Virtual team managers must LEARN how to effectively communicate across cultures.  To complete the acronym, the focus of this week’s blog post is about strategy #5, the N of L E A R N.
 
Strategy #5   N o J u d g m e n t: NO JUDGMENT
 
Respecting others means suspending judgment.  Try this simple technique:
 
Instead of jumping to conclusions consider that your cultural lens may distort someone’s worldview. Consider several alternative possibilities and use this three-part evaluation approach:

1. Describe – “Nat joins the call late every Monday.”
2. Interpret – “Nat doesn’t care about the job.”
3. Evaluate – “I’ll give Nat the less desirable projects.”

 
Now think about the three-step evaluation approach with one additional step:

1. Describe – “Nat joins the call late every Monday.”

 
Before you make an assumptions, consider several reasons for his behavior.  For example:

• He has familial obligations every Monday morning.
• His start-of-week meeting with his boss always runs late because his boss wants to discuss a report that never arrives on time, thereby putting him behind schedule.
• He oversleeps after the weekend.
• He doesn’t care about the job.

Once you’ve formulated several hypotheses for Nat’s behavior, you are ready to make your interpretation:

2.  Interpret – “Nat’s tardiness could be due to a factor which may be out of his control.”

3.  Evaluate – “I will talk to Nat about his tardiness and learn more about why it’s happening.”

This ‘consider several options’ step is the one that many people skip, leading them to erroneous, and often biased, conclusions.
 

Need a lock for your refrigerator? A growing trend of the virtual workplace is working from home, even occasionally.  Many consider flexible work-from-home policies encouraging, producing increased productivity, decreased costs, greater choice for talent, and lower employee attrition.
 

This might be argued given the recent controversy when Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer called all virtual workers back to the office. Shortly after her announcement, New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd called it [...] Continue Reading…

Managing Virtual Teams

Monday, April 22, 2013 | 3:15pm-4:15pm,

Times Square, New York City
An increasingly digital workplace has more leaders managing teams spread around the world. This evolution in management structure requires new skills to produce the best performance from the members of your team. Our own AIM CEO and virtual team expert, Yael Zofi,  will help the audience identify the strategies needed to build and coach virtual teams that work [...] Continue Reading…

To LEARN how to effectively communicate across cultures and enable the R of L E A R N., we must first practice using Active Communication
 
 
Five Steps to Manage Differences

Look at these situations, some of which you may have experienced firsthand. The proposed solutions are taken from various client sessions where we brainstormed how best to respond to the issues stated below.
 

Yael Zofi

Virtual team managers must LEARN how to effectively communicate across cultures.  After a few weeks focused on creating transparency and overcoming ambiguity, we continue this week with strategy #4, the R of L E A R N.

 
Effective cross-cultural communication can be difficult if you have trouble showing respect for another’s differences.  A low score here does not mean that you don’t respect others; it means that your behavior may [...] Continue Reading…

We continue this week with the LEARN Cross Cultural Concept with strategy #3, the A of L E A R N = Avoid Ambiguity.

 
Awareness of culturally derived differences in behavior and communication is step one in decreasing ambiguity.  If you score low on this category from the Cultural Strategy Checklist on pages 64-65 of Communicating Through a Global Lens, How to Broaden Your Perspective in a Cross Cultural World, [...] Continue Reading…

by Trudy Channer
 
These days you cannot toss a stone without hitting a company that has multiple offices, a remote staff and/or an offshore support team. We are living and working in a time when we have to consider the global implications of decisions made about projects and resources.  But perhaps most importantly, we have to consider the implications for our workforce. Now is the time to focus our attention [...] Continue Reading…

Has Marissa Mayer lost her mind? That’s the question on everyone’s mind this week, ever since the new CEO of Yahoo announced that telecommuting will no longer be allowed for employees come June.

Telecommuting has become such a staple in the modern workplace–one of those things where we wonder how we ever lived without telecommuting and how could we ever go back?

Ms. Mayer must know something the rest of us [...] Continue Reading…

Virtual team managers must LEARN how to effectively communicate across cultures. This week we continue with the E of L E A R N = Effectively Communicate, and provide you guidelines for building and maximizing interpersonal relationships to help you enhance your virtual cross-cultural interactions.

Strategy #2 Keep it Transparent: EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE
Virtual teams need to compensate for the lack of visual and physical cues. The aim is to keep the [...] Continue Reading…

Virtual team managers must L E A R N how to effectively communicate across cultures. The following are guidelines to build interpersonal relationships, help maximize interactions and foster a collaborative environment. By utilizing the following five strategies, you will develop your cross cultural virtual communication and become a more effective virtual team player in these settings.
 
5 Strategies for Engaging in Effective Cross-Cultural Communications:
 
L ISTEN
E FFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE
A VOID AMBIGUITY
R ESPECT [...] Continue Reading…