Lessons in intercultural communications abound every day, everywhere.  Over the past few days, “my friend” learned how orientation to different jobs/careers fields can yield the same intercultural snafus found in cross cultural communications.

Whether it’s Jargon (think SEO, CEO, B-Hag, NGO, HACE), written communication styles (think Engineer vs. School Teacher) or simply the anticipated protocol for completing a project—never underestimate the cultural patterns that are unique to specific careers or job titles.

Here are a couple of real-life case studies that happened to my friends recently:

Case Study 1:

Two partners agree to co-present a concert.  At the last minute, it turns out no one has committed to renting instruments.

The event planner:  How can a professional band show up to play without instruments?

The music promoter:  Bands from out of town never travel with instruments.  How could you expect to present an out of town band without providing their ‘backline?’

Case Study 2:

One partner offers to sponsor an exhibit to feature projects of four international architects, if the other partner, a not-for-profit board, will coordinate and present the exhibit.

Five weeks before the opening it turns out the exhibit doesn’t actually exist, and production of the exhibit wasn’t included in the sponsorship.  In a closer review of the budget, indeed it only included flight and lodging for the architects, shipping, the opening event and related symposia…not exhibit production.

The lay person on the Board:  If you are sponsoring a program to bring in an architecture exhibit, I’d think it’s implied that the exhibit actually exists!

The architect on the Board:  It’s common practice in the US that architects will produce their own exhibition materials, to maintain control. (This one is a double whammy—expectations of architect vs. non-architect, plus differing practices between architects from two different countries.)

So what do you do?

As is the same with instances of intercultural conflict, yelling at the other person may feel good initially, but it won’t necessarily yield a positive outcome.

Repeating your position over and over while making the “duh” eyes also doesn’t really help.

Recognizing that you entered the conversation with a series of implicit assumptions (no matter how logical they are to you) based on your “title” in relation to the project, does help.

Here’s how:

1.) You’ll learn better questions to ask next time;

2.) You may listen more deeply to understand the others’ assumptions;

3.) You may learn something about another field that will help expand your value in future partnerships and interactions.

What are the underlying assumptions you carry with you?  How have they come up lately?

I caught this version of Tracy Chapman’s “Give Me One Reason” on the radio today, that she did with Eric Clapton, and it was great.  Her sultry tones complemented by his distinctive blues guitar were wonderful. 

Each was able to bring her/his unique style to the table to produce a fantastic product in a spirit of mutual respect. 

Kind of like the way it’s supposed to work in the workforce.  It’s called engagement and inclusion–and studies show that diverse teams, where team members recognize and value each other’s styles and what each brings to the table, consistently outperform homogenous teams. 

In the workforce many still struggle–While companies work toward a truly diverse workforce, reward bands (particularly in US corporations) tend to favor direct, immediate, task oriented output and don’t always keep employees who are relationship oriented or who provide critical support roles motivated.

The music analogy is a good one, and is particularly true with Chamber music, including jazz.  According to Chamber Music America, Chamber music is “music for small ensembles in which players perform one to a part, generally without a conductor.”

At the heart of this art form is a spirit of collaboration. Democratic in essence, chamber music demands that each individual engage in a close musical dialogue with the other performers. Their collective musical instinct, experience, knowledge, and talent guide the process of interpreting, rehearsing, and performing.

In other words, it respects the expertise of each individual musician and values the unique sound they bring to the whole.  Isn’t that what would make a diverse workplace thrive?

p.s.  If you are in Chicago you can get a first hand taste of this kind of musical collaboration with the new Jazz Duets Series created by Carolyn Albritton for Chicago’s Hyde Park Neighborhood.  Howard Reich, Arts Critic for the Chicago Tribune thinks it’s terrific.  (Albritton is also Music Director for the September 25, 2010 Hyde Park Jazz Festival.)

Intercultural Talk had a chance to catch up today with Lynn Walker, Interim President at Truman College in Chicago, to talk about how she draws upon intercultural communications skills to lead a 10,000+ student organization with students from over 100 different countries.  

Her leadership role requires the ability to shift from speaking to administrators, students, community members, government leaders and more from moment to moment throughout the day.

Also known as “code-switching,” Walker credits a focus on Servant-based leadership–putting the needs of those she is serving first–plus being genuine at heart, as feeding her success. 

