Euroasia: Language, Culture and Travel

No matter how good we are at foreign languages, the fact remains that a lot of the time we will be communicating with non-native speakers of English – in English! We may find ourselves using English with non-native speakers in business meetings, either at home or overseas, writing emails or publicity materials intended for them, or simply working and living alongside them. But how much thought do we give to our use of English? Are we using our own language as clearly and succinctly as we can? And if we are not, what impact does that have on our business or professional lives, or even our personal lives?

Some difficult issues that perhaps too many native English speakers don’t pay much attention too. At Euroasia, we’ve been contemplating these issues, and Peter has been working on some exciting initiatives in this area.

Times are tough. People are worried that they might lose their jobs as the unemployment rate starts creeping up. Job summit or no job summit. As always, during difficult times, the ones worst hit are the ones who are lacking in qualifications and experience.

It’s time to upskill. It seems university enrolments are up around the country, according to various local news articles.  Recent graduates who can’t find work are going back to university. But so are many students looking at gaining more qualifications in order to keep pace with developments.

During such perilous times, it’s important to understand what skills are in demand and how to stand out from the crowd. In New Zealand, where almost all native English speakers can only speak one language, knowing some basic foreign language can indeed be an advantage. Most of all you demonstrate to prospective employers that you have the ability to persevere with something as well as the ability to work across cultures. As New Zealand becomes more and more multicultural, the ability to communicate across cultures will be as essential as knowing how to use a computer.

New Zealand is an exporting nation. We would be poorer than Samoa or Tonga if we didn’t trade with our friends, and foreign tourists stop arriving. There are in fact more Chinese and Spanish speakers than there are English speakers.  Naturally, these are key languages to learn if one wants to learn how to communicate with our future customers.

But learning any language is useful. New Zealanders have traditionally learnt French, German and Japanese at school. Knowing any one of these languages would be useful. I have written at length about why one should learn each one of these languages, so feel free to check out my blog entries on why learn language

Understand how learning a foreign language helps you develop greater cross cultural empathy. In this video, I share some observations on how you can better understand people from other cultures.

Euroasia offers cross cultural communications courses and cross cultural solutions to people who work across cultures.

Understandably, the foremost issue in the mind of most managers today is how to deal with the global recession. The focus, at least in the short term, is how to survive the downturn. This should be the time to be thinking about how to capitalise on the next upturn. Recessions do not last forever, and we’ll no doubt get out of this rut. Which leads me to the point of this article. One significant management challenge in the coming decades is how we manage global talent flow.

Research by consultancy KPMG has argued that managers will need to be prepared for a completely new, international management environment over the coming decades as the flow of skilled and unskilled labour between the developing and developed economies increases.

This convergence, or a net flow of skilled and unskilled workers migrating between the developed and developing worlds, will mean companies will need completely to rethink how they manage their workforces, argued the author of the KPMG report.

Organisations are pretty unprepared for this. Global migration is a recent phoenomenon, driven by cheaper airfares, and Gen Xers who surf the net every day researching new destinations and sharing travel and OE stories. It seems to me that people will continue travelling despite environmental concerns. The only difference is that we seem to feel a bit more guilty about it. Somehow I don’t think we’ll see a drop in air travel figures anytime soon.

The successful organisations of the future will be highly innovative, truly understanding how to harness diversity and capture talent from around the world. The offices of the future will have people speaking different languages dealing with clients and suppliers from around the world. The essential skill to have in that environment is the ability to understand and work with people from other cultures.

I’m often asked the question “how does one develop greater cross-cultural empathy?”

In my view there’s really no better way than learning a new language. It’s quite straightforward. In learning a new language, you start to feel what non-native English speakers feel when they attempt to speak English. The ideal experience is a full immersion atmosphere, where you spend most of your time in an environment where only the target language is spoken. This may not be practical for most, or even too scary. We far prefer the comforts of relative anonymity in a packed lecture hall with 35 other students. There’s far less risk of getting picked on, and we can enjoy learning about French instead of actually learning French.

