CHAPTER 7

CRAFTING DEVELOPMENTAL CROSS-CULTURAL EXPERIENCES TO INCREASE CULTURAL AGILITY

A learning system to develop cultural agility needs to include two parts, cross-cultural training and experiential developmental opportunities. Chapter Six focused on cross-cultural training, including methods for laying the foundation of cross-cultural knowledge within the workforce. For cultural agility to be created, however, professionals need to interact in different cultures and with people from different cultures. We cannot learn to swim by taking even the best land-based swimming lesson. At some point, we need to get in the water. Similarly, professionals need to learn to be effective in cross-cultural situations by experiencing cross-cultural situations. This chapter focuses on how professionals build cultural agility through developmental cross-cultural experiences.

Chris Steinmetz is a culturally agile professional who recalls many significant developmental cross-cultural experiences throughout his life, several occurring long before the start of his professional career. Chris was born in Quito, Ecuador; his mother was a German-born Ecuadorian employed by the U.S. Embassy in Quito; his father was an American diplomat and Georgetown University graduate. Chris’s childhood was one of continuous cultural immersion; his family changed countries every four years for his father’s next assignment. Chris recalls his multicultural upbringing fondly, now appreciating having had the opportunity to live in Ecuador, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, and Mexico before he was a teenager. These were especially rich developmental experiences given that Chris’s family eschewed expatriate neighborhoods for more typical local ones.

Chris learned to be culturally agile at an early age. When he was five years old and his family lived in Belém, Brazil, a city at the mouth of the Amazon River, Chris remembers being “scared to death” to attend a Portuguese-speaking primary school. His fear quickly subsided; “fortunately, my brother and I adapted quickly—we were young so we made new friends and learned the language easily.” Adjusting to a different cultural context is a powerful lesson at any age, but foundational for a five-year-old. From that point forward, Chris met all cross-cultural challenges with excitement rather than trepidation, and that feeling still remains with him today as a successful international business professional.

With an MBA in international business, fluency in three languages, and several well-honed cross-cultural competencies from his years living internationally as a young adult, Chris was a natural fit for internationally oriented professional roles. He began his career with Rich Products (a privately held organization specializing in nondairy food products) in 1988, at a time when the company was beginning a tremendous global expansion. In 1990, at twenty-six years of age, Chris had his “baptism by fire” in international business when he was assigned to open the Mexican market for Rich Products. He relocated to Mexico City and traveled throughout Mexico, ultimately visiting and experiencing thirty of Mexico’s thirty-one states over a five-year international assignment. Chris recalled “feeling a bit like MacGyver on a stretch challenge, I was forced to be resourceful and creatively solve business problems every day.”

Chris developed his business acumen quickly while working in Mexico, but the experience was not all smooth sailing. In the early 1990s, Mexico was in a precarious position economically, which was challenging for even the most seasoned international business professionals. Chris will never forget one short day in 1994 when the Mexican peso devalued over 100 percent, and interest rates surpassed 100 percent. Like many other American firms operating in Mexico, Rich Products sold goods imported from the United States in U.S. dollars. Unlike other American firms that started closing their Mexican operations to wait out the economic crisis, Chris recommended to Rich Products that the company remain and continue to invest in Mexico. His recommendation was based on his on-the-ground knowledge of the socioeconomic changes happening in Mexico, his understanding of Mexican traditions and culture, and the relationships he had built over the course of the assignment. It was a white-knuckle year that ended well for Chris professionally. He shares that “we lost a lot of money in 1995 while subsidizing the peso devaluation, but, in the end, we solidified our relationships—gaining confidence, earning the trust of our local customers, and leading to an increase of 25 percent in market share in one year.” With well-deserved pride, Chris notes that “still today we are the dominant market leader with number-one market share in a field of ten competitors, including some of the biggest food companies in the world.”

Chris understood the Mexican culture and how to succeed in it. In a surprising twist, in 1995, Chris agreed to step down from the leadership role of the Mexican business, the very business he had just spent five years (and countless sleepless nights) helping grow. He did this to allow a more senior Mexican manager to lead their newly created joint-venture organization. “While I started the business, I knew it would take someone with better connections in Mexico to take it to the next level,” Chris noted. In that simple act of stepping aside, Chris’s cultural agility shines; he demonstrated both cultural humility and also a deep understanding of what it takes to be successful within a cultural context.

