Knowledge of intercultural communication as a key to business success

Any serious company, irrespective of the kind of products or services it sells, aims to maintain a good relationship with its clients. 

As you may know from first-hand experience, sometimes the behaviour of your potential leads might surprise you. Politeness and a complete mutual understanding of client’s needs are two central features in our communication. 

Nevertheless, with different cultures come different levels of understanding.

Under the conditions of tough competition, every client is important. General awareness of intercultural communication greatly increases the likelihood that they will come to you for help, time and time again. 

How do we know if we’re behaving correctly and how can we deal with or overcome challenges in order to maintain great client relationships?

Cross-cultural communication

We live in the process of globalization, which arouses interactions and relations between people from different cultures.

As participants in various congresses and meetings, as tourists, travellers and family members, we cross the borders of many countries and we interact with people from other cultures around the world. The world is a smaller place. We don’t need to communicate face to face, there are social networks, messenger apps, phones and emails which work just as well.

Networking, leads, efficient communication 

In the beginning, you might start with cold mailing. However, it’s crucial to be aware of the fact that your lead might not be the same as you are, they might be completely different in every single way. It’s almost impossible to predict how someone will react, especially via email.

Have you ever thought that the first face to face meeting can play a significant role in your further collaboration with the client? It is important to realize that in every culture, the approach to social distance is different.

Edward T. Hall, an American anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher, did a lot of research on how we keep our personal distance. “Each culture has its own characteristic manner of locomotion, sitting, standing, reclining, and gesturing.” - Edward T. Hall.

What do you need to know about cultural sensitivity?

Depending on the relationship we keep the distance in four main zones. Why is it so important?

Super enthusiastic way of saying “Hello” may lead to failure, besides, too formal manner can create some issues as well. 

It must be remembered that touch and closeness are considered a natural thing in Latin America, Arabic, Italian and Spanish culture, partly in North Africa, so don’t hesitate to smile a lot, shake hands, show your happiness and even give a hug! 

On the other hand, in some countries in Eastern Europe, also in Ireland, England and the Netherlands, and some regions of Africa people tend to limit contact to a minimum. At the same time it is worth to know that avoiding eye contact is the norm in Africa in order to express respect. Prolonged eye contact is considered dangerous in Japan.

For example, a potential lead might reply to your first message with a firm “no” but may expect you to continue providing them with more reasons to change their “no” into a “yes”! 

Generally speaking, Greece, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Korea will more likely suspect from you plenty of details, clenches and facts. This can be confusing for those of us who read the word “no” and think, “no means no”. For instance, Mexico, UK, USA, Singapore, India, China and Indonesia, in this case, will have higher customer loyalty and it would be easier to negotiate or simply introduce your product and establish collaboration.

Suffice it to say, globalization creates a new challenge for everyone. This challenge means overcoming cultural boundaries of a given country and, moreover, to leaving your own comfort zone!

Leaving your comfort zone

The most important reason of communication failure (besides the language barrier) is simply the lack of knowledge of the culture. 

Most of you had at least once strange situation in a business meeting with a person from a different country. And you probably heard about cultural shock, that's exactly how the “uncomfortable feeling” is described. That could happen if you don’t know the culture or never knew, there could be a difference (apart from skin colour, language or way of dressing) between a person from Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity

The first question which may come to your mind is how to overcome the feeling of being uncomfortable? Well, that’s not that easy to get control of your feelings or emotions, but awareness of DMIS (Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity) will definitely help you. 

In international environments, especially in large corporations, there are often situations in which there is a dominant and secondary culture. It is always a challenge because people aren't the same - everyone has a conscious cultural sensitivity. This means that both groups understand, or at least try to understand and respect each other's characteristics. So, what's really going on?

Founding director and CEO of the Intercultural Development Research Institute, Milton Bennett, created six-stage model of growing sensitivity. Each stage describes another behaviour, psychological state, experience and simply a step in the development of personal sensitivity, increasing intuition in intercultural interaction. Going through subsequent stages of the model, from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism, you learn and challenge the sensitivity.

The first three phases of the model are characterized by ethnocentrism - simply saying, the belief that your own culture, nation and ethnic group is better than others. Ethnocentrism occurs everywhere and every day. We just treat and evaluate other cultures based on the exaltation of our own. Ordinarily, ethnocentric people have lack of cultural competence and experience. 

Through ethnocentrism, we move to ethnorelativism which involves interpreting and evaluating cultures in a more individual approach. Here’s an example:several business meeting with representatives of Saudi Arabia will make you more respectful towards cultural difference. Assuming that, intercultural experience is becoming something we are more likely to enjoy.

Final word

Overall, you can experience yourself in a multicultural way, due to the fact that there are no barriers in communicating with people from different cultural groups. You know and understand how to apply culturally specific behaviours (including non-verbal communication).

To avoid business failures and impact of unsuccessful management, understanding and applying the ideas of intercultural sensitivity will help you improve the quality of your intercultural competence and succeed as a global project manager in our open world.