Intercultural Management Consulting

Intercultural Management Competence is needed in all occasions and places where people from different cultures work together. Not so long ago it was usual that enterprises were only active in their own motherland and worked mainly with its citizens, but in the age of globalisation a manager without foreign experiences would not come very far. Apart from that, managers work in their own motherland ever more frequently with people from different cultures. Without intercultural know-how daily misunderstandings can easily arise, which partially result in high costs and time-consuming consequences for the company - contract negotiations fail, project aims cannot be kept, etc.

Shaking the head = yes or no?
Who does really know that shaking the head for Western Europeans means refusal and for Indians it means agreement? Or who knows that in Thailand you should not run your hand over someones head? If this would happen unintentionally you should apologise politely, because the Thais believe that the head is the place of the soul. Or who knows that spontaneous meetings and visits are not common in Australia? There is an endless number of those “Do’s and Dont’s”.
In order to manage intercultural situations you need knowledge about these different modes of behaviour which are culturally standardised on the one hand, and sufficient knowledge about the (foreign) language and the country on the other hand.

Intercultural Awareness
However, the basis for economic success crossing cultural frontiers is to develop some sort of Intercultural Awareness which knows both the differences between cultures and the common factors of human beings even if they differ greatly from an external and superficial perspective. This is exactly the point where the Intercultural Management Consulting from the science of Energology® by Kapur® begins. It offers managers the possibility to deal with the human being fundamentally and individually, to deal with his cultural standardisations, his communication, to deal with emotional situations and conflicts, etc.

This theoretical and practice-oriented basic work which is added by sufficient self-reflection and reflections from others may enable managers to considerably increase the efficiency of their intercultural collaborations and consequently not only to lead their corporate enterprise to success but also their personal und human aims.

(Mag.phil. Nicola Spiegl, TM Thinker Manager from the 3dManagement© by Kapur®, African Studies, Ethnology)