"The world is shrinking and leaders from different cultures are finding that they need to work together. The cultures are formed of geography, faith, gender, generation, organization and sector. And in a global world, where problems cross borders between cultures, we need leaders who can cross those boundaries and cross cultures too; people who can communicate effectively and build diverse networks necessary to solve messy problems. We need leaders who don’t just shy away from difference but gravitate towards it. They don’t see heterogeneity as threatening; they see it as creative, exciting, inspiring and enriching. These are the leaders with Cultural Intelligence (CQ)".
Who can benefit from Cultural Intelligence development?
Any manager or employee who needs to interact efficiently and effectively with colleagues, customers, partners or suppliers from another business culture.
What are the objectives?
- Improve awareness of own and other cultures and its implications
- Increase your personal and team effectiveness.
- Strengthen relationships with your colleagues
- Eliminate cross-cultural communication breakdowns Learn to adapt your cultural style for improving collaboration, communication and achieve better results
- Manage and lead global teams with confidence
- Negotiate across the world with clearer insight and better results
- Avoid conflicts in your team and change cultural gaps into strengths
- Prepare for meeting, presentations and negotiations with people from different cultures
Consultancy and cultural audits
You will be able to identify culturally problematic areas, critical challenges and adjust your practices and leadership to multicultural environment. Diversity among your team gives a variety of viewpoints and provides larger pool of creative ideas and solutions.
Together we will:
- Assess existing competence and diversity in your company using validated tools
- Design strategy towards culturally diverse internal and external stakeholders
- Implement actions to grow your competitive advantage and avoid international failures
Culturally sensitive strategy will allow you to perform better in the (virtual) cross-cultural teams, sell more internationally or create better communication and collaboration across diverse channels.
COACHING
Coaching - Cross-cultural coaching helps to deal with challenges and discover solutions to think out-of-the-box. It enhances performance of individuals working in international teams and helps to improve cultural effectiveness.
Leaders, managers and executives face cultural complexity in dealing with business partners, bosses and employees from abroad. Cross-cultural coaching helps them to improve cultural sensitivity and become culturally competent, which can help to achieve business results and be more inspirational and supportive within their teams.
CROSS-CULTURAL TRAININGS
aim to develop cultural awareness and skills to constructively deal with challenges of cross-cultural workplace and international operations. Those trainings will raise levels of mutual understanding, trust and respect among team members, equip managers in skills necessary to successfully lead international staff and prepare participants to successfully communicate and collaborate with colleagues, business partners, bosses and clients. Since cultural diversity is critical for an organization’s ability to innovate and adapt in a fast-changing environment, there are additional advantages to the sessions: - increased adaptability
- more effective execution
- better staff retention and satisfaction
- enhanced variety of viewpoints empowering creativity and innovation.
We offer trainings in the following areas:
- Cross-cultural management
- Cross-cultural communication
- Negotiations in intercultural context
- International sales – selling to foreign audience
- Successful meetings in intercultural context
- Difficult conversations with colleagues/clients from foreign cultures
- Presentations to culturally diverse audience
- Motivation across cultures
- Managing internal cultural diversity
Cross- Cultural Communication
Effective intercultural communication skills are a must-have in order to understand people from different parts of the world properly and often open doors in the business world.
Especially candidates for expatriate assignments, managers of international companies, permanent business travelers or employees of geographically distributed teams have to acquire intercultural communication skills.
The constant process of developing competence in cross-cultural communication is highlighted by trials and errors but also by a chain of experiences during which insight is gained. Furthermore assumptions are drawn and tested. An intercultural training helps to kick-start this process and continuous intercultural coaching makes sure the chain does not tear.
Benefits
During the cross- cultural communication training attendees will get to know:
- how their own values influence their behavior
- the factors which drive and motivate their counterparts from another culture
- cultural aspects of communication
- how to use a model of feedback, communication, and listening
- the impact of body language and voice tones on communication in different cultures
- tactics of how to overcome objections of international business partners appropriately
- how to use the acquired knowledge to build successful communication strategies in their business interactions
Cross-Cultural Leadership
With the increased volume of international business throughout the last decades, managers are facing an expanding scope of duties nowadays. In addition to the normal pressures of man management, managers are now required to deal with challenges, friction and misunderstandings emanating from cross cultural differences. In order to satisfy the rising requirements of modern management, cultural competency is required to get the best out of a multicultural team.
