Three years ago, a Spanish and a German employee
have coordinated how to reduce the stock of the company in the store. The
pressure of the financial crisis and new trends had led them to work almost
with zero stock. The project should be carried out during the next twelve months.
After two days, the Spanish employee received directives from Germany regarding
the implementation.
Six months later, there was a meeting to
present the first results. The Spanish employee had no concrete results because
the suppliers demanded more time. The German results were presented concretely.
The line managers of both discussed what
happened. The German employee trusted that the Spanish employee would know how
to carry out the directives. He did not know that he joined the company only
six months before. They have no shared information or results within six
months.
In the case of the Spanish employee, he
could not put pressure on providers to cut their deliveries in such a short time
in order to reduce the stock. Furthermore, everything was documented . The
Spanish and German employees both did their job properly.
The German said during the meeting that he
had worked with an employee of Spain once and he told him that he hated to be
reminded of the rules all the time, what that influenced the business
relationship now.
This was a real case.
There are several intercultural
communication errors . The first is the lack of information about the other's
culture and what one expects from the other side. The second error is to
generalize a culture with the behavior of a single individual. Third, we
believe that if a person is asked he could act regardless of the cultures of the companies
with which that person works. Besides the problem of not communicating clearly and
openly with each other, eg. calling once a week , writing mails , making
conference calls to get updates, etc., people make the mistake of thinking that they can work with an employee even
if they don't know that the network of
companies with which he operates is also immersed in a culture that has its own
concepts , beliefs and processes.
It is extremely necessary to create an area
code where everyone can truly understand and carry out their objectives
efficiently. 1 +1 = 3
Paula Figueiredo
PM Intercultural Agent
PM Intercultural Agent
www.intercultural - agent.com
http://www.linkedin.com/company/pm-intercultural-agent?trk=company_name
www.facebook.com / pm.interculturalagent
Skype: intercultural-agent
Mail : info @ intercultural-agent. com
