Diversity and multicultural teamwork are very much on today’s agenda. But what does it mean for your team, a specific group of people working together to reach a common goal?

 

Your team might be a global team working across borders or it could be a team in the same location but with colleagues from various cultural backgrounds and nationalities. Challenges often emerge when team members realize that what one sees as common sense might not be so common for everyone else in the team.

 

Besides being frustrating in the team's everyday communication and interaction, it also becomes a challenge for team effectiveness and team spirit.

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Understanding one’s own cultural upbringing and worldview plays a role in understanding the biases one might have in the workplace and how it affects interaction and behavior. But in a team there is a need to go beyond bias training and extend individual cultural awareness with a road map for how to visualize the cultural differences and exactly what challenges the specific team are facing.

 

Cultural mapping provide a baseline for the intercultural understanding in specific team. Team members become better at interpreting each other’s actions and reactions to each other’s preferred type of communication and thus cultural mapping help reduce conflicts and misunderstandings in everyday activities and problem solving.

 

Knowing the mix of cultural profiles on one’s team is essential for effective team performance and workplace satisfaction, so team leaders will get a new perspective on employees and team members acquire a new language to adresse miscommunication. 

 

Eventually, having a culturally high performing team will help the company’s ability to attract more diverse candidates and more broadly from the talent pool.