Imagine that you are in charge of promoting diversity within your organization. You promptly start recruiting people with diverse backgrounds, and initially achieve some success. But not long after you see morale problems. New employees don’t feel welcome, and quit. Established employees feel that their talents and abilities are no longer valued, and so they...
Suppose you have a young employee, Emily, who has been on the job for just a month. She has been working hard on a marketing report, putting in long hours. She has just completed the report and you want to reward her. So you call her into your office, congratulate her, and offer to write...
About twelve years ago, a friend yelled at me for what he saw as constant interruptions. "You never let me finish talking," he said. I was confused. When had I ever interrupted him? After much discussion, I finally figured it out. What he considered an interruption -- saying "right" or "yes" while he was talking...
If you ever have to work with people who don’t speak any of the same languages as you, you will probably have to use an interpreter to make yourself understood. Interpreters are a highly valuable resource for cross-cultural communication -- but when things go wrong, they can go very wrong.
February 3, 2015 Alelo's Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Ph.D. has posted a blog entry on the Defense Language and National Security Education Office's (DLNSEO) "Culture Ready" web-site. The article discusses the positive impact of speaking the local language when in another culture. You can read the entire blog post at: http://www.cultureready.org/blog/rapport-and-local-languages
As Julie Dirksen notes in her book Design for How People Learn, the goal of good training design is “for learners to emerge from the learning experience with new or improved capabilities that they can take back to the real world, that help them do the things they need or want to do.” When learners...
