Leadership is challenging - especially in a cross-cultural team. Things that people take for granted, such as being on time for a meeting, or trusting the employee with responsibility, can suddenly be a source of conflicts they did not anticipate.
I have seen many examples of conflicts that were rooted in implicit cultural assumptions. One of the typical conflicts is about accountability. In many cultures, loosing face is the worst thing that can happen, and you can experience that people will just keep saying everything is fine - even though the project is in ruins - just to avoid loosing face. The truth about the state of the project then emerges at a critical time, often just before deadline, and a conflicts breaks out.
How can we avoid these kind of conflict escalations?
I have had great experiences working with a Code of Conduct process. The process was introduced to me by anthropologist Bjørn Nygaard, whom I asked to teach leadership students about cultural competences.
Creating a Code of Conduct in the team is a way of creating common ground about the way the team communicates, performs and interacts. The goal is not to overcome cultural barriers and create compromise, it is to bring these cultural differences out in the open and create a common culture – a fusion – which represents the team.
Fusion
A cross-cultural team can either assimilate (one culture dominates), integrate (compromise) or create fusion (a new culture emerges in the team). Fusion is off course not done over night, but it can be an ideal to strive for, since research shows that the best performing teams are the ones where more cultures succeed in working together. The worst performing teams are also multicultural and have not succeeded in working together.
Motivation
Furthermore, we know that motivation has a lot to do with being involved, and creating a common Code of Conduct is a way of involving the entire team in ’how we do things’. In the process, opinions and values are expressed and taken into account, and this way different cultural assumptions are appreciated.
The process
There are many ways to work with Code of Conduct. In my leadership training, we have created smaller groups who choose to work with a few topics that are important to them. It could be ’communication with clients’ or ’meetings’.
First, the groups discuss how they do things today, and then, they discuss how they would want things to be in the future. This process of aligning expectations and expressing why certain behaviors are important to them, is in itself a strong teambuilding exercise. They get to know each other as individuals and representatives of different cultural values, and they agree upon a common way of doing things. This can be described as a collaborative learning process.
The Code of Conduct is written down for the various groups and handed out to the team leaders in order for them to develop further with their teams. The feedback is that the Code of Conduct is great for setting expectations in the team, as well as for introducing new employees quickly to the team’s procedures. And most importantly, the Code of Conduct serves to de-escalate conflicts in the cross-cultural team.