Culture

Relating Across Cultures

Working and relating across cultures can be enormously stimulating and can motivate and ignite creativity in decision-making. However it can also provide hurdles which, for the unaware, can jeopardise trust and relationships before the opportunity for creative solutions has a chance to flourish.

IMS begins to tackle this potential for misunderstanding by asking delegates to first consider the ease with which we fall into cultural stereotyping, and then presents them with a range of accepted cultural dimensions and gets them to plot where they would place themselves, their organisation and their national culture. In viewing sequences from a specialised video we get them to look at the dynamics of an inter-cultural team and how to start to approach cultural diversity. We finish with an ever-popular cultural game that ensures the delegates experience moving across culture.

This section of IMS can be supported by an individual questionnaire and de-brief of the score that helps explore gaps and exploit aptitude in working with other cultures.

	Tip for Cultural Awareness
	Remember that our own culture supports and rewards certain behaviour and punishes or penalises other behaviours. A behaviour that one culture chooses to reward or penalise through social acceptance or rejection, and the degree it does so, will likely differ from that of another culture. Thus lateness will be abhorred in some cultures, whilst tolerated in others.

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