Funny, those are the same skills that drive great intercultural communications competence:  know thyself first, and learn to be attuned to the styles others.

Okay, and she does give an unsolicited plug to ask for help from professionals (like me), when in doubt.

What are your secrets to successful, intercultural leadership?

It’s funny that after presenting a workshop on communication styles, I’m obsessing about my communication style. 

I think it’s because I’m more aware now that I’m an “emotive-intuitive” communicator (I speak passionately about things I believe in and like to throw out big ideas as they come to me) and the “norm” for the business world (in the US)against which rewards are doled out is “rational,” meaning more direct and impersonal. “Just the facts, Ma’m.”

When we talk about diversity in business, at the end of the day it’s about embracing diverse communication styles.  It’s also about recognizing that there are “norms” dictated by the company, and people may feel like an “insider” or “outsider” based on how their communication style compares to that norm.

This actually played out when I didn’t hug my good friend goodbye after a business meeting yesterday.  Why?  Friend = Hug.  Business Meeting = Handshake.  Could I really have ‘dissed’ my friend and not hugged her goodbye, because subconsciously I thought others would think we were too “girlfriendish” and not “serious about business?”  And what norm was it that I thought I was conforming to anyway?

I decided to do some cross-cultural research about my (seemingly) own culture.  Culturecrossing.net explains it this way:

Man greeting Man – Men shake hands when greeting one another and maintain direct eye contact.  A relatively firm handshake is the way to go.  Light hugs are common between good friends and family. 

Woman greeting Woman- At a first meeting, a light handshake will suffice.  Light hugs are common between good friends and family.

Man greeting Woman-   At a first meeting a regular handshake will do.  Light hugs are common between good friends and family.

I’ve heard the statement ‘women are more emotional and men are more rational’ used to convey males’ better suitability to business, but really these are just alternate communication styles.  It’s only US business culture that places higher value on one style over another. 

Recognizing, including and rewarding a diversity of communication styles is at the true heart of employee engagement and inclusion. 

Think about your day-to-day activities in the workplace. Do you do them because they come naturally, or because you think they are expected of you?  What’s your communication style, and how is it valued within your workplace?

While you do that, I’m calling my friend to apologize!

(If you’re my client reading this please skip to the second paragraph)

When Carolyn and I first arrived at Chamber Music America’s 32nd annual conference in New York City this past weekend, as “Jazz People” people there representing the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, we thought “what are we doing here?”

At the outset people self-identified as either “classical” or “jazz.” Racial, ethnic or other superficial characteristics of difference were clearly insignificant in contrast to one’s musical orientation.  By the end of the weekend, however, all realized at a visceral level the deep value of cross-cultural communication in the form of collaboration between jazz and classical traditions.

Musicians played jazz with string instruments (Quartet San Francisco, and Harlem Quartet-above).  Saxophonists played Chopin (Capitol Quartet).  A violist and percussionist (duoJalal, featuring durbakeh--goblet drum, djembe and riq–a tambourine, but you’ve never seen one played like this before) commissioned original work to play together. 

And genius never goes wrong.  Keynote speakers included Steven Reich, called “our greatest living composer” by The New York Times and “the most original thinker of our time” by The New Yorker.  He humbly and personably laid bare before us his inspiration and creative process, including drawing upon classical, non-Western and Jazz traditions, spoken word, pigeons flapping wings, and spoken word, even interviews with Holocaust Survivors.

We stood in the back at the beginning of the session with Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, agreeing to slip out as soon as we started to nod off during his speech on “Performance in the Age of Recording.”  I sat down when he opened by warning that he would offend most if not all of us, and laughed openly with his reference to going to church as an analogy to distinguishing between composers and performers in classical music:  “If you don’t like sermon you don’t say “I don’t like Jesus…you just don’t like the way that particular preacher is talking about Jesus.” 

He won Carolyn’s heart when saying how live performance will always trump a recording.  “You want to see the musicians have fun and engaging with each other on stage…that will engage your audience.”

The constant theme was about creating new music based on thinking out of the box… by stepping out of narrowly defined possibilities for creation into a world of possibility.

This idea was embodied by CMA’s recipient of the 2010 Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, Chick Corea.  According to CMA, “A jazz luminary for more than 40 years, Corea has been a transformative voice in virtually every style of chamber music.”  In addition to 55 Grammy nominations and 14 Grammy’s, at least 10 presenters talked about meeting Corea and experiencing his music as a “life changing event.”

