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Cross cultural videos

Due to regular unauthorized use for commercial purposes, which breached our copyright, and lead to some awkward conversations, we have had to remove our very popular cross cultural videos. They are still available for a fee. Please contact us if you want to use them/find out more. They have been replaced with a single ‘taster’ video (below) which we hope you’ll enjoy:

Transcript: Cross-cultural Training Tools.

Hi I’m Kevan Hall, CEO of Global Integration and I would like to share with you some of the key tools we use in our “Tools for cross-cultural success” training program. The three key tools are: “The Onion”, “The Culture Abacus” and “The Five Choices”. A lot of cross-cultural training focuses on tips and dos and don’ts which – quite frankly – you can get today from free apps, websites or by buying a simple book. Our cross-cultural training focuses on building skills and giving people practical tools to make sense of the cultural differences they see at work, and actionable ideas on how to deal with the differences:

  • The Onion Tool helps us focus on the difference between the outer layer – what we observe, and the inner layer – what it means. This is often where we make mistakes in working across cultures, assuming that the behaviours we observe at the outer layer have the same meaning as they do in our own culture.
  • The Abacus describes the five major areas where cultural differences have an impact on work behaviours and allows us to undertake a gap analysis to identify our own profile and that of our target cultures.
  • The Five Choices Tool helps us think systematically about how we will resolve these differences in a business context.

The cultural differences we deal with at work are usually a mix of national, functional and corporate cultural differences, so the differences you observe may be different from those that individuals in other organizations will experience, and will certainly be different from the generalizations made in books or research that was often carried out 20 years or more ago.

In our training we focus on two important questions – where is the other culture relative to me, and is the gap big enough that I need to do something about it?

We can then use the three tools to plan practical improvements in areas like better meetings, decision making, cooperation and communication.

To find out more about our global and cross-cultural training, together with more free videos articles and podcasts, please visit www.global-integration.com.

And remember that in working across cultures we tend to notice what’s different from our own culture, so any cultural differences you observe are 50% about you and 50% about them. One of the best outputs of cross-cultural training is learning more about yourself..

Thank you for watching and good luck.

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