Doing business across cultures_13

THE RECONCILING ORGANIZATION those who look different decide they might as well be different too. Hence many kinds of reconciliation contribute to novelty. Our approach is that we help an organization compose a policy document in which reconciliation permeates every function of the corporation to comprise an overall philosophy. All is lost if you make reconciliation into just an HR responsibility, or if it remains only as an advertised aspiration. Compartmentalize reconciliation and other functions will believe it is your job, not theirs. They do not have to include diverse people; you do. We must weave reconciliation into strategy, into corporate ethics, into customer and market relationships, into recruitment and career planning, into training and personal policies and activities. The inclusion of reconciliation has to be woven into the fabric of the cor-poration itself. Every department has to know its challenges and how these should be met. This will take a lot of drafting and a lot of consultation, but it will help solve the problem you will otherwise hear – that line managers do not seem to know what reconciliation means to them, nor what they should do about it. We must not become sentimental about reconciliation. It is a chasm across which we must learn to leap with all our strength. The time to celebrate is when we reach the other side. Our own approach to reconciliation is more conscious of the chal-lenge and the necessary responses, of the pains that must be endured if the gains are to be realized. Confronting reconciliation is a necessary risk for a company of global scope, but the “million-dollar misunderstandings” must be looked at, long and hard, so as not to repeat them, or even better, so as to learn from the mistakes of others. 319 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES APPROACHES TO EMBEDDING RECONCILIATION Our evidence from research and consulting reveals that the process of embedding will happen through correctly identifying an organi-zation’s more successful units, whether the strategy has come top-down or bottom-up, or with help from customers. We learn from and formalize what works best. Individuals, teams, and business units rarely manage to benefit optimally from the value of reconcili-ation wholly outside their active working environment. Furthermore, embedding the new way of thinking and doing is best achieved when combined with actual business operations and actions. When acting upon current business priorities and initia-tives, coupled with structured self-discovery and reflection, the constant interplay among these elements over time is what creates lasting change. We often begin with an inventory of current issues and initiatives, discuss the points of entry and prioritize the issues, in order to ensure that some relatively simple added-value suggestions may be included among activities already planned and scheduled. These are intended to create minimal disturbance to existing plans. We can then proceed to some more ambitious projects that would take time to complete and for which there would necessarily be some reorga-nization and co-development. In order to create the Reconciling Organization, we can identify a three-phase process: • Phase 1: Diagnosing Leadership Strategy and Issues • Phase 2: Transfer and Embedding through work sessions • Phase 3: Transfer and Integration of Learning Loops Typically, this could pan out over a period… 320 THE RECONCILING ORGANIZATION Phase 1 2 months Preparation and Launch ® Phase 2 1 month Transfer and Embedding Through Work Sessions ® Phase 3 ongoing Transfer and Integration Learning Loops Research and review Validate tensions and ThroughWise™ Interview executive board Interview sponsors and key players Program designs Material designs WebCue™ “interviews” Planning and scheduling dilemmas for target groups Two-day reconciliation work sessions Methodology transfer classes Life Line coaching of co-facilitators Key Initiative sessions Collections, feedback, evaluation Competency measurement Continued LifeLine coaching of facilitators Next step planning Figure 10.1 The three-phase process PHASE 1: DIAGNOSING LEADERSHIP STRATEGY AND ISSUES The best way we found to begin embedding dilemma reconciliation thinking within an organization is to start with the most senior ally you can find to champion the cause, preferably the CEO, COO, divi-sion head or other key strategists. Initially, they do not need to use dilemma reconciliation or be converted to it, but only agree that it illumines their leadership and provides a rationale for it. Nor does this leader have to have an articulated strategy. It might be even more useful to have issues or challenges that must be met, problems that must be solved, answers that must be found. These are issues or dilemmas facing the whole industry. If the particular 321 BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES organization concerned works out solutions quicker than its com-petitors, it will prevail. We often support the identifying and mapping of strategic issues, facilitate the process of working on reconciling the issues, and map the joint action plan. This initial phase has two intrinsic rationales. Firstly, it has the nature of an intervention, namely to identify, map, and work out the issues. Secondly, it is also a way of introducing the reconciling way of thinking and doing so with top leaders in the context of them engaging themselves to solve issues which they relate to. This helps to ensure the support of these top leaders from the very start and gain their commitment to embedding the process in the future. After this initial process of face-to-face interviews, we cross-validate the finding by our online interactive WebCue™ with a larger num-ber of leaders and senior managers across the organization. Face-to-face interviews with CEOs and other key strategists An advantage of starting at the top is that you can develop your mandate from those generating strategy and all your subsequent activities can be a means of fulfilling them. You build the compe-tences demanded by the company’s mission and strategy. All those “developed” know why and what they are supposed to do with these new skills. The dilemma approach helps to spell out for everyone’s agreement what this or that policy would entail. It also satirizes any direction pushed to an extreme. Statements by senior persons can be turned into policy maps on which progress can be plotted and gains mea-sured, while you act with the fullest authority. The advantage of the dilemma format is that leaders get to pose 322 THE RECONCILING ORGANIZATION questions and to flag crucial issues, to which the rest of their teams now have the duty of finding answers and solutions. It is becoming increasingly impossible for leaders to be omniscient about every cor-ner of the globe and they should not be encouraged to try. Leaders have to become Inquirers-in-Chief who know what the dilemmas are, but need their people to find solutions. Cross-cultural compe-tence cannot be commanded from on high; it needs to be learned by error and correction. It is increasingly the job of business leaders to define excellence. It is the job of HR and others to help the employees get there. There is genuine respect between leaders and employees where the former want to know about key issues, and the latter – who are closer to customers – can discover the answers. The basis of dialogue is that questions need answering, theories need data to confirm or refute them, dilemmas need reconciliations. Through our consulting work we have found that the Integration Theory of leadership is effective in a variety of key business pro-cesses ranging from selection, team building, and learning. Selection instruments need to be adapted to be able to “scan” intercultural competence in the manner we described in Chapter Seven when we enriched MBTI from a bi-polar instrument to a two-dimensional one that can measure the degree to which the leader concerned has a propensity to reconcile (see also Trompenaars and Woolliams, 2002). We have also found that leaders can be more effective in practice by reconciling dilemmas raised within teams and learning environ-ments. Use of WebCue™ We have referred previously to the use of our online WebCue™ “interview” tools. In the context of seeking to embed dilemma think-ing with the organization, we use these WebCues™ primarily to 323 ... - tailieumienphi.vn