Turn your delays into an interesting and positive experience!
Bonding, uncertainty and external control

Despite the fact that this situation is an economic nightmare and chaos for millions of people and organizations it was a positive and extremely interesting experience.
Read below my observations on organic groups, Uncertainty and External Control

The Entrepreneur’s Corner is one of the new and exciting initiatives of the European Professional Women’s Network. Its objective is to ensure that the needs and interests of the entrepreneurs in the network are being met – which is certainly especially important given the current economic climate.

To support this initiative, EPWN invites you to a brainstorming session on 28th of April facilitated by Ursula Brinkmann. The session is intended to gather and collate all ideas, needs, interests, concerns that you as a self-employed EPWN member, as one of our entrepreneurs, have identified, and to communicate the outcome of the session to the EPWN board.

Ursula will guide you through the process of Silent Brainstorming, conducted in groups of about 7 participants. Whatever comes up during the brainstorming session we will then cluster together and prioritize in an engaging, commitment-building process. Ursula has used this approach several times in her own training interventions and just the method alone is worth trying out!

Ursula is co-founder and director of Intercultural Business Improvement Ltd, a consultancy and training firm specialized in intercultural management development.

Ursula has been delivering courses and presentations for a number of public and private organizations. One of her recent assignments consisted of workshops on Managing Dutch-German cultural differences for the integration teams involved in a major cross-border acquisition. In 2007/2008 she was responsible for an integration program for a European corporation; the program combined training, individual assessment, coaching as well as networking events for 180 managers.

Together with Oscar van Weerdenburg, Ursula developed the Intercultural Readiness Check (IRC), a questionnaire assessing four key intercultural competences. The IRC has been widely recognized in the academic and business communities, and its database by now is one of the largest sources of information on intercultural competences world-wide.

In our training sessions, we regularly receive this type of question from participants: “Why is my Russian colleague always so negative? Is it something I did wrong?” asks Tom from London. Our answer is: “On the contrary Tom, your Russian colleague trusts you enough to share his concerns with you. Actually he is trying to be friends and bond with you.”

Bonding by complaining

In Western Russia, many Eastern European cultures and various cultures in Southern Europe and Latin America, people try to bond with others by complaining. Complaints about the boss or about tasks to be performed or simply about the food, places people ‘together’ in a common situation in which they can relate to each other - bonding with the suffering majority. These complaints are usually expressed with emotion. However, it is passive and is not followed by an action to change the situation that is complained about. An outsider will get the impression that something terrible has happened and that the complainer is deeply unhappy. This however is not the case. There are many reasons for such behavior depending on the context. Some of the underlying reasons may be uncertainty, risk avoidance, xenophobia, fatalism and the feeling of not being in charge as well as being unable to create or accept change.

Misunderstandings, irritations, feelings of exclusion and a sense of inferiority, are daily challenges for non-native English speakers trying to communicate in the language of global business. What exactly happens and how can global organizations help employees become more effective in this intercultural language and its various communication styles?

Vast amounts of skill, expertise and knowledge remains hidden in organizations because of language and cultural barriers. Native Spanish, German, Dutch, Turkish, Chinese or Bahasa Indonesia speakers all make a daily effort to understand, speak and write English. Native English speakers try to understand the many variants of non-native speakers.

Together we try to get used to each other’s accents and accept the language mistakes inevitably made. We try to figure out what a good translation would be for a particular expression and how the words are to be interpreted and valued in our own language. We get lost in translation.

On many occasions the native English speakers form the majority at international meetings. They patiently watch how non-native speakers demolish their native language and still praise them on their command of English. Are native English speakers aware of the difficulties non-native speakers face and how this affects their feelings and the dynamics of a discussion or debate?