Culture plays a more important role in our lives than we might think, in our private lives as well as in business. It affects our thought process, the way we learn, communicate, negotiate, and resolve conflicts.
A Cross-Cultural Management training is necessary for anyone working either internationally or in a multicultural environment, as it provides the ability to recognize cultural similarities and differences and gives the possibility to adapt to certain situations properly.
Benefits
During the cross-cultural management training attendees will get to know:
- Differences in corporate and international cultures
- Differences between reactions of people from diverse cultural backgrounds
- How intercultural issues manifest in the workplace
- How to develop and use skills such as communication, time management, assertiveness and conflict resolution in an intercultural environment
- How to leverage cultural differences and maximize the potential of a multicultural team
- How to combine cross cultural management with domestic tasks
Negotiations in an intercultural context
Every CEO, manager or employee who works internationally has negotiations with customers or suppliers from other cultures throughout his career. Either they travel abroad or host customers/suppliers from different cultures. Both situations need key information regarding approaches, tactics and business etiquettes because neither your partner nor you want to waste time on misleading communication.
Therefore the cross cultural negotiation training centralizes the maximization of your effectiveness in intercultural business negotiations but also highlights the importance of your counterpart in such a situation.
Benefits
During the intercultural negotiations training attendees will get to know:
- How you can use your negotiation skills properly to achieve your goals in intercultural negotiations
- How intercultural negotiation stress can be avoided
- Proper meeting etiquettes, greetings, gift giving, entertaining and verbal & non-verbal communication.
- How to prepare for cross cultural negotiations with all necessary steps
- How to use necessary information like facts, statistics and other supporting evidence in negotiations.
- Negotiation tactics in cross cultural context including different approach styles resulting in a deal
Successful meetings in intercultural context
The main arena for intercultural business interactions is the team meeting in which thoughts are shared, decisions made and actions taken. In a globalized business world where people from all around the world meet, this may often lead to business deals going to waste and the emergence of communication problems producing higher costs for an organization.
This course is addressed to all companies and organizations with a multicultural workforce and should help you making your meetings function like clockwork.
Benefits
During the intercultural meeting training attendees will get to know:
- How culture influences our values, norms and communication
- How meetings can be managed appropriately
- How to establish functioning meeting processes
- How to motivate and build a team
- How to conduct discussions and address certain issues
- How to organize a meeting in order to make it efficient
- How to use different techniques for running meetings across the world
- And what if the meeting are not within the team but within international partners/ collaborators/ possible clients? Think also from this perspective
International Sales – selling to foreign audience
Sales is a matter of culture, which professionals have to take into consideration when dealing with business partners from other cultures. They have to adjust their sales styles and techniques and interpret buying signals differently in order to be successful all over the world. Otherwise all sales efforts will lead to nowhere and end up in frustration and decreasing sales volume.
In our international sales training we do not teach professionals how to sell their goods but how to differentiate between cultures and overcome objections to close a deal. Furthermore the attendees will learn how to use their skills in foreign environments through analyzing demands and suitable approaches.
Benefits
During the international sales training attendees will get to know:
- Which steps are needed in order to build credibility in a particular culture
- How the selling process works in other cultures
- How to develop good relationships to business partners
- How cultures influence objections and communication
- How to deal with the challenge of objections in a proper way
- How to disable objections positively and get sales back on track
- How to use different selling approaches in other cultures
- How to adjust their skills in order to fit others’ expectations
Presentations to culturally diverse audiences
Introduction
Presentations give us the possibility to be the center of attention and provide certain information to the audience. Especially in the business context they are an important medium for convincing someone of our intentions and we use them in our everyday life. As it is a challenge to give a good presentation to a domestic audience, the requirements increase with an international audience, which has a different level of language and not the same understanding for expressions, body language and jokes. Like there are good and bad presentations, they are also perceived in a different way from culture to culture.
This course addresses directors, managers, salespeople, consultants and business personnel in general who are involved in international business and want to increase their presentation effectivity in order to target a higher cross cultural audience.
Benefits
During the cross-cultural presentation training attendees will get to know:
- How cultures differ regarding the way people receive, deliver, understand and use presentations
- How to satisfy expectations of certain cultures in respect to talking, statistics, visuals and content
- How to use language, colloquialisms, tone, speed, etc.
