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Several months ago, a client organisation requested a briefing on Arab culture for a senior operations manager. He was leaving for Oman in three days, would be there for two months, and could spare…three hours.   

I lobbied hard for a full day, but he was already in “spin mode” and this cultural briefing was clearly an afterthought. While it’s not uncommon to be asked to give two days’ worth of information in a morning, normally when I find myself in such a situation I have personal experience of the culture. This time, I didn’t—I’ve never been to the Arab Gulf.  

Maybe that was what caused me to abandon my familiar power point show and chalk talk, and try a different approach to mentoring.  Or maybe it was the sheer volume of detail—impossible to convey in just three hours—that forced me to step back from the situation and look at what I could transmit that would serve the client well in his coming encounters.

The magnitude of the change would depend on several factors, including his natural ability to relate to different cultural realities—e.g., how cosmopolitan he is. This is a function of his experience in other cultures, how much he has learned from it, and how open or receptive he is to this particular culture (affinity). 

The day before the session I managed to talk to this manager on the telephone for five minutes. I learned that he had been overseas, but never to the Middle East; he was mid-forties, at the top of what had been a technical career path; he managed a multicultural team, but there were no Muslims on his team and he had no previous direct exposure to Muslim or Middle-Eastern culture.  Ever. What would best prepare him for what will seem like a lunar landing, greeted by aliens wearing robes?  What does he need to know when he hits the tarmac in Oman? First impressions are lasting. It’s mission-critical to have the first few transactions go smoothly to build confidence. 

To hone in on what skills he might need in his toolkit, I asked about the specific nature of his mission and role there, including whether he will have direct reports, what he considers to be the critical success factors of his mission, and his perception of the nature of communications he will be engaged in. Would it be mostly work-related, or will he be attending social or diplomatic events as well? Finally, I asked him to sketch out his agenda for the first week there. More on that later.

The bottom line? This guy had very little understanding of the world he was entering. He needed two things in his survival kit—basic protocol and core values. Both are essential to soften the impact of culture shock in the short-term, and give him reference points for transactions that would otherwise be difficult to comprehend in the weeks following his arrival. 

Nice to have Cultural Detective^® up my sleeve—but first, a realistic look at what might be achieved. The entire purpose of the activity is to make him more effective by reducing the levels of anxiety he is likely to experience in a radically different cultural setting, so I found a cultural informant at the university who gave me his perception of protocol essentials. I augmented that with information from the web on appearance, behaviour, formal greetings, etc. [www.cyborlink.com/besite/uae.htm]  

We spent the first and last thirty minutes of the session on protocol: the first to actively engage him in the process and quickly expand his “comfort zone,” the last to reinforce the new learning with practice. Emphasis was on proxemics and behaviours that could be perceived as ignorant or insulting in the culture.

The two hours in between were carefully designed to take him into uncharted territory. The Cultural Detective^® Values Lens is a mental model that is easy to recall, and provides ready insights into some of the more complex cultural situations. I chose critical incidents from the Cultural Detective Arab Gulf package that were based on meetings he would actually run or attend in that first “make-or-break” week. I had planned for four, of 30 minutes each. We actually covered three, with intense discussion of each.  

Each meeting was in a different setting; I set up several potentially uncomfortable or damaging situations in each, asking him what he might do or say. If he was uncertain, I presented several different options to select from. I would then probe for his reasoning, why he chose that option. This is a departure from the Cultural Detective critical incident Worksheet, a heuristic model that forces him to examine why he responds a certain way at choice points. This Socratic dialogue approach helped him to see the connection between outer behaviour and implicit cultural values. If he chose an approach to the situation that resonated with a core value of the culture, I gave him positive feedback and continued with the case; if not, I roleplayed the kind of feedback he could expect, challenging him to think of a more appropriate response to the situation. At the end of each case, I pointed out the values he had confronted on his copy of the CD Values Lens.

It’s been nearly two months and I just received an email from him expressing thanks for the session. He’s on track and will be home on schedule, in time for Christmas. I hope this information is of some use; knowing some of you have faced this challenge and may have devised other successful strategies, I invite your comment and constructive feedback.

Bill Watson

Co-author, CD-New Zealand