This week we have been putting out a series of podcasts that feature speakers from the upcoming WordCampUS. In fact, the third and last part of the series will come out next Tuesday right before WordCampUS. As I collected these tips, there was one that Petya Raykovska shared that I felt needed its own space. Now this may be a bit selfish on my part, as the reason being is it really resonated with me on two levels.
One is our extension of global reach that we will be doing here at Do the Woo.
Secondly, our own personal move to Porto, Portugal.
She gives us some great tips on Cultural Intelligence that gives us a taste of her session at WordCampUS. So in lieu of me talking in today’s WooBits, I am going to let her introduce herself and share with some tips as so many of us how now work both remotely and globally.
Episode Transcript
WordCampUS – Developing Cultural Intelligence
Hey hey, I’m Petya Raykovska, the director of Business Ops at Human made and a long time WordPress polyglots contributor, team rep, and community leader.
The world has gone remote. And today you are very likely to have colleagues from across the globe. And even though we all speak English, in our day to day work life we face constant issues of not understanding each other. Very often this has nothing to do with our language skills and everything to do with differences in our cultural programming.
One thing that is missing very often when people from different cultures work together, is the lack of cultural intelligence – or the willingness and ability to understand the people you have to work with because you judge their communication and behaviour with your own culture and habits as the benchmark.
I’ve got a few tips to help you develop your cultural intelligence and understand people from different places better without necessarily knowing everything about everyone’s culture.
One thing to have in mind is that there are significant differences in how people communicate, make decisions, lead, provide feedback, disagree, perceive time, decide, and trust across the world.
The most important tip I can give you is investing some time to understand where your own cultural programming is on those 8 different scales.
- Is being 5 to 10 minutes late acceptable in your culture or is it considered a sign of sloppiness and disrespect? How important is being on time where you come from?
- What’s the most common approach to decision making in your day to day? Is it more acceptable for everyone to participate in making a decision and agree or is the normal approach for one person to make a quick top down decision for everyone?
- How do you build trust – through shared experiences or through accomplished tasks? Do you need to spend face to face time with someone and learn more about them as a person to trust them more or is it enough that they always deliver 100% of their commitments at work?
- To persuade a person to run with your idea, do you have to lay out your full concept before presenting the action plan or do you present the action plan and then explain how got there? In other words do you go for principles first or applications first when persuading someone to run with your idea?
- Are you more accustomed to direct or to indirect negative feedback?
- Do you address leaders by their first name or their surname in your culture? Is it acceptable to criticise your direct manager in public? Is it ok for your manager to wear casual clothes to work? Does your manager need to know more than you on the subject of your work and can they do your day to day better than you? Is that an important part of you recognising their authority?
Based on the answers above, you can position your own understanding and culture on a scale between the Western and Eastern cultural clusters. And it’s important to know that there might be people in the world that will be in the exact opposite side of that scale compared to where you are. With time, if you follow the next few steps I give you, you can learn enough about the people you work with to get along and understand each other much better.
Here are three practical steps towards developing your cultural intelligence:
Think before you react. When someone does something that feels very different or unacceptable to you, try and suspend the instant judgement. Count to 10 and use that time to ask yourself – can this be a cultural difference? Why does this person think or behave like that? Then ask them about it, and make sure you explain your point of view, without insisting your approach is better.
Be curious. Approach behaviours you don’t understand with curiosity. The best way to get someone to cooperate is to be genuinely curious about the reasons they say or do things the way they do and combine that with a positive attitude towards their differences of opinion. Avoid rejecting or dismissing people that do things differently based on your own principles.
Show that you care and explore how flexible you can be. People won’t expect you to know everything about their cultural context but they will be way more interested and invested in sharing it with you if you show genuine interest in knowing it and the ability to listen, appreciate it, and adapt your own expectations based on that learning.
Looking forward to meeting you all at WordCamp Us where we’ll talk about developing cultural intelligence in a little more detail! ~ @petyeah
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