- How to identify signs of boredom or attentiveness in a cross cultural audience
- How to maximize the impact and cultural acceptability of your presentation.
- How decisions are made in other cultures and which influence presentations can have on these
- How body language is used in different cultures
- How to use hand-outs in other cultures
Difficult conversations with colleagues/clients from foreign cultures
A good working atmosphere is one of the key factors of success within a company. Team building measures are a good solution to achieve this atmosphere. Still problems may arise, especially in companies with a multicultural workforce due to the cultural perception of different behaviors as difficult. Also companies who trade internationally face those problems in regard to customer conversations. The stress of handling difficult people and difficult situations can create a lack of productivity, poor attitude, and reluctance to come to work.
This course addresses all employees who work together with people from different countries and have problems with their behavior, but also all employees of multicultural teams who want to avoid problems to come up in the future.
Benefits
During the training in solving difficult conversations with members from other cultures, attendees will get to know:
- How their attitudes and actions have an impact on others
- How to develop strategies for dealing with difficult intercultural situations
- How to use different techniques for dealing with members from other cultures during unpleasant conversations
- How to identify situations which are influenced by culture
- How to deal with stress and anger resulting from intercultural misunderstandings
Managing internal cultural diversity
In a globalized world with an increasing number of people working and living abroad, a new term has gained in importance: ‘’diversity’’. This includes all types of words to describe a person like nationality, religion, gender, age, values, ethics, race etc. A good organized diversity management can contribute to the success of your business. When used properly, the different talents and creativity within your team may bring you a competitive advantage.
This course primarily addresses management employees, HR staff or members of multicultural workgroups and seeks to provide practical steps to help overcome diversity issues within the workplace.
Benefits
During our diversity management training it is our goal to give the attendees an understanding of:
- How to manage diversity within your company with the help of the analysis of your business' demographic development in the employment and sales markets
- How to address the diversity and development of your workforce and your business
- How to use diversity management in order to gain benefits
- How to develop a diversity management strategy, introduce it and implement it
- How to deal with specific questions such as cross-cultural working and gender diversity etc.
Leadership in a global environment
Leadership is a skill that every manager, who is responsible for other employees, has to possess in order to achieve goals. It is something that fits better to some but still can and should be developed over time. Nowadays, it gets even harder because managers face a greater multicultural workforce with different needs and values, they have to address and motivate.
This course approaches all employees in higher positions who are responsible for a multicultural workforce in the home country or abroad.
Benefits
During our intercultural leadership training it is our goal to give the attendees an understanding of:
- Cultural awareness and self-evaluation in a cultural context
- How to work with practical cultural models like the ‘’cultural detective’’ etc.
- How to cope with uncertainty and step outside the comfort zone
- How to increase flexibility and agility in the global environment
- How to take advantages out of cultural differences
- How to adjust the leadership style to suit different cultures but maintaining authenticity as a leader
- How to develop relationships virtually and face-to-face
- How to ensure effective communication and good collaboration with employees, colleagues and business partners from all around the world
- How to deal with misunderstandings, disagreements and conflicts in a global working environment
Motivation across cultures
With the ongoing globalization and an increasing number of multicultural workforces, the requirements for managers to be successful are rising as well. One important aspect in order to achieve the best possible outcome is motivation. But this is not that easy in an intercultural context because every culture needs a different approach for motivating its members.
This course addresses employees in leading positions who either have a multicultural workforce in their home country or abroad. Also leaders of virtual teams have an advantage out of participating in this course because in general people leave managers and not jobs.
Benefits
During our cross-cultural motivation training it is our goal to give the attendees an understanding of:
- How to build interpersonal relationships and trust within the team
- Understand where cross cultural differences lie when it comes to motivation and communication
- Solutions, guidelines and techniques for motivating members of different cultures
- How to set goals and objectives and reward positive results
- How to align individual team goals and the goals of the organization
- How differences can be resolved within a team
- How conflicts can be used in order to improve the outcome
- How to use the present leadership skills properly
- How to create an atmosphere of team spirit
I am looking forward to discuss the opportunity to match our services with you and your clients’ needs. If you are interested in working with me and my global team, please do not hesitate to contact me directly on my mobile or via email.