Now the vice president for Latin America at Rich Products, Chris uses his knowledge to develop his staff, manage his region, and build cross-cultural competence within the organization by “promoting high-potential associates quickly and creating cross-cultural stretch opportunities in an effort to develop them, while fostering effective expansion and growth to meet our company’s aggressive global growth goals.” True to his cultural agility, Chris knows when to push and when to adapt to cultural differences. For example, staying true to the egalitarian values he shares with his organization, Chris successfully promotes women and junior managers, rare in the male-dominated and hierarchical culture in Latin America. He uses his understanding of the Latin American culture to persuade local (senior, male) leaders in the host national organizations to embrace an “unconventional” approach to staffing the organization. Rather than leading with the importance of diversity (another value he and his company share) to persuade, he leads with the business case for his associates’ top-notch skills and fresh perspectives because he knows that “all could agree that ultimately it is the results that count.” With respect to his U.S.-based colleagues’ interactions with Latin American colleagues, Chris is steadfast in fostering respect and peer-level collaborations. He has zero tolerance for condescension, nipping it in the bud and replacing it quickly with cultural humility, mutual respect, effective communication, and positive relationships. Chris and his team continue to be successful in Latin America.

HOW CROSS-CULTURAL EXPERIENCES BECOME DEVELOPMENTAL

Chris Steinmetz can easily point to many significant developmental cross-cultural experiences he has had throughout his career, almost all of them occurring when he rolled up his sleeves and began working alongside his host national counterparts. “To become effective in international business, you need to experience culture deeply,” Chris notes. I agree—and the research supports this conclusion.

A great challenge to the development of cultural agility today is the highly efficient business-class travel (hotels, airport clubs, car services, and so on) that has evolved over the years, now pervasive in almost every big city around the world. Although these resources have made travel infinitely more comfortable and efficient, they have created the cultural equivalent of an around-the-world vacation without ever leaving the culturally homogenized cruise ship. Here is the paradox: international travels are now easier, but using them to develop cultural agility has become harder.

Truly developmental experiences, such as the ones Chris shared, are stretch opportunities for intercultural learning that allow professionals to understand the limits of their cultural assumptions and progressively increase their cultural agility. Cross-cultural developmental experiences have three conditions, or qualities, that make them truly developmental. They enable the professionals in your organization to

All three features are important and can be embedded into the learning system for building cultural agility in the workforce.

Many firms . . . have been surprised to learn that cross-cultural experiences their organization offered actually lacked the qualities to make them developmental.

I encourage you to conduct an evaluation of the cross-cultural experiences in your organization’s learning system; many firms I have worked with have been surprised to learn that cross-cultural experiences their organization offered actually lacked the qualities to make them developmental. Let’s consider each of these key qualities a bit more closely.

Engage in Meaningful Peer-Level Interactions

The first important feature of cross-culturally developmental opportunities is meaningful peer-level interactions with people from a different culture or cultures. Meaningful interactions allow peers to work collaboratively toward a common goal in an environment that supports their collaborative success. Peer-level colleagues working together in the same department for a few years have more potential for meaningful interactions, compared to the same two colleagues attending a weeklong off-site meeting together. At the same time, working in adjacent offices for a few years could have little developmental value due to lack of collaborative work, whereas the offsite meeting might be highly developmental if it included an action learning project.

Meaningful experiences are not always the most comfortable ones. Almost everyone who has worked cross-culturally or internationally can point to a cultural faux pas that was costly, either to the organization or the ego. Early in my career, I had a deep developmental lesson, thankfully embarrassing only to me. It happened while I was teaching in Singapore for an executive master’s program, a joint program between the Singapore Institute of Management and Rutgers University. On the last day of an executive class titled Managing the Global Workforce, some of my students approached me during break and invited me to a restaurant for dessert after class at about 3:00 pm. Honored to be asked, I checked my calendar and said in American English, “Thanks for the invitation—that should work. The dinner I have tonight starts at 6:00 pm.” At the end of the class, I noticed that many of the students were leaving. Wondering where everyone was going, I asked the student who had extended the invitation. Looking confused, he said it was their understanding that I had politely declined the invitation. “I did?” I asked. “Yes, when you told us about your dinner this evening,” he said. I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to round up people from the parking lot, while apologizing for the misunderstanding. We all laughed at the miscommunication over dessert.

