I hate that you remind me the rules!. Intercultural business

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

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