone now, though.” As we talked about it, she told me she’d used that story, with quite a few pictures, in a powerpoint slide presentation that she developed with a colleague.

With Thorunn and her co-presenter Avrora’s generosity of spirit, we are privileged to share with you a gift to all Cultural Detectives from them. Their slides summarize the swastika’s history, and include photos of its use in Bulgaria, Greece, Iceland, Native America, and Tibet, as well as the Nazi version. Thorunn and Avrora help you pull learning from these photos with slides explaining culture, judgments, and symbols.

Download their powerpoint slides here. And please let us know how you put them to use!

As an aside, I’d share with you that I recently met an incredibly interesting woman who is Indian and Austrian. Her stories about personal and family conflicts and learning around the swastika were really something to hear! Hopefully I might convince her to share some of them with you in a future guest post.

What Do You Mean?! I’ve Worked Abroad 20 Years and Score Low?!

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Image from The Vegetarian Athlete

So many of you seemed to resonate with my blog post about intercultural fitness, Tweeting it, Scooping it and passing it around the social media networks, that I thought you might be interested in a short article I originally drafted back in 2005 that uses the metaphor of an athlete to explain intercultural competence.

Developmental Intercultural Competence and the Analogy of an Athlete

Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), first published in 1986, provides a well-regarded theory about the process people go through as they learn to make sense of the complexity of cross-cultural communication. In the late 1990s after much research, an assessment for measuring intercultural sensitivity based on the DMIS was developed. Version 3 of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) is currently in use by qualified practitioners. Owners and users of the IDI have in turn used their results to revamp the DMIS into the Intercultural Development Continuum (IDC).

While such tools can be useful for measuring program effectiveness when used for pre- and post-testing, and can be hugely beneficial for individuals who want to improve their cross-cultural communication and collaboration, there are downsides. I’ve worked with career expatriates and global nomads, for example, who score quite low on the IDI. What this means is that the low-scorer may have a lot of experience, but has not yet engaged in systematic, structured sense-making of those decades of complex intercultural experience. I’ve also worked with quite a few individuals who value harmony as fitting in, and thus, on a scale that measures celebrating differences, they score comparatively low. Predictably, low scores can cause people to become focused on discrediting the instrument or rationalizing the assessment process, rather than on gaining benefit from what the results have to say.

To help learners focus on the guidance these tools can provide, I often use the analogy of an athlete. Just as athletes need multiple abilities to perform well, so do intercultural communicators. Both athletes and intercultural collaborators can use assessments to guide their performance improvement training.

Let’s say that the data on my athletic performance shows that I need increased flexibility. I dedicate several months to becoming more flexible, and then my coach tells me that I now need to shift my focus to building strength — of course while maintaining my flexibility. Months later, I may find that I need to refine my technique in order to make the most of my superior strength and flexibility. Or, I get injured, and I decide to add to my training a focus on my mental game: overcoming adversity, learning from mistakes, being fully present in the moment. Athletes thus focus on multiple abilities at different points throughout their careers in order to perform at their best.

In a similar way, the DMIS, IDI and IDC can be used to show us which issues we should focus on at a given point in time in order to maximally improve our intercultural performance. While developmental models and assessments are designed as measuring sticks or standards of comparison, their value for personal competence development is to highlight to us what competencies we should focus on building at each point in our careers in order to improve our overall performance.

Each of us has to balance the dynamic between comfort and stretch, challenge and support, growth and rest, in our own ways. Knowing what we are good at, as well as where we can improve, can help ensure we continue to develop. Using an assessment tool to gauge and target our intercultural development, in combination with a competence development tool such as Cultural Detective Online for ongoing, structured learning, is a powerful combination.

Facilitated Online Learning Sessions for Cross-Cultural Skills

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How can you quickly develop the skills necessary to lead your global team, manage your global project or prepare for expansion to emerging markets, without leaving your desk?

The Cultural Detective team presents a two-part series of Facilitated Online Learning Sessions that will provide you with the keys to a proven, industry-changing and industry-leading toolset for developing your individual and organizational global competence and to ultimately succeed where “culture conflicts” caused failed ventures.

