(Written For Cultural Diversity At Work)

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ADC Associates The Human Side of Business

Synopsis Growth in the Asia-Pacific region creates many opportunities to work with diversity. Culture- specific training in such areas as business and personal etiquette and communication is important. Equally important is to examine underlying attitudes towards people from different cultures, races, and backgrounds. In a recent conversation with MBA students at RMIT University in Melbourne, I discussed diversity in Singapore, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia, and Australia with managers from those countries. Diversity issues were present in all countries, with a wide variety of specific issues and culturally appropriate approaches identified. Clearly, diversity is not an issue confined to “Western” countries, though the reasons for doing diversity work and the approaches necessary to make the work successful vary widely across cultures.

Introduction With the rise of the global marketplace and the spread of multinational organisations, working with diversity is becoming increasingly international. What are the implications for diversity work, and diversity practitioners, as they work cross-culturally in a global context? Is diversity work, as developed and practiced in the United States, relevant globally? Do U.S.-based diversity practices and the values underpinning those practices have such a distinctive cultural bias as to render them irrelevant in other cultures?

As an American born and raised in a White, middle-class, New England family, and a diversity practitioner who has lived and worked for the past seven years in Australia, working with diversity

ADC Associates 31 Ridge Road, Kallista, Vic, 3791 Australia Tel: +61 3 9756 7366 Fax: +61 3 9756 7399 Mobile +61 419 329 539 Email: [email protected] www.adc-assoc.com has been an expression of my desire to help organisations get their people working together better. My approach involves learning through a combination of experience, reflection, theory, and experimentation. I do believe that we can change both attitudes and behaviours if we wish, and that we can certainly expand our range of behaviours to produce more positive outcomes in our work and in our lives.

ADC Associates 2 31 Ridge Road, Kallista, Vic, 3791 Australia Tel: +61 3 9756 7366 Fax: +61 3 9756 7399 Mobile +61 419 329 539 Email: [email protected] www.adc-assoc.com Testing diversity in a global setting Recently I taught a class in "Managing Diversity" to MBA candidates -- all experienced managers -- at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. My students offered me the opportunity to test whether this American-style organisational development intervention makes sense to people from around the Asia-Pacific region. Roughly 70 percent of the class members were from outside Australia. Key represented groups were Chinese (PRC, ROC, and Overseas Chinese), Indonesian, Singaporean, Malaysian, Indian, and Thai. Using Cultural Diversity in Organisations, by Taylor Cox Jr., as our primary text, supported by many other supplementary writings and models, the class explored diversity at the personal, group, organisational, and national levels, with specific attention paid to leveraging diversity as a management strategy. Students worked in small multicultural action learning groups of four to five members. In most cases the Australians found themselves as the sole representative of Western culture in the team. As a team, each group had to assess an organisation's diversity strategy and make recommendations. Along the way each class member kept a journal of their personal experiences during the course.

By the end of the course, the students could all identify with diversity from a majority-minority perspective, and they found looking at the intersection of demographics, power relationships, and business outcomes to be a useful framework. Of course, membership in "majority" or "minority" varied from country to country and from situation to situation. But by applying the framework to their own culture, students were able to consider ways in which certain people in organisations are valued more, or less, because of a non-work-related characteristic, the social and economic impacts of people being devalued, and strategies for achieving more positive, useful outcomes. (As I write, I am acutely aware of the underlying Western substrate of meaning behind words such as "positive" and "useful". In many countries, words such as "harmonious" or "respectful" would be more appropriate.)

Of particular interest were the students' personal journals. In them, the Asian managers spoke openly, with clarity and emotion, of personal experiences of discrimination, being devalued, caught in a cross-cultural crossfire (for example, being the only ethnic Chinese manager in a factory employing all Javanese staff and all Korean management). The eloquence of the students' writings

ADC Associates 3 31 Ridge Road, Kallista, Vic, 3791 Australia Tel: +61 3 9756 7366 Fax: +61 3 9756 7399 Mobile +61 419 329 539 Email: [email protected] www.adc-assoc.com belied the quiet, more considered verbal approach they took in class, where discussions were frequently dominated by the Australians.

As a teacher and group leader, I also had much to learn-not only about the attitudes, values, beliefs, and experiences of managers from a rich mixture of cultures, but about how to work with these cultures. As a teacher/facilitator it was critical to explore such questions as: what are group norms for these cultures; what are their expectations and their comfort zones regarding group dynamics (spoken or unspoken), leadership (hierarchical or egalitarian), education (formal or participative), or experiential learning?

Applying the lessons So what lessons can this experience offer regarding the applicability of diversity work outside the United States? Yes, the work is applicable. No, the U.S. approach is not entirely useful or appropriate in many, perhaps most, other countries in the world. U.S. assumptions about what “diversity” means, what the most important aspects of diversity are, what the important social tensions are (do you focus on race, gender, thinking style, or none of these?), need to be left open as areas for exploration, not assumed as obvious facts.

Understanding our own values and behaviours helps us in our interactions with other people. Becoming more aware of our own cultural lenses enables us to better recognise differences and similarities and others. Better understanding of ourselves, coupled with better understanding of others, leads to building more effective relationships-for business, for personal satisfaction, for tackling pressing social problems.

Often, we Americans tend to equate our own values with universal values. Concepts such as freedom, equality, and social justice have particular meanings to Americans, meanings not shared by all cultures. (It is useful to remember that if the global village consisted of 1000 people about 510 villagers would be Chinese and about 60 would be North Americans.) Americans also tend not to be culturally curious-we are often unaware of our own culture ,and of our (and our culture's) affect on the people around us in the global village. At a deep level many Americans have been socialized to believe that our culture and practices are superior, so while we try to be polite, we do not engage in ways that allow us to learn from other cultures.

ADC Associates 4 31 Ridge Road, Kallista, Vic, 3791 Australia Tel: +61 3 9756 7366 Fax: +61 3 9756 7399 Mobile +61 419 329 539 Email: [email protected] www.adc-assoc.com A sure way to make our work more difficult as diversity practitioners is to attempt to replicate elsewhere the processes we use in our own culture. As an American, I find it especially important to listen to the ways the host culture describes American culture. Some or much of it we may be naturally inclined to laugh off as irrelevant or stereotyping. But pause. Listen. Think about it. Understand the nuance. Even people in countries friendly to the U.S.A., such as Australia, have complex reactions to U.S. culture and to us as its representatives. Some of those reactions are negative, often with good reason. Remember that most "foreigners" will know far more about us than we will about them, if only through their exposure to U.S. culture in the media. They also have different social structures and values, and different social pressures. Their assumptions-about how to work with diversity and the reasons to do the work-will be quite different from ours.

So let us come back to the question: is the U.S. approach to diversity relevant worldwide? If our intended outcome is to create solutions for developing the full potential of all people, then in my experience, the answer is "yes, but" only if we acknowledge our own cultural lenses and are willing to listen and learn. In this way we are all teachers and all students, searching for solutions that are both liberating and culturally contexted enough to be workable.

A useful description of this kind of mutuality was given by J. Krishnamurti: "The right communion is only possible when the teacher and student function at the same level, communicating through question and counter question, until in the act of learning the problem is explored fully and understanding illumines the mind of the student and the teacher simultaneously." I believe this attitude is essential to successfully engaging in diversity work in a global context.

ADC Associates 5 31 Ridge Road, Kallista, Vic, 3791 Australia Tel: +61 3 9756 7366 Fax: +61 3 9756 7399 Mobile +61 419 329 539 Email: [email protected] www.adc-assoc.com