How do you navigate cultural or language barriers during verbal exchanges in diverse teams or cross-cultural settings to ensure effective communication and conflict resolution?
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acknowledge upfront that you don’t have all the answers and let your team know that you are committed to understanding their perspectives and experiences. By openly sharing that you may make mistakes, but that any missteps are unintentional, you set a tone of transparency, trust and mutual respect. continuously seek feedback and when given take the time to really listen and continuously learn and improve.
I would advise the book from Erin Meyer "The culture map" to understand different scenarios and context in multi cultural environments. The book provide lots of advises.
We have a few times run cultural training sessions working with India and a few times we have run this for hybrid team with a mix of locals and Indians as part of start up activities. We have used a person from India to do this as he has lived and worked in Norway for 20 years knows well different cultures
Hello - I have worked in multiple different countries and would share the following learnings that I found helpful.
1) If a video call, turn on closed captioning so that there is visual and audio of what is being said
2) it's common that all of us process information differently and also there are differences in views of hierarchy, I'd suggest consistently providing a few bullet points or agenda in advance of the discussion so there is time to process. Also consider that others may not be comfortable sharing a different view or speaking first if they are not the highest ranking person attending or in the setting
3) check for understanding by asking questions like - what concerns do you have? what are you taking away as next steps or things to work on? You can preview that you will ask these questions regularly, so folks are not surprised. This will allow you to understand real time what has landed and what may have been missed or misinterpreted.
4) Finally, ask for micro feedback regularly. You can ask an individuals(s) what would make the interaction better? What's something we should keep doing? What's something we need more of?