Written by Whether you’re an expat adapting to a foreign country or an international manager in one’s own country working in a multicultural environment, you must ready yourself for integration.
To integrate means to “bring together and become part of a whole.”
As a foreign or international manager, it’s your duty to bring your team together – to make it a cohesive whole – and you can do this by taking action.
Sink or Swim
Just as you prepare yourself for negotiations, coming up with your objectives and the strategy you might use to achieve them, you must also prepare yourself for integration into a foreign culture.
As with every aspect of meticulously planned business – from putting together engaging presentations that appeal to clients to scheduling your time down to the minute – a cross-cultural business venture requires an extra layer of planning: preparing for the cultural differences and those potential monkey moments that accompany them.
Depending on your organization, you might not even receive cross-cultural skills training prior to departure.
This leaves you two options: take it upon yourself to prepare beforehand or just wing it when you arrive in your host country.
Either way, your host country colleagues and the friends you make will essentially become your “trainers,” while your entire host country – from its local streets, shops, and restaurants to your workplace itself – will be your training venue.
Daily interactions with locals, friends, and colleagues will become hands-on training.
You’ll be thrown in the deep-end and told to sink or swim.
Here’s how you swim.
Learn How to Prepare
In order to successfully swim when thrown off the deep-end, you must eliminate, as much as you possibly can, the culture shock.
This phase is called “Taking Action.”
Taking action involves a conscious effort to adapt smoothly and quickly, avoiding monkey moments in the process.
Being that you’ve already taken the first step of cross-cultural integration – Awareness – you’re already able to reduce cultural monkey moments by following the next steps: Accepting, Adapting, or Adopting.
Accepting, Adapting, and Adopting are generic steps that help you integrate into any culture.
However, knowing the culture in which you’ll be living, you can take specific action to prepare yourself, for example, by learning the cultural values and norms prior to arrival.
In the next few weeks, this blog will discuss a general methodology to efficiently learn the scope of a new culture.
Success Across Cultures 