There were a few cultural missteps I made in this example, but for the sake of illustration, I’ll focus on one lesson learned: the difference between high-context speech and low-context speech. As described in Chapter Six, in low-context communication cultures (including my culture, U.S. American), speech is interpreted directly. In high-context communication cultures, such as Singaporean, meaning is interpreted from words in the context of the situational cues surrounding them. I know the difference between high- and low-context speech. I even taught the difference between high- and low-context speech in my Managing the Global Workforce class (oh, the irony!). At the time, however, I was not experienced enough to apply it to this situation. I failed to realize that opening my calendar and explaining the potential conflict would be interpreted as a polite way of declining the invitation. This was a meaningful interaction that taught me to double-check for intended meaning in high-context cultures. Lesson learned!

If professionals receive enough knowledge, coaching, and feedback, these meaningful developmental experiences need not be professionally or emotionally risky. Chris Steinmetz, for example, actively encourages interactions between his U.S. and Latin American team members. Given his functional biculturalism and depth of experience, he is able to “run interference” between cultures when needed. In addition, he is able to be proactive in fostering respectful collaboration in a way that is comfortable enough for most, and that makes the interactions truly developmental.

Use (New) Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities in Different Cultural Contexts

In developing cultural agility as in developing many other skills, practice makes perfect. Chris Steinmetz describes his approach in Mexico as, initially, “more of a trial and error—the more knowledge and experience I gained, the more successful I became.” Over time, he gained knowledge and a better understanding of how culture affects customer tastes and client preferences, and had the ability to build trusting relationships with clients and suppliers, negotiate effectively, and motivate team members. The knowledge, skills, and abilities Chris gained in Mexico helped Rich Products create a template for global growth, an approach for how to expand through South America and other countries. With this template, Chris and his internationally oriented colleagues were able to use their knowledge to point out the aspects of the company’s approach that should be synchronized and the other aspects that should be adapted to the cultural context. “Trial and error was no longer needed once enough of us had knowledge about how to open a new country.” The knowledge accumulated through these cross-cultural experiences was critical. Chris noted, “When you are selling cakes, as we do, it is important to know that Mexicans prefer sweeter-tasting cakes compared to the Brazilians.” Chris continued, “Not knowing the details of differences, at first, is not the real problem. You can do your homework and learn. The real problem is not even realizing there might be differences in the first place.”

Greater participation in cross-cultural experiences will enable the professionals in your organization to gain culturally appropriate behaviors and foreign language skills—and also to understand the role of the cultural context. Using new skills and abilities in a cultural “stretch” situation affords opportunities to practice different cultural norms for working on a team, leading, presenting, negotiating, and the like. Over time, these experiences build higher levels of cross-cultural competencies by increasing knowledge, building skills, and improving their ability to reproduce culturally appropriate behaviors when appropriate.1

Receive Feedback on Performance in Cross-Cultural Roles

Judging our own abilities and performance is not easy for us as humans. We tend not to see ourselves as others see us; instead, we often either make excuses for our shortcomings or criticize ourselves more harshly than is warranted. This human tendency is what makes feedback from others so valuable. And it is why cross-cultural experiences, in order to be truly developmental, should include opportunities for receiving feedback on culturally appropriate behaviors and language skills. Seeking and receiving feedback from colleagues and managers is one way this occurs. As we all know from our own professional experiences, certain contexts are easier than others for feedback to be sought out, perceived as appropriate, and even welcomed. If the professionals in your organization are in senior leadership roles, they might not feel comfortable trying new knowledge, skills, and abilities at the risk of making credibility-depleting cultural or linguistic mistakes. Similarly, subordinates may not feel comfortable giving feedback to a senior leader.

