Business Is a Uniter, not a Divider

Last week, I had the privilege of working with nearly 20 staff members from an international university in Doha, Qatar. Representing at least 10 different nationalities, this diverse group, despite focusing on conflict management, demonstrated remarkable engagement and collaboration.

This made me think of an experience I had about 20 years ago in the Balkan states where colleagues from Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia were working passionately together to grow their business. 

I couldn't help thinking at the time: what was this Yugoslavian war about? What have they gained at the end of the day? They or their fathers shot at each other, perhaps hated each other, and now they or their sons are devising a marketing strategy together to 'conquer' the market.

It would be a simplistic and false statement to say that politics divide whereas business unite, yet trade has often served as a way to push people to communicate, collaborate, and build things together. 

When we do business with people of different cultures or when we lead multicultural teams, we should not only appreciate the chance we have but also the responsibility we carry. 

One of the aspects we need to keep in mind is that in spite of having a common business framework and common business practices learned on the global market, we are all mostly influenced by the first years of our lives (childhood and to some extent teenager age). 

When you compare how different cultures approach things like decision-making, communication, disagreeing, time management, there are definite differences. One of my participants remarked that Belgians, for example, were often in the middle of the Gauss curve on many markers. Interesting comment. 

Perhaps that is a factor that can explain why they (we) easily navigate cultural contradictions versus some of their (our) neighbours who are much more 'marked' on those scales, like the Dutch. Which maybe explains why some cultural models were created by the Dutch as a way to ease their trade with others. This is not a claim, just a digressive thought.

My point is that we should as leaders be aware of that: we have a responsibility in uniting people around a goal, we need to be aware that contrary to appearances, and people might claim, everyone around the table has a different approach to what we take as obvious and granted, from our own cultural perspective.

What strategies have you found most effective in fostering unity within culturally diverse teams?