And now back to the performance by the Harlem Quartet:  It’s a single, visual image in less than three minutes that sums up the power of drawing from diverse traditions to create something new and exciting.

In adapting this concept to my own work, I win from an audience development perspective by appealing to a broader base (classical, jazz, and Latin music aficionados, plus a wider age demographic.) 

But then it looks like I already won, when I walked out of my own knowledge-base and into the “Chamber” room and said “let me listen and see what I can learn.”

What are “opposite” traditions, theories or approaches in your field?  How have you or might you integrate them into your own practice.  What were the results?

Hard to believe that relationships exist without the orientation of the (white) majority as the center starting point, but they do!

So much of the original language devleoped in the US, at least for the workplace, started from an “Us” (those in power) and “Them” (those for whom we will set policies and programs to include).  Primarily this equated to “Caucasian” and “People of Color.”

But US population trends, as well as world power and commercial leadership are shifting (think BRIC).

Time to adopt a multi-dimensional understanding of diversity.  Both resources higlight a myriad of relationships, political and personal, from many international, cross-cultural, intercultural perspectives.

There are two concepts I always remember from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook:  The Left-Hand Column and The Ladder of Inference.

 The Left-Hand Column asks you to compare on a piece of paper “what was said” in the right-hand column with “what you were thinking and feeling, but not saying” in the left-hand column.   

The Ladder of Inference is the idea that we look at the world through our own personal lens, we self-select the ‘data’ we choose to see and interpret it through that same framework, in what Chris Argyris calls a “ ‘ladder of inference,’- a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguided beliefs.”

Argyris and later Senge used the models to help bring awareness to underlying assumptions that can govern conversations and block productive connections in real-life situations, and to help organizations and individuals within them to become more aware of their own thinking and reflection processes, as a step to making them more visible to others. These are also good practices for Intercultural Communications. 

If you take out sleeping (8 hours), eating (3 hours), ‘personal’ care (1 hour), commuting (2 hours), sending emails (1 hour), thinking about what you are going to say while the other person is still talking (2 hours), daydreaming (1 hour), plus whatever you spend on focused individual work, caring for children, parents, etc. (5 hours)—much of our very existence is spent inside our own heads.   

Sure, it can be hard to peek out for a reality check.  Intercultural Communications (or good communications in general) asks you to 

1. Turn off the left-hand column and try to focus on what was actually said (of course that means we have to recognize it’s there, first!)
2. Voice out the feelings or questions that the conversation prompts
3. Ask questions as you go up the ladder of inference to check your interpretation against the other person’s intent.

The good news is, “according to some cognitive theorists, changes in short term everyday mental models, accumulating over time, will gradually be reflected in changes in long-term deep-seated beliefs.” 

 The more we consciously practice recognizing and challenging our own biases, the more we frame questions for clarity in communication, the more that becomes second nature.   In other words, practice makes perfect.   What practices are you working on?

Drawing Credit:  Senge, Peter.  The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.  New York:  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., p. 243.

The Genome Project confirmed the constructed nature of race:  there are more differences genetically between members of a single ‘race’ than between ‘races.’  I was surprised to find the same experience today between Engineers and Marketers.  I accidentally sat at the wrong table this morning (we were assigned by discipline) and sat with the Engineers.  It was fantastic–they were able to talk about their work in Human/Machine interaction and how that might vary in different cultures, and as the sole marketer at the table they loved my creative ideas, and I was chosen to create a lively presentation summarizing our discussion.

I then regrouped with my fellow marketers, and…not so easy.  We each had different ideas on how to approach the subject and rather than consensus or dialogue, we ended up with a laundry list of 45 different considerations related to intercultural identity and service delivery.  Sure, great to brainstorm and have ideas, but at the end of the day our “mono-culture” discussion (marketer to marketer) was more challenging than our “cross-culture” (engineer to marketer) discussion.

The discussions are fascinating–how to create a framework or model for inter-cultural service science.  We are a multi-displinary group looking at systems to facilitate cross-cultural communication, whether it be national origin, cultural identity or organizational culture.  

 The process also is worthy of note:  in talking about culture, participnts own cultural identities became a moot point, it was their ideas, knowledge and area of academic research that were most important.