Ideally, cross-cultural developmental experiences should include situations where making cultural or linguistic mistakes would not be embarrassing or socially risky, either professionally or personally, and where feedback is offered to employees by those who accurately understand how their behaviors are being perceived in the cultural context. This feedback should be provided in a respectful fashion, in a setting that is comfortable, supportive, and welcomed. A cultural coach or a bicultural manager is often the best person to offer such feedback. Chris Steinmetz, for example, will debrief with and coach his junior associates when they start working in the Latin American region. He knows this is a developmental process and wants to foster cross-cultural competence among his associates, adding that “I know I made some mistakes, at first, when I was in Mexico, so I try to provide the coaching I wish I had had back then.”

It is no surprise that people who have grown up in multicultural households, as Chris did, are often very culturally agile. The family setting in the home is typically a comfortable, supportive place to learn about two cultures and practice two languages, and feedback is frequent and readily available. These home situations often provide multiple supportive “coaches” in the form of parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Compared to one’s family life, the professional setting—where one is charged with leading a subsidiary, managing a team, and working with colleagues from different cultures—tends to be comparatively less comfortable. The stakes are higher: a promotion, or even one’s job, can hinge on how well one does in the cross-cultural professional situation. Professionals who grew up being accustomed to receiving feedback from family members often find it easier to give and receive feedback in these more risky professional settings.

Now that we have examined the three qualities that I consider key for making cross-cultural experiences truly developmental, I encourage you to turn to the assessment of developmental potential (see box). If you employ it to evaluate the experiences in your organization, it will help you step back and analyze, in the aggregate, whether the learning system in your organization is actually designed to do what is intended: build cultural agility in the workforce.

SUGGESTIONS FOR DEVELOPMENTAL CROSS-CULTURAL EXPERIENCES

As I’ve just discussed, cross-cultural experiences are developmental when they provide opportunities to practice newly learned behaviors in a meaningful and collaborative context that includes receiving feedback on their effectiveness, and when they do so in an environment that is professionally safe for learning. Within your organization there are likely to be several opportunities for these developmental experiences that are consistent with your organization’s business goals and strategic needs. They include, but are not limited to,

• Mentoring programs
• Buddy programs
• Global project teams
• International volunteerism programs
• Global rotational programs

Let’s examine each of these in turn.

Mentoring Programs

Mentoring or coaching programs are generally associated with the formal or informal matching of a successful senior manager with an associate who is more junior or less experienced. Through work-related advice-giving interactions, the knowledge of the more senior person can be transferred to the more junior person. This is particularly powerful for developing organization-level cultural agility when the mentor–mentee dyad does not share the same nationality. Having a mentor of a different nationality allows the mentee’s behaviors to be interpreted through at least two different cultural lenses.

In their research, Shawn Carraher, Sherry Sullivan, and Madeline Crocitto found that among international assignees, those who had host national mentors enjoyed a variety of career-enhancing benefits from the relationship, including organizational knowledge, improved performance, and promotability.2 Especially for international assignees, I encourage your organization to establish formal mentoring programs that promote the high value of mentoring relationships and that reward host national mentors not only for participating but also for the success of their mentees. These programs should also be fostered more informally; international assignees should be encouraged to actively seek out professional relationships with more senior host national managers while on assignment.

Buddy Programs

Unlike mentoring programs, which are characterized by a hierarchical difference between the mentor and mentee, buddy programs involve the pairing of peers from different countries for the purpose of knowledge sharing. An example is IBM’s global mentoring program, which is consistent with the company’s goal of creating a globally integrated enterprise. This program connects IBM employees from emerging markets with comparably placed IBM employees from more mature markets. These pairs build relationships and share information via phone and email, in addition to connecting face-to-face when business travels enable them to do so. One example is described as follows:

Taiwanese software programmer David Lin paired with Danny Chen, an engineer who was born in Taiwan but works in Austin. Chen taught Lin how to develop ideas that were patentable, and Lin set up an invention team in his office and began publishing a newsletter full of tips for new inventors. Last year the Taipei lab got five patents, up from one in 2005. For his part, Chen got valuable advice from Lin on how to do business in China.3

Global Project Teams

There has been an increase in the number of organizations using cross-border, virtual, and global teams composed of members from geographically dispersed units. Participation in cross-border teams allows for the development of cross-cultural competencies, including in-depth knowledge about different cultures, ability to form relationships, cross-cultural communication skills, and perspective-taking. Given their collaborative and peer-level team interaction, they can provide rich cross-cultural development opportunities.

