Three things drive our workplace behaviour – who we are, when we were born and where. This informative and fascinating webinar focuses on the latter – ethnicity (other courses by Dr. Murray deal with personality and generational differences). As a manager in a culturally-diverse workforce, you need to know how ethnic differences affect the way in which your direct reports follow your instructions, assess your competence, function as a team, make decisions, handle disagreements, deal with time pressures, receive feedback, respond to issues of trust, and disagree with each other.
We’re all the same – we’re naturally prejudiced … because we prejudge based on what we know and don’t know. We’re also all different from one another, but predictably so. Canada is the most ethnically diverse nation in the northern half of the planet and BC is its most diverse province. There are over 40 distinct racial groupings in British Columbia, though some are more dominant. While the racial split is different in the major urban centres, the advice offered will be instructive to the success of your corporate mission and strategy.
As globalization transforms the way business is done, whether you manage in a single building or across an ocean, this timely and engaging webinar explains the do’s and don’ts of handling the consequences of misunderstanding ethnic differences within high-performance teams. This is not a course about DEI in the workplace; it’s for anyone who has trouble interacting with people who are different than themselves. And that includes just about everyone. It’s about improving your effectiveness as a manager in solving or avoiding work-related challenges caused by uninformed or stereotypical thinking. You will discover meaningful strategies and tactics for altering your management style to enable greater cross-cultural collaboration, creativity and accountability.
A 30-page pre-course workbook of readings and tasks will augment your learning experience.
Discussion topics include:
❏ One skill managers must possess more than ever
❏ How minority workers perceive workplace issues
❏ Demographics, stereotyping and prototyping
❏ Cultural intelligence, chauvinism and empathy
❏ Critical management concerns and challenges
❏ The eight dimensions of ethnic work behaviours
❏ Dissecting cross-cultural communication styles
❏ How to give and get feedback in multiracial teams
❏ Insights and tips on reading non-verbal gestures
❏ Overcoming linguistic obstacles and differences
❏ Proxemics: Interpersonal space across cultures
❏ Interpreting ‘odd’ behaviours in different countries
❏ Reconciling your culture to doing business abroad
❏ On-line communications: What you should know
❏ How to disagree without being disagreeable
❏ Differences in negotiating and decision making
❏ Building ethnic profiles to achieve better outcomes
❏ What it takes to act and be seen as a great boss
❏ Strategies for working in hierarchical cultures
❏ How cross-cultural trust is created and perceived
❏ The vehicle for achieving deep workplace harmony
Formally recognized by the Canadian university community for “excellence in the design and delivery of lifelong education,” Jim has been researching and teaching cross-cultural negotiating strategies for over 40 years, has written extensively on the topic and was recruited by Dealmakers International – a worldwide consortium of negotiating experts headquartered in Israel that advised business leaders in over 25 countries. He was the only Canadian member of this practice and his expertise was utilized in developing training materials to support the network’s consulting activities. For over a decade, he instructed senior Canadian military officers on cross-cultural communications techniques in such international ‘hot spots’ as Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan and Darfur. As his course inventory attests, his primary focus is on building high-performance organizations. And that is the objective of this webinar.