Cross-cultural competencies are key to managing projects successfully across national borders in today’s world. Furthermore, simultaneously, cultural gaps must be overcome, as well as building on commonalities related to leading, communicating, reasoning, or persuading, among others.
While many organisations run projects successfully in their local environment, international projects becoming more challenging. As a result of this situation, companies are wondering how to build a global mindset and better understand other cultures, behaviors, and values.
On June 28th, 2022, Eurapco hosted the Culture Map Webinar to address the cultural gap challenges and also focus on best practices while inviting tips and lessons learned from the participants.
The main goal of the learning session was to help participants to understand others’ perceptions. Perception can quickly become the Co-Driver of Reality, and as such, the concept of Intent & Impact is important.
During the webinar, Simone-Eva Redrupp shared in an interactive keynote presentation; “What does having a global mindset mean when it comes to project management?”
Following her presentation, participants got insights on the topics of scheduling, communicating, leading, evaluating, and disagreeing as well as trusting. In addition to many reflections on how cultural differences influence these pillars, best practices were shared. Further to the insights and best practices, the attendees were also introduced to the five golden rules for virtual and global collaboration, which are as follows:
- Stay curious, listen, and observe with an open mind.
- Be explicit and over-communicate.
- Avoid closed Yes / No questions. Instead, use open-ended “W” questions (What / Where / When, etc) to create dialogues.
- Make the implicit explicit!
- Tell stories to make things colorful… and explain them.
The webinar was attended by representatives of the different Partner companies, and we would like to thank all the attendees for their engaged participation and insights. Furthermore, we don’t want to miss the opportunity to invite you to watch the video below to find more information about the topics presented.
