Top Tips for Female Lawyers
Top Tips for Female Lawyers
September 18, 2018
Why Training is Essential for Customer Satisfaction
Why Training is Essential for Customer Satisfaction
September 29, 2018

Improved Leadership Through Cross Cultural Awareness

Four Essential Qualities for Aspiring Lawyers

Diversity is a popular business buzzword at present, but while it may be trending at the moment, there is good reason to suspect it may outlast many other buzzwords.

This is because diversity in the workplace can bring innovation and expansion through new skills, and fresh talent. It can increase potential, secure new developments and give rise to a new, varied client base.

For managers, this means it is time to broaden their horizons, and examine their views and beliefs, in order to ensure a diverse variety of employees are secured and retained.

Cross cultural training is an ideal opportunity for management to get to grips with their own diversity awareness and ensure they create an inclusive environment within their workplace.

Building an effective, diverse workforce, and creating an inclusive work environment, are essential to the success of management teams. Research often shows that multicultural teams perform better than mono-cultural ones, if they are trained and managed properly.

The following points will help you, and your team, to understand your requirements for cultural training – how it can help to develop new intercultural communication skills, improve cross cultural leadership, and bridge social and ethnic gaps, enhancing teamwork and success.

Know Your Strengths (and weaknesses)

An essential part of any successful cross cultural training involves the learner’s wisdom and honesty in assessing and understanding their own strengths, and more importantly, their weaknesses.

Understanding which areas you need to work on will ensure you gain more depth from your training.

By integrating a self-assessment process into your employee reviews, you can monitor areas that require attention and apply training to suit. However, in order to fully appreciate the needs of others you must also be willing to take stock of your own standards or shortcomings, and also the areas in which you are confident. Inspiring change in others is best led by example!

Intercultural training courses can provide resources and teach best practice methods in order to help you examine your patterns concerning issues such as, religion, race, gender, generational difference, socio-economic backgrounds, and so on.

Once these have been identified it is far easier to move forward with learning objectives, enriching your comprehension and enabling greater leadership abilities.

Strengthen Your Squad

Effective managers understand the success that can be achieved through a diverse team, actively encouraging policies that highlight cultural and self-awareness, and cooperation between all team members.

Advanced cultural awareness training can lead to an increase in cultural sensitivity, the ability to pre-empt issues through well-timed training and planning, and improve communication, alongside promoting a shared vision.

These factors encourage your squad to work together for the benefit of your organisation, leading to satisfied staff, and happy customers.

 

The Concept of Culture

Culture can be classified as the features of a particular group of people. It can encompass characteristics such as, language, religion, societal norms, work patterns, family and philosophical beliefs.

Our culture make us different, interesting, unique, exceptional and fascinating. Cultural difference can be a positive force – when properly managed and understood.

Cultural variances in the work place can impact employees, managers, customers, and ultimately, business. However, this doesn’t have to be in a negative way.

Cultural variances can lead to a unique workforce, with new talents, a broader client base, and a dynamic team.

Managing this dynamic team will require some formal training in order to ensure you can all enjoy the benefits of such a varied team. Multicultural awareness courses can assist managers, and their staff, in getting the most from multicultural teams; promoting communication, developing cultural sensitivity and informing on culturally diverse work practices.

 

In order to meet the challenges of a multi-cultural team, managers should have the necessary skills to influence this cultural diversity making it a source of inspiration and strength.

Managing a culturally diverse team can often be an amazing experience. Shrewd leaders will take the time to understand how these cultural differences can be an asset to the company; undertaking multicultural awareness courses, assessing their own (and their co-workers) strengths and weaknesses, and learning how to communicate positively with such a varied workforce, will all encourage an inspirational team who work together for the benefit of the company.