No one likes being put on the spot, but sometimes we’ve got to take that additional step in order to really improve. It’s a lot like doing weight training at the gym. The initial work really is about wearing down the muscles, and it’s only the last few seconds, when you’ve reached the pain threshold, that you really build the muscles. This is why it helps to train with a buddy or with a personal trainer who can push you.

Language learning is a bit like that.  If you push yourself just that little bit further and start speaking the language, you improve so much quicker. This is why at Euroasia, we limit our classes to no more than 10 people, and keep the classes interactive, so that every person gets a chance to speak every time they are here. We won’t embarass anyone, but we certainly encourage people to start speaking. We don’t want people to go away learning a lot about the language, but not speaking the language they set out to learn.

The added bonus is that you engage in virtual travel to the distant lands that you wish to explore, every time you turn up for class. It’s great stress relief for the busy professional. What a deal…

It is a truism to state that, as companies wishing to operate successfully in the global economy, we need a global perspective. What is perhaps less widely appreciated is that a key part of that perspective is a real understanding of the people we are working with. We have to see our partners, our staff, in the way they would like us to see them, namely, as rich and complex human beings, who are at once individuals, but at the same time moulded in the light of the culture in which they grew up.

In today’s world, we probably come into contact with people from different cultural backgrounds almost every day. We perceive similarities: we are all human beings. We also perceive differences. But what do we make of those differences? We can, if we choose, see them as a problem, even as alienating; we can pretend they don’t exist; we can treat everyone as if they would really like to be just like us, if only we gave them the chance. Or we can see these differences as fascinating, enriching, real but not off-putting, a key component of who people are and would wish themselves to be; and then, in the process, we also begin to understand a little more about ourselves.

If we take the positive line, we are half-way towards making a success of cross-cultural relationships, business and personal. Where we come in as cross-cultural consultants is in filling in the other half, in offering you a shortcut to specific information and skills which could otherwise take years to acquire.

No one is surprised that Kiwis are heading across the ditch at a rate of 100 a day in March alone when news filter back that the average after-tax income in Australia is 34% higher than in New Zealand. If New Zealand ranks as the second easiest place on the planet to do business why are we less prosperous than most of the OECD, coming in at 21st out of 30 countries on GDP/capita?

It’s certainly “easy” to do business in this country. Anyone can start up a company within a matter of hours, apparently one of the fastest places you can do so in the world.

However, just because it’s “easier” to do business doesn’t mean that our firms are necessarily more prosperous. Quite the contrary. Our firms are unusually small (over 90% of firms employ less than 10 staff), compared with under 50% for USA and Korea for example. In the highly significant export sector (where we derive most of our wealth), only 4% of our firms export, and 80% of our the total $ value exported is generated by 1.5% of exporters (Source: David Irving, Icehouse presentation Apr 08) .

The reason Kiwis don’t get paid more is simply because we’re not productive enough. New Zealand is in the business of producing pretty low value goods and services. We are easily lulled into a sense of superiority because we are one of the world’s largest exporters of dairy products.

It’s a matter of demand and supply. It’s not just our dairy products that are in demand, but our talent too. As we have seen from the prices of butter and milk in our local supermarkets, we are by no way insulated by global forces, regardless of how many cows we have in New Zealand. In a global market, organisations compete for talent by paying more. Over time, the best resources move to the highest bidder.

New Zealand is a great place to live. No doubt about that. That’s why most of us are still here. We can and should still talk about what the government and the rest of us can do to make New Zealand more competitive.

Personally I would like to see more people create value by growing their businesses, employing more staff, and selling higher value products/services. Hopefully if enough people do that, Kiwis get paid more, and fewer would have to move to Aust/UK for more money.

I had the chance to visit a high tech company last week and spend some time with the owner (as part of a leadership training programme I’m attending). It was absolutely amazing to see how they managed to grow from nothing to a “mini-multinational”. I’m now pretty inspired to make a difference!

I’m pretty happy that at Euroasia we help people connect with foreign cultures, and a fair few of our clients have extensive contact with people from overseas. They build relationships that help with international trade and New Zealand’s global competitiveness.  I have a feeling that in 5 years, we’ll see a lot more people providing cross cultural training and consulting services. And when you google “cross cultural training” you will find more than the handful of providers you see there now.