Diversity: Interculturality

Interculturality is about developing skills and behaviours enable you to integrate with any nationality to achieve success ,wherever you are and with whomever you are with, by learning the skills to integrate while still being yourself. It draws on different disciplines to review mindset and behaviours and create new ways of being effective, managing challenge and opportunity and creating outcomes and plans for a fulfilled and rewarding personal and professional life.

Eating and Drinking

One of the most interculturally difficult areas is food and drink. A truly intercultural person knows their way around menus, knows how and at what time people eat. They eat and drink everything host puts in front of them (subject to religious constraints), knows how to indicate when they had enough, and entertain knowing those constraints.

Interculturality is not just about countries

Interculturality is not just about countries. One of the most interculturally difficult areas is accent and local culture within the same country. In the UK for example, where their claims to be multiculturalism, getting on in the workplace generally requires behaving with a certain culture (restrained English) where being loud and direct is frowned upon, and where speaking with the correct accent is important. Code switching is where you behave and speak differently at work than with family. Not only do Black and ethnic minorities have to do it, anyone with a Birmingham or Northern accent has to change how they speak to get on in London. It’s not as bad as it was, but is still there. What time ‘dinner’ is , is significant and many class criteria apply in UK.

Three Colours Worldview

The Three Colours of Worldview can be visualized as three coloured lenses – formed of the basic beliefs and assumptions underlying behaviour and culture. People take in the world and make decisions on how to act through the filter of these lenses. For example, is being seen as honourable more important than being seen as right? Or is maintaining positional power more important than being shamed? To communicate effectively in a cross-cultural situation, you need to know what mix of lenses you have on in the way you see the world, and how to evaluate the lenses of the people with whom you are communicating. When we understand our own self-culture, we can begin to understand what drives others. These are what we look at first when we encounter a new situation, as they influence so many other cultural factors.

1. Innocence/Guilt

In an Innocence/Guilt focused culture, schools focus on deductive reasoning, cause and effect, good questions, and process. Issues are often seen as black and white. Written contracts are paramount. Communication is direct, and can be blunt.

2. Honour/Shame

Societies with a predominantly Honour/Shame worldview teach children to make honourable choices according to the situations they find themselves in. Communication, interpersonal interaction, and business dealings are very relationship-driven, with every interaction having an effect on the honour/shame status of the participants.

3. Power/Fear

Societies with a predominantly Power/Fear worldview raise children to assess where they fit into the pecking order of every situation they are in and behave accordingly. As they grow up, they learn how to align themselves with the right people to gain more power.

If you are well, both mentally and physically you will achieve more. Being in the right job in the right place will increase satisfaction. We run coaching, individual on-line training and group workshops in Wellness, to help you gain better understanding of the problem areas you may have in your life and begin to alleviate stress, tension and anxiety so you can live life happier, with more freedom and peace of mind, and achieve your career goals.