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 and the challenges that managers face in a culturally-diverse business environment. If you are one, you need to expand your cultural intelligence in a world that’s more divided and antagonistic along racial differences than ever before. You need to understand how these differences and more demonstrative expectations 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 connection and trust, and choose to disagree with each other. To paraphrase a well-known proverb, a team divided against itself cannot function effectively or endure.
We’re naturally prejudiced – we prejudge based on what we know and don’t know. We’re also different from one another and, for the most part, predictably so. Canada is the most ethnically diverse nation on the northern half of the planet and BC is its most cosmopolitan. There are over 40 distinct racial groupings in British Columbia, some more dominant than others. Over 90% of First Nations bands reside in BC. While the racial split varies in urban centres, and likely also in your business, the advice and insights offered will be instructive to the success of your corporate mission and strategy.
Over 95% of HR leaders today say “we’ve improved our DEI processes” – only 30% of their employees agree (per Gallup). While your numbers may be different, over 90% of marginalized workers say they’ve experienced discrimination in the workplace and about a third believe they aren’t given “equal opportunity” for advancement. Awareness alone doesn’t change corporate behavior; solutions require a paradigm shift that embraces increased managerial competency, better feedback loops and enhanced cultural intelligence. If you don’t understand their concerns and what motivates them, then you can’t influence, manage or lead them.
As globalization transforms how 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 collaboration, creativity and accountability.
The course instructor has been researching and teaching cross-cultural negotiating strategies for over 50 years, has written extensively on the topic and was recruited by Dealmakers International – a worldwide consortium of negotiating experts that advised business leaders in 25 countries. He was the only Canadian member and his expertise was utilized in developing training materials to support the network’s advisory services. For over a decade, he instructed senior Canadian military officers and peacekeepers on cross-cultural communications techniques in various international ‘hot spots.’
Topics include:
❏ The one skill managers must possess more than ever
❏ What makes bosses relatable and then what happens
❏ How marginalized workers perceive workplace issues
❏ Demographics, stereotyping and prototyping
❏ When good intentions become micro-aggressions
❏ 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
❏ Strategies for working in hierarchical cultures
❏ How to build and reinforce cross-cultural trust
❏ Jim’s cross-cultural playbook for high-performance
A 33-page pre-course workbook of readings and tasks will augment your learning experience.