  • Learn how to build trust in your global relationships.
  • Develop highly productive global teams.
  • Complete projects on time and under budget.
  • Determine how to best enter and succeed in your targeted international markets.
  • Know how to deliver superior client service, globally.
  • Get the most from your international assignees by equipping them with the skills necessary to excel in any culture.

Sessions will be held Wednesday and Friday, February 27 and March 1, 2013! Click here for more information or to reserve your spot. Seats are limited.

 

Cultural Detective Online is LIVE!!!!!!!!

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Cultural Detective is proud to announce the new product launch of Cultural Detective Online! This tool is like having a virtual coach in your back pocket, successfully guiding you through the all-too-common missteps of cross-cultural negotiations and communications. Please check out the four videos on the home page. Today only (15-16 October, depending where you are on the planet) there is a 25% launch discount; enter promo code:   CDO-blog25  during checkout.

Huge thanks goes out to each of you who have worked with and incorporated the Cultural Detective Method into work with your clients or employee populations globally, as over the past eight years this tool has become a significant contribution to the intercultural field. Because of our clients and team, Cultural Detective has become globally recognized as one of the premier developmental tools of our time. Now we are on the cusp of very exciting and broader use of the tool through Cultural Detective Online! This new product launch furthers our mission of encouraging communities globally to prosper through intercultural understanding and collaboration.

Cultural Detective Online is useful in a broad range of contexts including global business negotiations and multicultural team effectiveness, international assignments and study abroad, and for successfully communicating within our families and communities, and within and across faith traditions.

A subscription to Cultural Detective Online offers the opportunity to explore the concepts of “culture” and “values” and how they impact communication in everyday life. It provides access to dozens of culture-specific Values Lenses and topic-specific Challenges Lenses, hundreds of real world cross-cultural incidents, and the easy-to-use Cultural Detective process for improving the ability to collaborate successfully across cultures, both on individual and organizational levels.

We are excited to announce that subscriptions are now available for individuals or groups, and we invite you to subscribe to Cultural Detective Online today by visiting http://www.culturaldetective.com/cdonline/ ! Subscriptions start at less than US$100/year, and are less for larger groups of subscribers. You will rarely find more value for your money.

Cultural Detective Online for International Teams

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You’ve already told us Cultural Detective is fabulous. That it’s helped your team achieve its deliverables. That it’s rocketed your performance to new levels. That’s why we are very excited to SOON be able to offer you the Cultural Detective product line as an integrated, online system rather than as stand-alone packages! And, better yet, it’s designed as a personal coach, encouraging you and your team members to track your goals, summarize and apply your learning, and upload, debrief and share with a facilitator, team lead or each other your daily life experiences (and make accurate meaning from them).

Be sure to stay tuned for our official launch. Or, enter to win a free subscription for you or your team!

If you are unable to view the video above (if you are on an iPad or other device that doesn’t play Flash), click here to view the video on YouTube.

Please feel free to share this video with others who might be seeking a virtual intercultural coach. Please let us know what you think! Thank you!

Why Do Kids Study Abroad?

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The allure of traveling to exotic places, learning about people, their language and how their lives were shaped differently than our own – these reasons and more attract students globally to explore the opportunities of living and studying abroad.

From my experience, living abroad as a young adult can be one of the first opportunities to see the world through a very different lens. The experience of trying to understand and communicate with a foreign language and adapt to a very different way of daily life can be both eye-opening and a shock to the system.

As an intercultural product development company we have had the unique opportunity to work with several organizations in the study abroad and student exchange industry. I’d like to point out two of them as organizations who not only facilitate the study abroad experience but also enrich the students’ opportunity to have powerfully positive study abroad learning experiences. Both CIEE and AFS International put significant effort into preparing students for their time abroad by teaching about the impact of culture, and how to interpret behavior by getting to what’s underneath – the values that are motivating the behavior.

