After 40 years in this industry I am amazed at the journey we have been on throughout the years. When I started in this industry our marketing focus was to seek out companies with a global presence. Our mission and our curriculum reflected the needs of those companies and their employees to develop an awareness of self, their communication styles and the cultural values packed in their own cultural bags. Learning to adjust and adapt to other cultures by understanding their learning styles, values and how they gave and received information was our key message. Through this link to themselves and the countries and cultures where they were working they were able to develop an action plan that created a more positive interaction with the members of the local teams.
Two weeks ago I took my 8 year old granddaughter to see the play “Drawing Lessons” at the Children’s theater in Minneapolis.
It is a story of a first generation American girl from a Chinese family and her struggles to adjust and adapt to the learning styles and curriculum of her local school. Her father, a native Chinese, kept impressing upon her that she needed to change and adapt to the system of education in order to succeed. The US curriculum graded her on participation, but that wasn’t the way she learned. She was expected to conform to the system or fail. It never occurred to the teachers that they were failing her. As a child being raised in an Asian household, she valued a more thoughtful form of expressing herself, her art. Her father pressured her to conform, as did her teachers, both of them attempting to get her to follow their idea of a path to success.
We actually grade students in the USA based on participation. I remember my years as a French teacher letting students know what percentage of their grades would be class participation. What I meant was active learning, speaking out and sharing what they knew with everyone in the class. Those who didn’t follow those expectations were penalized for not participating. Unknowingly diminishing what the less verbal students had to offer to the classroom. Both in business and in education, those who speak out are valued those who do not are viewed as being less valued.
It is easy to define and identify differences when you can see them on the surface. It is much more challenging to identify and embrace those differences when you are surrounded by a majority culture that accepts those norms as the “only way”. In the USA being seen, in this case speaking out and sharing ideas whether they are right or wrong, good or bad is more valuable than not speaking at all. In this play, not until she won an award did they accept the different way in which she processed the world around her. I believe the story was about acceptance but, that didn’t happen until she was recognized as a success in the art world. Culturally we tend to pigeon hole people, place them in a box with no visible means of escape unless they conform.
We are now engaging with clients beyond their global interactions. We are focusing on teams and individuals, learning to discover how we can place value on those whose communication styles are different than our own, how they can be valued as an enhancement rather than a obstacle that needs to be overcome. More than learning to understand the diversity of others we must learn and develop our skills to value that diversity, creating opportunities for us all to flourish in this multi-cultural environment we live in.