Culture
Ability, knowledge and experience are all attributes that as managers we are used to thinking about. Sometimes when working outside of our own country there's an additional factor that perhaps we aren't so used to dealing with - culture, or to be more precise, the recognition of and dealing with cultural differences between all the stakeholders in an international setting.
Decisions
There are times when decisions need to be taken about how to handle a matter that has an international cultural element. Be it that you are working with new suppliers, expanding your own business into territories abroad or that you are trying to work with a new client based abroad.
Do you feel that a lack of cultural understanding between your UK staff and those abroad might be hindering progress ? Is a significant element of the work based in the UK but the end-users are abroad ? Are you trying to decide whether to hire managers in the UK market or in the foreign market ?
Solutions
Pace Professional Services Ltd can step in, as it has done many times before, to provide you with a UK based consultant who has a lifetime experience of UK blue chip culture yet who also is a spanish speaker and is experienced in gettin things done in a hispanic, or high-context, culture.
Sometimes it takes this interim step to be able to get a project on track and then to use new insight gained to feed into the development of a proper long term strategy for the organisation.
Working in High-Context and Low-Context cultures.
We thought that it might be useful to draw together (indexed on the left) some of our favourite literature on the theme of cultural context. We should remember, however, that culture is far to complex an issue to be described succinctly in a few paragraphs. The articles here try to encapsulate and simplify common cross cultural themes. The reader should not underestimate the challenges however and a healthy recognition of how hard it is to tackle "us and them" issues will serve the reader well.
Language
At Pace, we have often come across the belief that "everyone speaks English" when it comes to dealing with other European countries, and even South America. This tends to be borne of the fact that most business people have in fact studied some English and have a certain level of ability in it. Foreign English speakers often however develop "coping mechanisms" to be able to smooth out conversation where they haven't quite understood the conversation fully.
We recommend that all parties in international business attempt to develop their language skills and that the new entrant to a market abroad ensures that some of its UK based staff can communicate directly with those abroad. When we provide an interim consultant to work on your project, we provide someone fluent in the language.