Getting the best out of your culturally diverse team (through role-play)

An intercultural training programme will help to actively raise cultural awareness and mutual understanding among your culturally diverse employees. Help them to obtain the right tools to become  a well oiled team.

Working with other nationals: great, but I find it hard to understand them!

Meeting nationals from other countries is a wonderful way of finding out about other cultures.  It enriches one’s view of the world and provides a myriad of discoveries about different lifestyles: different food, language, colours and daily rhythm are all there to be marvelled at.

But, working with nationals different from one’s own can cause misunderstanding, even misgivings and quite often frustrations. Indeed, how to interpret silence during a brainstorm-session, or not being able to obtain a clear answer from your business partner or dealing with a different approach to sticking to strict deadlines?  Or how do employees cope with constantly changing parameters and can they build trusting relationships with their colleagues when they don’t understand them?  And, how come your message is interpreted in a totally different way than you intended?

Why interactive training?

Getting your team to understand each other is evidently crucial, under any circumstance.  But in dealing correctly with culturally (often) sensitive matters does require businesses to take an integral approach.  Grabbing the bull by the horns is important to ensure that communication hurdles, big and small, are dealt with both structurally and systematically.

Underestimating communication problems that at the core are culturally driven, can easily lead to situations where effective teamwork is hampered.  Believing it is adequate for your sales manager to follow an intercultural training session may be penny wise, but pound foolish. Sure, different levels of exposure require different levels of awareness and understanding.  Getting your whole team to be culturally savvy though, may impact more greatly on your overall business output than you know.  Intercultural training should therefore be an integral part of the in-house training programme of any multi ethnic business.

Through tailored workshops and soundboard sessions they help clients achieve a work environment that supports, enables and encourages sound working relationships between different nationals.

ChinaMoves regularly teams up with other trainers and coaches, who have decades of experience in coaching businesses in dealing with intercultural complexities.  Together they guide and equip teams according to the needs of the companies. They assist and advise businesses how they can set up and implement systems that support and enhance their cultural awareness, understanding and attitude throughout the whole company.

One particular tool from their kit is role-play*.

How does Role Play Help?

• By putting oneself in the position of the other, people are triggered to fundamentally understand the other person.
• Role-play takes participants out of their comfort zone in a playful way.

• Role-play enables individuals to direct and control the communication processes with peers, bosses, juniors, suppliers and other people they work with.
• It is the essential base from which to develop a working modus to cope with verbal and non-verbal behaviour different to one’s own.

For whom?

• People working in an international environment and keen to improve working relationships with nationals from a foreign country, eg senior and boardroom managers dealing with other nationals on a daily basis, either in conference calls, developing programmes together, drawing up contracts with each other and working on new market strategies
• Senior and boardroom managers who have responsibility for creating and managing inter cultural cooperation relations
• HR Managers who are convinced training will help to raise quality of intercommunication between staff members of different ethnic origin
• In-house company teams who find day-to-day across the board communication difficult with colleagues of another culture
• People who cannot get their message across to either staff, boss or peers
• Includes people in the service industry, like hotel and flight personnel and management

Advantages in a nutshell

• Management tool to achieve communication objectives in a pleasant way
• Long-term cost effectiveness generates competitive advantage
• Reduces number of cooperation issues resulting from lack of understanding
• Better atmosphere on the work floor

* Many different and complementary active learning tools are available from our store. We have also devised three particular levels of training geared towards varying needs in the company.  The degree of intensity that comes with each level signifies the amount of breadth and depth necessary to tackle issues resulting from cross culture misunderstandings.

For more information, please get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to provide details.