Cross Cultural Awareness improves your communication
Experience shows that intercultural competence is an essential faculty, both at the level of an organization and at the individual level, for international success. Intercultural competence is imbued with what is called Cross Cultural Awareness. The two therefore go hand in hand and mutually enrich each other throughout international projects and professional life.
Cultural Awareness permeates intercultural competence
If so many IT, marketing, sales or merger projects fail, including between countries of the European Union, it is mainly because of a lack of intercultural competence, and therefore, at the base, of a lack of of Cultural Awareness in the planning, design and implementation of strategies and project management.
Thus, international success depends on the individual and collective ability to communicate effectively with individuals from other countries and cultures to achieve a goal. But overcoming cultural differences is often seen as an obstacle to which intercultural training – often a random juxtaposition of country, linguistic and management training – cannot provide a satisfactory answer. This is for the simple reason that interpersonal communication does not lie solely in a sequence of standardized rules or decorum, but indeed in the exercise of sensitivity for the other. We must therefore become aware of nuances, as well as our own communicative flaws, but also our personal resources, in order to progress on the keyboard of intercultural and international communication. This soft skill is called Cultural Awareness. And the good news is that it can be learned and developed easily to enrich it, where necessary, with specific cultural knowledge and skills.
The method of intercultural learning
If the communicative process is first dominated by the individual perception of the actors, intercultural communication implies an additional complexity linked to cultural aspects, sometimes a source of misunderstandings. To avoid unpleasant surprises, the method of intercultural learning, associated with NLP, is an effective tool to improve intercultural competence, both at interpersonal levels and in project management beyond cultural barriers, which it it concerns IT projects, cooperation, the development of a marketing and sales strategy, or more generally intercultural management.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are. “
Anaïs Nin
Without an individual being forced to abandon his own system of values and without conceding what does not need to be, the intercultural awareness approach first promotes awareness, at the individual level, of filters cultural and bias in the interpretation of facts or situations, which can negatively affect communication and collaboration. This method, associated with NLP, makes it possible to identify, activate and develop personal and team resources within international projects, with the aim of developing appropriate solutions to achieve the objectives set, or simply to communicate better and derive personal satisfaction.
Cross Cultural Awareness is therefore the first step to initiate and sustainably maintain the process of learning intercultural competence.