In today’s highly globalized world, our international Leaders and Managers are continuously striving with uncertainties. VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) is the most embraced concept by leaders of all sectors, to describe the extreme challenges they find themselves facing these days.
In today’s world both leaders and all of us, we can no longer solve our problems with just the expertise and experiences of the past and technology solutions, because the variables are constantly changing.
Problem solving requires more of a “learning approach” than of an “expertise approach”. Companies like Microsoft have changed the paradigm with leaders like Satya Nadella, who inspired his management team to shift from “know it all” to “learn it all”.
Thus, the human dimension of professional world and people and organization culture are now highly critical to success. While people and organization culture were always on the radar, there have been greater focus on expertise, efficiency, technology and Human Resource Management, in the last few decades. In the last few years though, there is more focus on the greyer areas like culture and diversity/inclusivity. The leaders and managers with “learner mindset”/ “learner approach” are extremely aware of and understand that their “realities” or “beliefs” are not the only ones, and that many other versions also exist. And this is where awareness, understanding and Respect for a different culture becomes crucial. The differences could be as wide as nations or as narrow as within a small team.
Why cross- cultural competence?
The world today, is beyond globalization. It is completely interconnected, socially, economically and politically, and not to forget the global environmental concerns.
Organizations that are already doing business internationally, and those which want to engage beyond their parent nations and do business globally, need to now think beyond standardization across structures, processes, policies and systems.
There is increasingly a greater need for adapting to the geographical, sociopolitical, legal and thus the cultural norms of different nations. In order to create this delicate balance between consistency and adaptability, global leaders require highest levels of cross-cultural competences.
As we already are aware of, that, “competence” is a mixture of “adequate” knowledge, skill and aptitude to perform successfully in a “role”. Thus, having sufficient knowledge of a different culture only, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Each of us need to develop sufficient levels of skills and aptitude to successfully navigate and build commitments in a global or multicultural environment.
We define “aptitude”, as a combination of ability, talent and mindset. All 3 of them can be developed and nurtured. It is a learning and maturing process, which follows the same path as any other competency.
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