Your Company Needs an Intercultural Mediator. Here’s Why.

Understanding somebody who is culturally different is extremely difficult.

People tend to forget that intercultural communication is a skill. And like any other skill, it takes years and years to develop the necessary expertise to truly master this skill.

We have different needs, different beliefs, different worldviews, different thought patterns, different ways of communicating.

All of these differences make it extremely hard for people from different cultural environments to really ‘get each other’.

And yet, intercultural communication has a lot of factors that make it extremely difficult to master this skill.

Firstly, there is no ‘obvious’ way of learning how to get better at it. Secondly, it is difficult to measure ‘expertise’ in intercultural communication. And thirdly, there is such a large variety of cultures in the world that nobody can ever hope to ‘understand them all’.

Nonetheless, there are people who have….

… a significantly better ability to put themselves into the perspective of people from a different cultural environment

… the ability to adjust your behavior in ways that suits the needs of the other party

… the ability to be exposed to a new belief system and analyse it much quicker than most people.

Finding people with these abilities is extremely difficult.

It starts with the fact that is not easy to find somebody who has had exposure to a large number of different cultures on a long-term basis.

Then, this person also needs to have developed the necessary mental- and behavioral flexibility in order to adjust him or herself to that new cultural environment. This requires a large degree of intercultural empathy and perspective taking.

He or she needs to have the ability to look at seemingly paradoxical ways of looking at the world and find creative solutions to integrate them into a larger whole.

But that’s not all: without the ability to help people who have spent most of their lives in their own country to understand the different perspective of the people from another cultural environment, these skills will also be useless from a corporate perspective.

After all, our goal in hiring this individual is to have somebody on the team who can facilitate the communication process with others.

International communication situations among people without the necessary intercultural expertise will end up disastrous

One of the main problems with this is that these problems also do not necessarily show themselves quickly enough.

While we may think that everything is in order, the reality might be something completely different.

There will be resentments behind each other’s backs. Misunderstandings that show themselves only when it is already too late. Mistakes that result in high expenses to resolve problems. Missed business opportunities and so on and so forth.

Of course, this also makes problem-solving incredibly difficult.

One good example is that of an American firm that tried to establish a partnership with a Japanese firm. While they seemed to make for a good match, the Japanese side suddenly dropped out of the negotiation process without giving any reasons.

What had happened?

The Americans had suddenly presented a 50-page contract to the Japanese outlining the conditions of a potential partnership.

Since the Japanese have a much more relationship-based approach in their communication processes, they felt a lack of willingness from the side of the Americans to first build up the relationship and establish the necessary degree of trust to go further in their partnership.

So, what to look for when hiring an intercultural mediator?

The fact that somebody has several years of experience in dealing with different cultural environments simply isn’t enough.

We have to keep in mind that it is perfectly possible for somebody to spend years overseas and to spend a significant amount of time in the ‘expat bubble’.

In that circumstances, he or she is largely dealing with other foreigners who, although perhaps from different countries originally, are mostly well-versed in ‘international culture’.

While adapting to this international culture originally takes an effort from the perspective of adapting to it, ultimately it leads to stagnation as we are surrounding ourselves with people from similar backgrounds over and over again.

Consequently, it is relatively difficult to tell whether or not somebody has developed his or her intercultural communication abilities to the point that he or she can take on the perspective of a different culture altogether.

And yet, there are some questions that will help you to determine whether the candidate has some ‘real’ intercultural communication skills.

Some questions to include are:

• how much time have you spend with local people in your host culture as opposed to other foreigners?
• to what degree have you been successful in learning the local language?
• could you please describe some situations in which a communication process with somebody from another culture has gone out of hand. What were the causes of the conflict and what would you do differently now?
• could you please describe some beliefs of people from another culture and how they differ from the one’s you grew up with?
• could you please describe a situation where you had to adjust your behavior significantly in order to achieve the outcomes you were looking for?
• could you please describe some of the biases that make it difficult for you to understand the perspective of the people from another culture?
• could you please describe a situation where you have felt extremely uncomfortable with the behaviors of people that you have repeatedly observed in another cultural environment? What steps did you take to understand where this behavior was coming from?

Lastly, I would like to hear from you. What were communication situations which have led to negative consequences for you or your colleagues in another cultural environment. Looking back on this situation, what learning points have you taken from this situation?

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