Enjoy these two different but equally interesting case studies of how enhancing cultural understanding with a core process like Cultural Detective has been successful. I would love to hear your opinion and ideas that have worked for you in this field!

  • Business case for university exchange program by CIEE (Council on International Educational Exchange)
  • Business case for high school exchange program by AFS USA

Cultural Detective Online: Virtual Coach for Expats and Business Travelers

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You’ve already told us Cultural Detective is fabulous. That it’s helped your team achieve its deliverables. That it’s rocketed your performance to new levels. That’s why we are very excited to SOON be able to offer you the Cultural Detective product line as an integrated, online system rather than as stand-alone packages! And, better yet, it’s designed as a personal coach, encouraging you to track your goals, apply your learning to your business objectives, and upload and debrief your own life experiences.

Be sure to stay tuned for our official launch. Or, enter to win a free subscription for you or your team!

If you are unable to view the video above (if you are on an iPad or other device that doesn’t play Flash), click here to view the video on YouTube. Please feel free to share this video with others who might be seeking a virtual intercultural coach. Thank you!

Diversity and Attrition in the Global Executive Suite

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Image of Indra Krishnamoorthi Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO (NOT the subject of this post)

A major global corporation lost a 25-year senior executive at the prime of her career. She explained in her exit interview, “The corporate culture here is too parochial and I am tired of fighting it.”

How did the company lose such a gifted executive, at the point it could have most benefited from her contributions?

I will tell you a story that she shared with me, one that will hopefully provide a taste of how she felt during her career with this company. She shared the story with me at the conclusion of a two-day training course I had conducted, in which she had just participated.

“Dianne, I have so very much enjoyed this global management training you have facilitated for us. These are exactly the cross-cultural skills and mindsets needed in our world today! You are providing us tools and processes for acknowledging and using unique contributions, hearing the voice and perspectives of all involved. This type of training is so very different from diversity training,” she told me.

Well, I happen to be a fan of diversity training. I was troubled by her words, and wanted to understand what this obviously intelligent, wise woman did not like about it.

“Well, Dianne, in my experience diversity trainers go through the motions. They do activities and they often don’t know why. I’ll give you just one example. A year or so ago I was in a senior management diversity training. The facilitator asked us to stand in a line, side by side. He instructed us to take one step back if English was not our first language. A step back if our skin color was not white. He said to take another step back if we were not Christian. A step back if we had not attended a first-tier university. On and on he cited the categories, and I took so many steps back that I was the only person at the far side of the room, alone. There were several others in between, but I was visibly alone.”

“I thought to myself, ‘YES! THIS is what I’ve been trying to tell you all these years! This company forces me to do backbends and jump through hoops in order to succeed! I have to lose who I am to influence decision making. I have to communicate in a way I dislike in order to be heard! Let’s change this corporate culture to be more inclusive!’ Oh, Dianne, I was so excited by this powerful exercise!”

“But, do you know what happened? The President of the company looked at me standing there in the back of the room and said, ‘Look how inclusive we are. A dark-skinned woman, an Indian Jain, can become a senior director!’ I thought to myself, do you know how much harder than a man I have had to try to succeed? How much harder than a white skinned person? How much harder than a European or American? He seemed to have no idea of the price I’d had to pay for my promotions. He didn’t acknowledge my accomplishments or the super-human efforts of other minorities in our organization. Rather, he prided the company on its color-blindness! And worse yet, the trainer didn’t say anything! The exercise concluded, and we went on to the next activity! Rather than a learning moment, the activity only reinforced ignorance and legitimized discrimination! I was absolutely crushed and stunned.”

Such a loss for this corporation. Such a difficult decision for this woman to have had to make. It was also a challenging position for the trainer to have been in; hindsight is 20-20 regarding how the trainer could have handled the President’s comments, and debriefed the activity, more effectively.

Let me close by asking you this: Have we all taken the time today to empathize, to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Have we done our part to change dysfunctional systems? What have each of us learned today?

I look forward to your comments on this post. Thanks!
—
Linked to the My Global Life Link-Up at SmallPlanetStudio.