Define your team culture

Define your team culture with tools like the Culture Map.

Empirical research demonstrates the positive effect cultural diversity has on a business' bottom line. But when you, an American business person, schedules three meetings with your Ethiopian team mate and he shows up twenty minutes late to every meeting, you don’t think, “Look at all the diversity we have. This is great!” No, you think, “What’s his problem? This is crazy; how are we supposed to get any work done waiting a third of our time for others to catch up?”

A business needs diversity, but for smooth functioning it also needs an overarching team culture. The Ethiopian team mate may add an invaluable perspective to your operation, but he can do so under an agreed-upon definition of punctuality. A tool like Meyer’s Culture Map supplies an outline of each member’s cultural background in eight key areas. This can first serve the team’s leaders to narrow down the areas where their team is likely to have the greatest conflict over their differences, but it can also serve the team to share with one another their cultural perspectives in categories important to team functioning. This conversation can form the bedrock of the shared business culture that makes business possible when everyone is so different from one another.

If a team is left to define it’s own culture from the milieu of it’s individual members, the differences will look only like sources of conflict and tension. People who’ve lived in a mono culture don’t recognize their own cultural biases and can’t speak fairly about the pros and cons of their perspective. The Culture Map shares an outsider’s perspective with the team, allowing each person to look into the mirror of their own culture and view what makes their culture alike and different than other’s. The areas the Culture Map covers are critical to a functional team and will serve to keep the focus of the team’s agreements on what will best improve their relationships instead of descending into the a disorganized list of strange cultural facts and history. When a team agrees upon methods for relating in each of the eight areas; however, it can be a powerful magnet to draw each member into a single, efficient organization.

Culture isn’t easy to speak about with others. While I enjoy reading about cultural differences around the world, it’s another matter entirely to be in a room with Indian-background team mates and speak about how an Indian perspective differs from an American’s. What happens more often is, we shove our differences into the corner and embrace a unified culture. This does make us a more effective team, but I wonder if we miss our underlying similarities and differences when we don’t take the time to address our cultural perspectives in key areas, like those represented in the Culture Map. I’ve seen the huge value in a single, unified culture at Relativity, but I also wonder if we ever get to know one another in a less-than-superficial way. Because we adhere to agreed-upon standards of behavior, we can mistakenly believe that we are all basically the same, when in fact our cultures differ dramatically. I’d like to hear what other team members would say about any of the areas listed in the Culture Map.

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