Managing Across Cultures

Our culture defines many aspects of how we think, feel, and act. It can be challenging for managers to bridge cultural differences and bring employees together into a functioning team. This course will give supervisors and managers easy-to-use techniques for communicating across cultures, building teams, promoting multiculturalism in the organization, and leveraging the global talent pool.

Objectives

What Is Culture?
We’ve all heard of culture, but do we really know what it is? This session looks at defining culture and some of its various forms. The session then segues into a look at stereotypes before concluding with a discussion of individual and organizational attitudes.

Communicating Effectively
Communications can be tricky even within one’s own culture, not to mention across cultures. This session deals with communications under the lens of high and low context cultures while also tackling various forms of body language and other types of communication skills. The session wraps up with a look at handling miscommunication through a case study.

Team Building Across Cultures
The five stages of team development are covered in this mid-course session. Then the discussion veers to a look at how to handle working with virtual teams.

Managing Across Cultures
Diversity is the hallmark of working across cultures and it’s the opening of this session. Along the way the session looks at how far should you go to accommodate other cultures, dealing with culture-based conflicts and giving culturally sensitive feedback.

Building a Multicultural Organization
This session holds forth a brainstorming session on how to build a multicultural organization and then how to create inclusive programs for new employees.

Working with the Global Talent Pool
Today’s workforce is made up of much more than your typical 9-to-5ers from just around the neighborhood, it is made up of the workers worldwide. This workforce offers a global talent pool for employers, and it’s discussed here along with how to tap into this pool.

Workshop Wrap-Up
At the end of the course, students will have an opportunity to ask questions and fill out an action plan.