Intercultural competence is a success factor in the international project management
Reference is frequently made to the four major talents of the project manager: organization and management of the project, team management, good relational practices, the ability to ensure a good level of performance by generating commitment to the project. Despite this, international projects regularly fail, mainly due to a lack of social and intercultural competence.
Achieve your goals through well-calibrated intercultural communication
Managing an international project, whether classic or agile, means negotiating with various value systems, both entrepreneurial and cultural, with actors whose relationship to time, budget, work, hierarchy can diverge strongly, even within a European team from countries neighboring each other. To hide these intercultural factors or not want to be aware of them is to program difficulties and failure from the start.
The development of an intercultural awareness, or cross cultural, is a guarantee of success which strengthens the intercultural and social competence of the manager and his team. By also becoming aware of the position and role of the project manager, not only within the multicultural ecosystem, but also at the interface of internal and external hierarchies, it will be easier to gauge the forces present, to assess risks, understand opaque decision-making processes and ultimately develop a scalable, solutions-oriented strategy that alleviates tensions, defuses conflict, and ensures the engagement of all stakeholders in order to achieve the common goal of the project.
To sum up, integrating intercultural competence into the methodology of project management makes it possible to:
- Reduce the risk of project delay and failure
- Identify and name the opportunities and risks at the time of the preliminary design
- Recognize the forces present and develop a position of power
- Understand what impacts the success of a project and properly convey the objectives and their adjustments
- Have benchmarks to animate the project and the intercultural collaborative process, but also multigenerational
- Manage proactively
- Recognize hidden information and interpret it properly
- Improve your communication, communication flow as well as relationship practices
- Mobilize mental resources as well as the experience of the team to integrate them into the project
- Recognize and avoid pitfalls and old mistakes
- Develop new mental strategies to better structure and adapt your approach
- Understand the “political” problems of the project and defuse them
- Strengthen your leadership
- Accurately assess your training or coaching needs
- Decrease stress and its negative influence on privacy
Are you in charge of an international IT, marketing, industrial, sales or cooperation project, and are you in a difficult phase? So get in touch here.