Meeting Your Objectives

 Meeting Your Objectives

Drawing Creativity from Worldwide Sources

Last week I flew to a place I would call surreal. Yes, I went to Des Moines, Iowa, to teach a class on virtual teams written by a colleague of mine. As we explored cross-cultural value differences and how they affect teams across borders, one of the participants in the class raised his hand.

"I agree that as team leaders we need to be accommodating to a degree, but sometimes it seems like cross-cultural awareness is about pleasing everyone, and we all know that doesn't work."

This was not the first time I had come across this comment - after all, having to please everyone is not good for business. And sometimes people come in contact with cultural practices that make them extremely uncomfortable or that they don't believe are right. When clients ask me if they should say "this is how it's going to be" or "let me take your cultural practices into account," I say this: wrong question.

The more effective question is how will you meet your business objectives?

Take the following example: A team leader has multiple cultures on his team with multiple levels of English fluency. Some members of the team have a heavier accent than others, which brings complaints from native English speakers.

Should the team leader tell the native speakers to "get over it" or should he tell the non-native speakers to take accent reduction classes? Again, wrong question. The leader should ask, "What is my objective?"

His objective is to have a well-functioning, professionally satisfied team that can complete project ABC by a certain date. What did he need to do to meet that objective?

In this case, the team leader set an expectation for all members that dealing with language barriers was part of their job. They all needed to be resourceful in making communication is smooth is possible. Team members came up with all kids of creative solutions, everything from asking people to slow down, using humor, studying language on their own and so on.

When you take the approach of meeting objectives (which should include people and their strengths), all kinds of possibilities begin to emerge, especially on a multicultural team where more and differing perspectives are likely.

When obstacles arise, put the challenge to your team. State your objectives and let them exert their wisdom and creativity to come up with solutions. Lead when you need to lead and make bold decisions when they are called for.

The idea is not to please all of the people all of the time, but to allow multiple paths by which to reach the same objective. How creative will you be?

Vicki Flier Hudson
President, Highroad Presentations
www.highroaders.com
Phone: (001) 770-936-9209
E-Mail: vicki@highroaders.com