You are starting where most of my clients find themselves. You cannot see what is happening when you communicate within intercultural contexts. We all suffer from intercultural blind spots — you cannot change what you cannot see. What I find is that most people using English within intercultural contexts see the need for improvement. However, they cannot see exactly what kind of improvement is needed. My hope is that the intercultural communication articles below will help you begin that journey.
We build our futures together in the words we exchange today
Communication is a two-way street called intercommunication. If neither side knows how to take responsibility for communicating clearly and concisely, then miscommunication is inevitable. By becoming more aware of what is required within intercultural business contexts, you can not only speak and listen better, but can also help others speak and listen better.
After decades of experience in a variety of communication fields, including work with international companies, my five-step CLEAR method for expressing opinions has been designed to establish such a standard; one that is effective, while also being simple to learn and to apply. It’s a standard that is flexible enough to be endlessly adapted to suit your needs as they change over the course of your intercultural career. My sincerest desire is that you master expressing your opinions in English as a second language clearly, concisely and confidently.
Intercultural Communication Articles
Requesting and Promising Across Cultures
Regardless of your culture, the expectation is that if a promise is made it will be kept. While that seems straightforward enough, several problems arise when working across cultures.
Build Trust Across Cultures by Keeping Your Promises
I recommend to you what I recommend to my clients who work across cultures — keep your promises to everyone 100% of the time to build trust.
How to Inspire Intercultural Trust
We have double standards with regards to trust. We expect others to trust us automatically, even when we are not willing to trust others automatically ourselves.
How to Evaluate Intercultural Mistrust
Ideally when working across cultures you should be prepared to be more flexible about how much sincerity you expect from people before you evaluate them as insincere.
How to Cultivate Trust Across Cultures
Trust is an important issue when working across cultures. Deciding whether you trust someone or not will influence how you work with that person in the present and in the future
Overcome Overwhelm and Confusion when Adapting Across Cultures
In the previous two articles I explored how to see what to change and then determine whether that is open to change or not. Why? Because you can’t change what you can’t see and you cannot change what is not open to change.
Stop Wasting Time When Adapting Across Cultures
Once you can see what to change, you can change it, right? Actually, this depends on whether what you want to change can in fact be changed. The surest road to endless frustration is trying to change something that is not open to change.
Communicating Differently is the Key to Adapting Across Cultures
Are you having difficulties adapting across cultures when communicating? Do you conclude that it’s because you are not adaptable enough? Whenever a client says “I am not adaptable enough” I hear it as a desire to change but without any clear direction of exactly what to change.
Master the Universal Language for Communicating Across Cultures
If I told you that there was a universal language that you could use in all your spoken and written business communications with people of other cultures, would you want to learn it? Right answer! In this article I will challenge some of your assumptions about the complexity of intercultural communication.
Are You Uncomfortable When Communicating Across Cultures?
Do you expect to feel comfortable using English as a second language when writing an email, making a phone call, expressing yourself during a meeting, writing a report, giving a presentation, and so on? Which gives you the most discomfort — writing in English or speaking in English?
Slack Needs to Learn the Universal Language
There is an unchallenged assumption within the current conversation about the value of new group chat tools such as Slack and HipChat, which is that is that people innately know how to speak, write and listen effectively.
Intercultural Blamestorming: Take the Blame Out of Communicating Across Cultures
What I have observed over the decades is that both within the same culture or across cultures, when communication goes wrong there is a tendency to engage in blamestorming.
The Top Two Mistakes to Avoid When Making Requests Across Cultures
Unfortunately, few people are aware to what degree they have been conditioned by their cultures about the “right” way to make a request, to respond to a request and to fulfill a request.
Communicating Clearly Across Cultures
We simply don’t recognize that many of the problems we encounter in our daily work, in both our own cultures and internationally, can be solved by paying attention to speaking and listening.
Do You Need Intercultural Communication Training?
I am convinced that no single method or approach provides a complete answer to the changes we all have to make continually when working across cultures.
The Top 5 Lies Told by Intercultural Teams
I hear many of my clients, who work within intercultural teams, tell the five lies in this article. I call these lies “intercultural blind spots.”
How to Build Intercultural Trust in Just Five Minutes
Doing business globally depends on trust. And it’s clear that the greater the trust, the greater the ability to conduct business effectively across cultures.
Can Skype Translator Improve Intercultural Communication?
While I welcome technological progress like Skype Translator, my hope is that such technology can eventually serve the higher purpose of shattering the universal illusion that intercultural communication is actually taking place.
Do You Have the Illusion that Intercultural Communication is Taking Place?
The single biggest problem in intercultural communication is the illusion that communication is taking place.
Exercise Intercultural Wisdom
Knowing what you do not know is a sign of wisdom, according to Greek philosopher Socrates. A good example of this is intercultural wisdom.
Innovate More Effective Intercultural Business Communications
Within intercultural business contexts it’s generally agreed that improving intercultural communication is important. Unfortunately, specific guidelines for what needs to be done and how to accomplish it are rarely identified and implemented.
Build Your Intercultural Identity
Effective intercultural communicators know that their intercultural identity is like a puzzle that is built piece by piece.
Cultivate Intercultural Heart
Regardless of who they are communicating with, or in what situation, the best intercultural communicators have a heartfelt desire to build a bridge to their listeners.
Listen with Intercultural Ears and See with Intercultural Eyes
Did you know that you listen with cultural ears and see with cultural eyes? What I mean by that is that how you interpret what is being said or written has been culturally conditioned.
Do You Adapt First Within Your Intercultural Context?
