Cross Cultural sensitivities.

A culture is a way of life of a group of people--their behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and learning from lifestyles from one generation to the other.

Understanding and working with different
cultures

Cross culture communication is the interaction of people from different backgrounds and value systems. Culture plays a vital role in international business and the success criteria is dependent on how one understands and adjusts to different cultures. How people from varied cultures interact and do business become easy when cultural sensitivities are understood and key value indicators are introduced and implemented.

Some of the key indicators to sensitize culture is to make the person we interact with aware that we understand and are mindful of their culture and value systems and respect them. There are cultural differences because we have different value systems and it does not mean that a particular culture is better than the other. The key to bring harmony among cultures is to agree to disagree and find an alternative way to come to a common ground.

In the west and mainly the business world people are sticklers for time whereas in the eastern world we are more focused on the event and time is just relative as long as the event is done. In the west folks are mostly task focused but the easterners are mostly people focused.  There are others values such as holistic versus dichotomistic thinking. In the west people generally have a dicotomistic thinking, for example you are either wonderful or you are evil. Whereas in the east people think holistic, they will find reasons for why are you evil and are comfortable in the grey zone.

The west tends to be more achievement focus and the east is mainly status focused. The Westerners can be mostly crises oriented and the Easterners are more non crises oriented. There are ofcourse exceptions to these but this could be some of the main conflicts in value systems.

We are sensitive to these cultural difference. We constantly equip ourselves through training and learning to overcome these barriers so that we can help the business and relationships to thrive.