Currently, 80% of our General Managers-the people responsible for running our operations around the world-are expatriates. These individuals have worked in an average of six different countries on different continents in 10-20 years. The same is true of many other senior employees. I became an expatriate myself in 1995 when I moved from Italy, my country of origin, to the Bata Limited international office here in Canada. Communicating with managers from all over the world is a daily reality for me.
Our management development program, Elixir Vitae, identifies bright, highly motivated, well-educated individuals with an international mindset and education. We put them in a fast-track 12-to 14-month intensive training program and place them in a country of their choice. Our future expatriates visit and work in the host country two or three months before they and their families actually move there to get information about the country, the company environment, and the future job. They are our Bata international managers of the future.
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey argues that all our interactions are colored by the amount of courage we have to display our feelings and convictions and the amount of consideration we have for the feelings and convictions of others. Win / win situations / transactions / international business communication occur only when we adopt a paradigm of both high courage and high consideration. We want such people for international assignments: someone who knows how to demonstrate his/her culture's positive characteristics, but who also knows how to speak positively of the strengths of the other culture, who has the skills to bridge cultural gaps once he/she encounters them, and who knows how to understand and appreciate (or at least accept) differences.
Achieving cultural competence requires more than just memorizing a list of facts about a specific country or learning its language-important though these are. Cultural competence requires learning to expect differences and having a positive attitude toward challenges and change.
Our values, priorities, and practices are shaped by the culture in which we grow up. Understanding other cultures is crucial if you want to sell your products in other countries, manage an international plant or office, or work in this country for a multinational company headquartered in another country.
This chapter focuses on cultural differences that are linked to national origin. Other kinds of diversity are discussed in Chapter 13.
As Brenda Arbelaez suggests, the successful international communicator is
• Aware that his or her preferred values and behaviors are influenced by culture and are not necessarily "right."