In addition to being developmental, cross-national project teams are also strategic. For example, as a part of its leadership development program, Unilever creates teams of high-potential employees from around the world who collectively investigate trends in emerging markets and develop ways in which Unilever can respond to these trends. Working over a few months in a variety of modalities including face-to-face workshops, site visits, and distance components, these project teams collaborate on developing proposals and presenting their ideas to Unilever’s senior executives. The most viable proposals are then implemented.4

All cross-cultural encounters carry a significant potential for misunderstandings. To address this potential concern, many leading organizations are now using online tools specifically designed to foster cross-cultural understanding and ease cultural challenges that might arise in the course of collaborations. These tools help make peer-level interactions both effective and developmental by addressing communication challenges and opening the dialogue to create the best working relationship among colleagues from different cultures. Read about RW3’s Global Teams Tool (see box) for more information about online cross-cultural training tools to facilitate the effectiveness of multicultural teams.

International Volunteerism Programs

In a survey of more than three hundred organizations, the Deloitte Volunteer Impact Survey found that although cash donations have declined during the recent recessionary years, the number of firms adopting corporate volunteerism programs is rising steadily.5 International volunteerism programs are formal programs in which companies sponsor release time, ranging from a few weeks to several months and supported by regular compensation, for their interested highly skilled employees to volunteer with targeted nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in developing countries. In the years from 2007 to 2010, we have seen a plethora of leading organizations, such as GlaxoSmithKline, Dow Corning, PepsiCo, FedEx, and IBM, benefiting from their international volunteerism programs. These programs serve a variety of strategic business needs, including an increase in the corporate social responsibility reputation of the firm, improved retention among socially responsible high-potential employees, higher employee engagement, and improved employer attractiveness among the millennial generation, whose members are more dedicated to service.

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Global Teams Tool: Learning to Collaborate Cross-Culturally

The Global Teams Tool from RW3 CultureWizard allows online learners—the culturally diverse team members—to quickly see where they might encounter challenges when working in multicultural teams. The tool visually represents readily recognizable behaviors that differ among members’ national cultures to identify potential differences. The Global Teams Tool is a platform for dialogue and enables teams to comfortably discuss team-level ground rules.

Sample Screenshot from the Global Teams Tool Illustrating the Cultural Differences Among Team Members in a Cross-National Team

Used by permission of RW3 CultureWizard (RW-3.com)

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When designed well, these international volunteerism programs can build cross-cultural competencies and create new knowledge about developing markets. I worked with Ahsiya Mencin, the director of GlaxoSmithKline’s PULSE Volunteer Partnership (see box for more information), and my colleague Kaifeng Jiang to conduct a broad stakeholder analysis identifying the characteristics conducive to a high-quality volunteerism assignment.6 We gathered stakeholder data from business unit leaders, NGO leaders, and the employees, assessing the employees at three times:

Our study found that corporate-sponsored volunteerism created sustainable value across multiple stakeholders under the following conditions:

• Volunteerism assignments should be selected carefully such that employees are assigned to truly meaningful projects. The employees want to make a difference in the lives of those they are serving through the work of the NGO. Although stuffing envelopes and taking inventory of supplies may be necessary tasks for the NGO, highly skilled corporate professionals are unlikely to perceive this routine office work as meaningful.
• Volunteers should be placed in assignments where the NGO staff members and managers support the volunteers. In the most rewarding and satisfying assignments, the volunteers felt comfortable interacting openly and sharing feelings of mutual acceptance and respect with NGO leaders and staff members.
• Volunteers should be placed in assignments where they are able to offer significant value to the NGO through the use of their highly relevant professional skills. The volunteer experience should be designed as a stretch assignment that fully utilizes—and pushes—the volunteers’ professional skills in the NGO environment.
• The organization should recognize and leverage the knowledge and skills that the volunteers gain during the volunteer experience. Employee engagement was highest when the volunteers sensed that as a result of the volunteerism program, their newly honed skills were highly valuable in the eyes of the organization.
• NGOs should have the resources available (for example, time, money, talent) to sustain the volunteers’ projects after the volunteers leave.
• Employees should be selected carefully for volunteerism assignments, given that not everyone will benefit from these developmental opportunities. To reap the maximum developmental benefits from these volunteerism experiences, employees should be selected who are open, flexible, and emotionally strong.

