Written by: Ekaterina Matveeva, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
What does your slack notification show you when you’d like to send a message to the entire channel? Mine shows this: Notify 23 people across 8 time zones? And this is even not the worst, some channels have 13 time zones. This is no wonder when your team stretches across 4 continents, and you work at a distance regardless of the pandemic times are on or off. Amolingua, from the beginning, has been an online company with everybody working at a distance. But unlike Amolingua, the majority of companies had offices with employees working from 9 to 5 before the pandemic hit.
For many people who had to go remote during the previous year, it has been stressful to adjust to working in their global teams online. So what to do when you have to work on multiple projects and manage international teams from diverse backgrounds and culture codes?
At the start of June, the Women Tech conference boomed around the world. And I had a chance to share some of my experiences on the matter. This occasion went quite handy in preparation for my coming soon courses around Multiculturalism, CQ, and especially the course in partnership with Platzi, “Introduction to Cultural Intelligence” for Latin American entrepreneurs. Here are a few crucial things for you to take into account.
According to Jack Ma, creator of Alibaba, in order to become a successful leader, you need to develop IQ, EQ, and LQ. IQ is known to measure intelligence. EQ is Emotional Intelligence and is quite popular right now. LQ stands for Love Intelligence and implies that you need to be kind to people, to be a human. That’s beautiful; however, if you’re working in an international team, you also need to develop CQ - Cultural Intelligence.
CQ implies the ability to make sense of unfamiliar contexts and then blend in. The ability to cross divides and thrive in multiple cultures—the capability to deal effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds.
Can you make sense of unfamiliar contexts? Maybe not always. And how to effectively deal with people from different cultural backgrounds?
You can start with 3 components of CQ: Knowledge, Mindfulness, and Behaviour.
Knowledge is about recognizing the existence of other cultures and defining the nature of that difference.
Mindfulness implies perceptual clarity about one’s emotional state and the openness to experience dimension of personality.
Behavior stands for the ability to generate appropriate behavior in a new cultural setting.
I’ve personally been struggling with dealing with conflicts, especially if employees coming from diverse cultural backgrounds have their own ways to express emotions. I’ve identified a few points of fluctuations across the teams: the perception of time and deadlines, and mainly the difference between task-oriented and relationship-oriented people.
Time-perception is quite tricky. Being multilingual and multicultural, I’ve noticed how my time perception also shifts after I get immersed into another language/culture for some time. While studying in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, I noticed how I would inevitably be late anywhere while returning to stay in UK, Russia, or Germany, where people are typically quite punctual. This made me wonder why. I got deep into researching while writing my book “Language Alter Ego” and discovered a few theories, among them by Richard Lewis, on various time concepts across cultures.
Apparently, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian groups are part of the humanity living in the linear-active time where it’s believed that the most success can be achieved via doing one thing at a time. They’re extremely focused and organized.
Whilst, Southern Europeans, Latin Americans, and Arabs are multi-active, they can easily ignore time if a conversation is worth continuing. For them, time is a commodity that can be manipulated.
But this is not all; there is also cyclic time which is mostly found in Asia. It implies that everything goes around in a cycle. Everything repeats. But how does it move? And here, it got pretty intriguing and confusing for me when I was living in Shanghai, China. The prepositions in Mandarin indicating “up” and “down” are also used in phrases indicating “previous” and “next” talking about events in time. One of the research theories states that some Chinese perceive time in a vertical manner as the past is above us while the future is below us. And there is another peculiarity that I personally experienced that the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. And this is due to a simple concept that we have seen the past; hence it’s known; we are looking at it, while the future is unknown, we cannot see it; that’s why we’re moving to the future backward.
With all concepts mentioned above, you can see how tough it can be for people with various backgrounds to agree on deadlines and meetings not only due to different time zones but also because of a completely different attitude to time.
But there is another big issue that has been already stated, the tension between task-oriented and relationship-oriented people.
To put it simply, the majority of linear-active people are task-oriented. This means that they come from individualist societies, can work really well on their own. They don’t like to waste time on unnecessary discussions and prefer to keep it professional. And precisely this point on lack of human communication creates disputes between task-oriented and relationship-oriented people as the majority of multi-active people are relationship-oriented, which implies that they need a lot of time for communication, discussions, and team building. They need to feel that they’re part of a cohesive group. The ties play a significant role, they’re loyal, and relationships are more important than failures in projects. For cyclic time people, it’s a bit of both, but the relationships are also essential.
How to put these groups of people together?
If you have identified linear-active employees in your team, try to make them responsible for all the deadlines, they’re finishers. Whilst, multi-active people work much better in a team, work together on various solutions, and you need to budget extra time for them just to hang out and build on their relationships. This may also mean that you’ll need to establish more flexible deadlines for multi-active ones as linear-active people are used to working under pressure and won’t appreciate a loose schedule.
If you want to build a community, get a multi-active person in charge, they will be great for a networking position. They’re natural talkers and relationship-builders.
Have team meetings to discuss your similarities and differences with your employees based on your cultural backgrounds. See what each of your team members can bring to the table.
If conflicts emerge, ask your teammates to try to have a discussion with an open floor where they could share what hurt them, made them angry, and what they lacked in that situation, whether it was attention, more responsibility from the other party, or something else.
As we’re living in a global world where everyone can now work digitally with people from anywhere, it’s crucial that we learn to deal effectively with people from various cultural backgrounds, regardless of whether they’re our colleagues, clients, or employees, a dialogue must be built.
Remember, even we’re different, deep inside, we’re the same.
Ekaterina Matveeva, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Ekaterina Matveeva is a linguist working in 9 languages, award-winning entrepreneur, learning designer, founder of Amolingua, and leader of the ErasmusPlus funded project Lingo+. She is a TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and researcher developing her theory “Language Alter Ego.”
She has been training people worldwide for over 14 years and is now set to develop bespoke training for educators to teach in a multilingual, multicultural environment. This year she is running the MM Universe conference. Ekaterina is on a mission to create a better connected multicultural, multilingual world.
She believes in communication across cultures. She has been working with world thought leaders from TED to Singularity University, serving as a public speaking coach at Talkboutique, and an invited professor for executive programs at the Universidad de Palermo.
Education and entrepreneurship form a huge part of her life. She is an advisory board member of 3 Day Startup, helping university students acquire entrepreneurial skills. Her motto is: Dream, Decide, Do.
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