Do you adapt first within your intercultural context? If you do — bravo! That means you don’t a keep a who-should-adapt-to-who-first score card.
Take More Intercultural Communication Risks
Speaking a foreign language, adapting to understanding different accents and styles of speaking, as well as not knowing what is appropriate to say, and what is taboo, can cause you to doubt yourself.
The Conversational Model of Management: Shaping a Better Future Together
Managers need to communicate as effectively as possible. This is especially true within intercultural business environments in which the need to communicate quickly, and navigate the countless intercultural communication unknowns, is leading many managers to question their communication skills.
Improve How You Speak English in Just 10 Minutes a Day
When clients ask me for a simple suggestion about how to improve their English, I say, “Read out loud in English for just ten minutes every day.”
The Magic of Language Crosses Cultures
I am dedicated to seeing how we can all expand our intercultural communication skills by being more aware of how magical speaking and listening really are.
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Intercultural Communicators
I’ve identified seven communication habits of highly effective intercultural communicators, drawn from my training and consulting work with clients operating within intercultural business environments
Are You Too Old to Expand Your Intercultural Communication Skills?
Have you been working in an intercultural context now for several years? Do you consider yourself a “senior” and believe that there is really not much more you can learn, with the result that you have stopped trying?
Intercultural Communication Challenges in the Hospitality Industry
Employee behavior is typically observed by owners or managers and methodically adjusted over time to create a consistent experience for customers that’s a match for the brand values of the establishment.
Why Adapt How You Communicate for Intercultural Business?
Rarely do I find someone embracing adaptation, especially when it involves adapting how he or she communicates for an intercultural business context.
Three Ways to Improve How Colleagues from Other Cultures Hear You
Are you aware that within intercultural contexts, all of us listen with cultural ears? Therefore, as speakers and writers we have to take more responsibility for the listening side of communication within intercultural business contexts.
How to Build Bridges when Communicating Across Cultures
When I am asked to explain how my five-step CLEAR method can be helpful to a client in a single sentence, this is what I say: it is a way to build bridges, instead of walls, when communicating across cultures.
Three Ways to Improve How You Communicate with Colleagues from Other Cultures
Are you having trouble improving how you communicate with colleagues from other cultures? If so, this should not come as a surprise, since most of us have not learned how to communicate interculturally. We have never been shown how to adapt our speaking, writing and listening to an intercultural context.
Communicating Interculturally Takes More than Speaking English Well
Are you currently working within an intercultural business context, using English as a foreign language at an intermediate level or higher? And are you struggling with intercultural communication challenges?
Simplifying Intercultural Business Meetings
After a recent session a client told me that, “You’re a magician. I understand others better and feel much more comfortable using English during meetings, thanks to you.”
Can You Effectively Adapt to Your Intercultural Business Context?
Within your particular intercultural business context, do you have discussions about the need to adapt? If so, do these discussions include comments on how successful some people are at adapting, while others resist changing?
Can You Learn to Listen with Intercultural Ears and See with Intercultural Eyes?
The cultural background of the listener plays a large role in determining whether a loud voice and animated body language will be interpreted positively or negatively.
Lady Gaga Demonstrates the Perils of Intercultural Communication
Meaning is often not in the words but in the cultural listening, which leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
Do We Lose Our Identities within Intercultural Business Contexts?
Exactly who am I when I communicate using English as a second language for my work in intercultural environments?
Are You the Ideal Intercultural Communication Client?
What would I be looking for in the ideal client? Here’s my wish list.
The Intercultural Communication Challenges of Skype Meetings
The difficulty and dissatisfaction of using Skype to conduct meetings in an intercultural context is not due to the most obvious reasons.
Solving Intercultural Communication Problems
Are you are a manager or leader of an intercultural team? Or do you work within an intercultural company? If so, are you experiencing intercultural communication problems?
Are You Clear When Making Requests Within Intercultural Contexts?
When I raise the topic in my seminars of making clear requests within intercultural business contexts, participants wonder at first what there is to say about something that seems so self evident.
Do You Fear Simplicity When Communicating Interculturally?
When I raise the topic in my seminars of making clear requests within intercultural business contexts, participants wonder at first what there is to say about something that seems so self evident.
Redefining Intercultural Communication
This provides an overview of the labels used in intercultural communication studies: individualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures.
What is Your Cultural Dance of Opinions?
We can practice bringing a mood of lightness to our dance of opinions within intercultural business contexts.
Overcoming the Challenges of Intercultural Presentations
Even when faced with complex communication challenges, you can create and share intercultural presentations that stand out, thanks to their clarity, authority and humanity.
What is the Cost of Intercultural Silence?
In a previous post I talked about the mistakes we make when we listen, so now I want to address how we listen to silence.
How You Can Simplify Intercultural Communication
Speaking, writing and listening seem complex when you use English as a foreign language within an intercultural business context.
Do You Make this Mistake When Listening?
In intercultural business contexts you can change how you listen. Remind yourself that the act of speaking and listening is not an equation.
Why Take the Lead in Improving Your Intercultural Communication Skills?
Not all my clients are immediately enthusiastic about improving their intercultural communication skills.
Do You Know that You Have a Unique Communication Style?
Not surprisingly, within intercultural contexts we all bring our unique communication style to using English as a second language.
Keeping Up with the Intercultural Present
Everyone is doing their best in a very predictable way: the way they learned to communicate in their personal, cultural and professional past.
The Unique Cry for Help within Intercultural Businesses
If you listen closely, there is a unique cry for help that can be heard within intercultural businesses everywhere.
Accept Discomfort
There are countless differences within intercultural business contexts that you are constantly being challenged to adapt to.
More intercultural communication articles.
