Interculturally Competent Teamwork: Conclusions and Further Exploration

We began this topic with a definition of culture, or the elements of language, educational and experiential backgrounds, age, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and nationality, religious and non-religious beliefs, political ideologies, and customs of groups of people. While discussions about intercultural competency require an understanding of the expectations about teamwork that different groups of people have, avoiding stereotypes and over-generalizations is also important.

This topic has offered a number of tools that can be implemented each time a new team is formed to help everyone understand one another’s individual preferences around teamwork. In discussions based upon these tools, people often share instances in which a stereotype about the culture to which they are perceived as belonging has come up in teamwork. Over the years, people I’ve worked with have shared with me about painful moments from their work in which discriminatory statements were made about them based on their culture. I do not like sharing about these specific examples because I do not want to repeat the discriminatory statements made, thereby causing further harm through repetition. That said, in addressing cultural differences, we do need to be able to talk about demographic characteristics like nationality, race, and gender. An important element of the team-building tools presented in this topic is therefore that they be completed within a safe space.

An individual’s cultural identity has so many aspects, it is intersectional. Intercultural competency as a skill that one brings to their work requires treating people as individuals and acknowledging all aspects of their identity. This also requires shifts in our thinking and speaking. Acknowledging the non-binary gender, for example, requires that we change the way that we think and talk about gender as a dichotomous pair. This is a substantial change that cannot be acquired overnight and requires undoing a lifetime of unconscious socialization.

Beyond the elements given in the definition of culture above, within our professional lives, we also need to navigate work culture, or the organizational identity, values, attitudes, and ways for performing work within a specific organization. Newcomers to the workforce of an organization also need resources and tools to help them to integrate themselves into an organization’s work culture. The tools for the formation of small teams within an organization’s workforce presented in this topic should therefore also be understood as exercises built upon a shared understanding of workplace culture.

We all need to understand that while we operate within many types of narratives (familial, religious, societal) that give meaning to our cultural identities, in the end we need to work together as individuals. Working together as individuals requires an understanding of the cultures we come from, of course, but that we don’t let cultural assumptions define our expectations of each individual.

Do you have any comments about these conclusions about the Interculturally Competent Teamwork topic? Are there any additional resources or experiences you’d like to share to help shape our understanding of this big topic?

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🤖 GAI Study Prompts

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“Help me understand intersectionality and how it relates to workplace teamwork”
“What are some practical strategies for avoiding cultural stereotypes while still acknowledging cultural differences?”
“Explain the difference between organizational work culture and broader cultural identity”
“How can teams create safe spaces for discussing cultural differences and preferences?”
“What does it mean to treat people as individuals while acknowledging their cultural backgrounds?”
“Give me examples of team-building exercises that respect cultural diversity without reinforcing stereotypes”

Week 10 Complete! Next week we’ll explore Internal Corporate Communications