Building Cross-Cultural Intelligence

By Maya Townsend, MSOD Moving Beyond Cultural Cruise Control

The problem many Americans face when we work cross-culturally is that we assume that we won't have to think about culture. The work will naturally fall into line, we think. Then, we reconsider when things don't go as expected. For example, we discover that our American and Indian teams have completely different definitions of training and, as a result, we're 6 months behind schedule. Or, we develop our revenue estimates based on the assumption of a quick product adoption in Japan, only to discover that building relationships takes much longer than anticipated.

The first, and best, way to succeed cross-culturally is to turn off the cultural cruise control that tries to fool us into thinking that all cultures are the same. Instead, we need to build cultural competency.

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