Enhancing Cross-cultural Collaboration - Awesomic Community

On September 20th, 2024, Awesomic invited Mariia Tiekuch to share insights on effectively communicating with people across multiple cultures. Mariia is a D&I and Cross-Cultural Collaboration Consultant who has over 16 years of experience working with HR, mainly in the tech industry in companies like Grammarly and Robota.ua, developing DEI initiatives and coaching managers on people management practices. 

Our fantastic talents always talk about how one of the best parts of working with Awesomic is the people, and we’re constantly trying to ensure it stays that way. We have customers and talent from all over the world, and this webinar was an excellent opportunity to improve an underrated aspect of every experience, good or bad: communication.

Awesomic’s talent collaborates daily with customers from all over the world, spread across four continents. To ensure fruitful collaboration, we must understand the nuances of communication across cultures. We also need to be able to ask for requirements, receive and deliver feedback, and delight clients and stakeholders.  

This webinar was also created for our internal and multicultural team. Awesomic is committed to delivering the perfect match and experience for tasks ranging from no-code development to product and marketing design.

Here are a few key lessons we want to highlight from the webinar that boosted our communication processes:

How to improve cultural intelligence (CQ)

For this article, we’ll define cultural intelligence as the proficiency to work successfully, talk, and collaborate with people from multiple cultures. But what are the main pillars of cultural intelligence, and how do we improve?

The components of cultural intelligence

• CQ Drive: This represents your persistence and interest while communicating with people from different cultures.
• CQ Knowledge: This represents your current knowledge about culture, especially regarding differences and similarities.
• CQ Strategy: This represents your awareness and your ability to plan for multicultural interactions
• CQ Action: This represents your ability to take action, work, and adapt to multicultural environments

This way, we create a continuous improvement framework where your drive leads you to knowledge, which helps you strategize and take action during collaboration. Then, your growing interest leads to more knowledge, which enables you to strategize better, and so on.

A vital reflection to consider here is, from these descriptions, what areas do you improve in your cross-cultural communication?

Erin Meyer’s and Hofstead’s Cultural Dimensions

To evaluate where you stand with one another and draw conclusions that can make for stronger cross-cultural relationships with your team, we can use a part of Erin Meyer’s and Hofstead’s cultural dimensions. They are: 

1. Communicating: are they low-context vs. high-context?

• Low-context: Communication is precise, simple, and straightforward. 
• High-context: Communication is complex, layered, and more sophisticated.

2. Evaluating: do they prefer direct feedback vs. indirect feedback? 

• Direct feedback: They deliver negative feedback frankly, bluntly, and honestly without softening with positive feedback. 
• Indirect feedback: They deliver feedback softly, subtly, and diplomatically enveloped by positive feedback.

3. Trusting: are they more task-based vs. relationship-based?

• Task-based: “You deliver quality work consistently,” “I enjoy working with you” means “I trust you.”
• Relationship-based: “We’ve gotten to know each other better, we’ve shared time, meals, and drinks, and I know others who trust you” means “I trust you.”

4. Scheduling: are they more in line with linear-time vs. flexible-time?

• Linear-time: Focus on deadlines and stick to schedules and well-defined processes. Emphasis is on promptness and good organization. 
• Flexible-time: Tasks can be changed as opportunities arise. Many things can be dealt with at once, interruptions are acceptable, and meetings can extend over their proposed time.

5. Indulgence: do they lean more towards indulgence vs restraint?

• Indulgence: Value is put towards vacations, openly expressing emotions, and enjoying flexible work-life boundaries. 
• Restraint: Structure, discipline, and delaying gratification in favor of long-term goals are valued more than indulgent actions.

Evaluating dimensions cultural dimensions

On a scale, the leftmost being one aspect of a cultural dimension and another being on the rightmost side, you can add the countries with which you work the most. This helps you to create simple guidelines, not rules, which you can adjust with time and, most of all, with individual experiences. 

To be more accurate in your assessment, a cultural drive to check and research the countries of the people you collaborate the most with is a must. But remember: No generalization of people from a single country will be valid for everyone in that country. 

Now, you’re ready to start your journey toward improving your cultural intelligence to foster better and more fruitful collaborations. 

Consistently improve your cultural intelligence

Let’s return to our cultural intelligence components: drive, knowledge, strategy, and action. We must develop skills for each component to consistently improve our cultural intelligence. The question is, how?

Let’s quickly define how our perception of an interaction or event can be defined: 

1. Observation: we first observe what happens; 
2. Interpret: Then, we interpret the event through our perception of it;
3. Reaction: Then we react to it. 

We’ll take an extra step in our perception of an event to consistently improve our cultural intelligence.

1. Observation: we first observe what happens;
2. Cultural intelligence: we frame the event through our cultural drive and knowledge and the scale we’ve built;
3. Interpretation: we interpret the event and vet it through our cultural strategy;
4. Reaction: Now, we react to the event. Our reaction’s foundation will be our cultural understanding of ourselves and the person’s actions. 

While this works when all parts agree with each other or have given each other grace, there may still be times when an action that’s okay in a culture may not be viewed with kind eyes from another. 

For example, a boss from a high-context, relationship-based, and indulgent culture may be more warm and compliment people unrelated to their work. If you feel this needs to be more professional, ensure to deliver this feedback while framing your own culture and experiences. Hence, they understand that such compliments, when geared towards you or when you see them given to teammates, will have the opposite effect of what they intended.

The main takeaway is to understand that it may be a cultural misfit, a simple misunderstanding, or something else that may require intervention from a third party. We asked Mariia what the biggest challenge in cross-cultural collaboration is. Here’s what she had to say:

With that in mind, Awesomic is committed to creating a safe space for all our talent and core team members. We constantly develop and improve our cultural intelligence to boost collaboration efforts. 

Awesomic is looking for incredible people

Awesomic is continually working to deliver the perfect match and experience to our talents and clients. 

Are you a creative professional who wants to make a difference and dreams of collaborating with U.S.-based and European companies while being a part of a supportive community that values you as a person in our high-performance team? Sign up for the Awesomic Community today.

Best of luck! Stay awesome!