Global Rotational Programs

International assignments offer rich opportunities for employees to gain cultural agility through immersion in host countries. Generally lasting over one year, international assignments enable employees to live and work in host countries, potentially providing an opportunity for significant and meaningful collaboration with host nationals. Without question, this has been the single most developmental method organizations use to build cultural agility. Although Chapter Eight is fully dedicated to international assignments, this section of Chapter Seven covers a specific type of international assignment: the global rotational program.

Many leading organizations, such as IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Dow, Nokia, and GE, have created global rotational programs to build cross-cultural and functional competence within their firms’ most critical functional areas. These global rotational programs offer high-potential employees exposure to working in one or more host countries, spending between six months and two years in a given context before moving to the next location. Global rotational programs are generally offered early in employees’ careers, usually to new graduates from targeted master’s degree programs, with the hope that the participants will gain critical cross-cultural competencies to successfully manage and lead anywhere in the world.

The experiences of assignees in global rotational programs are designed to increase peer-level interactions with host national colleagues. After the experiences, these assignees report that they have developed an appreciation for new or previously unfamiliar things, gained cultural sensitivity, and learned to respect values and customs different from their own.7 Professionals’ increased understanding of the extent to which their skills and abilities are culturally bound is one of the most powerful lessons learned from these rotational assignments.8 For you to maximize the developmental components of the global rotational program and ultimately see a return on investment from the perspective of cultural agility, I recommend that you assess whether the international portion of your organization’s global rotation program contains the requisite qualities of a developmental experience (discussed earlier in this chapter). In addition, your organization should initiate the following three talent management practices:

TAKE ACTION

Based on information presented in Chapter Seven, the following is a list of specific actions you can take to begin crafting cross-cultural experiences that will be truly developmental for professionals in your organization.

• Offer cross-cultural experiences. Implement experiential opportunities, such as those described in the chapter, that will promote meaningful interactions among peer-level colleagues from different cultures. Structure opportunities for your employees to use and stretch their knowledge, skills, and abilities in different cultural contexts.
• Evaluate cross-cultural experiences. Brainstorm with organizational leaders the possible experiences that would serve a functional need while also offering a developmental benefit for the employee. Evaluate the experiences on two dimensions: Are they filling a business need? Do they have the potential to develop cultural agility?
• Create opportunities where it is professionally safe to make mistakes. In order to learn, employees need to receive feedback on their cross-cultural competencies. Arrange for employees to receive feedback on their performance in roles requiring cultural agility. Ideally this feedback will come from functionally bicultural professionals, those who understand the nature of the mistakes employees make.

Notes

1. Paula M. Caligiuri and Ibraiz Tarique, “Predicting Effectiveness in Global Leadership Activities,” Journal of World Business 44, no. 3 (2009): 336–346.

2. Shawn Carraher, Sherry E. Sullivan, and Madeline Crocitto, “Mentoring Across Global Boundaries: An Empirical Examination of Home and Host Country Mentors on Expatriate Career Outcomes,” International Journal of Business Studies 39, no. 8 (2008): 1310–1326.

3. Steve Hamm, “IBM’s Global Mentoring Program,” Globespotting, March 2009, http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/globespotting/archives/2009/03/ibms_global_men.html.

4. Matthew Gitsham, Mark Pegg, and Vicki Culpin, “The Shifting Landscape of Global Challenges in the 21st Century: What This Means for What Businesses Want from Tomorrow’s Leaders, and the Implications for Management Learning,” Business Leadership Review 8, no. 2 (April 2011): 1–15.

5. Deloitte, 2010 Executive Summary: Deloitte Volunteer Impact Survey (New York: Deloitte Development LLC, 2010).

6. Paula M. Caligiuri, Ahsiya Mencin, and Kaifeng Jiang, “Win-Win-Win: The Long-Term Influence of Company-Sponsored Volunteerism Programs,” Personnel Psychology (under review).

7. Joyce Osland, The Adventure of Working Abroad: Hero Tales from the Global Frontier (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995).

8. Paula M. Caligiuri and Victoria DiSanto, “Global Competence: What Is It—and Can It Be Developed Through Global Assignments?” Human Resource Planning Journal 24, no. 3 (2001): 27–38.