Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Preparing for cross-cultural work team
I am now part of a multi-cultural strategic team that is tasked with finding growth opportunities for the company by determining how to introduce products into new markets. We have a really talented group, but our initial organizing meeting in Chicago turned out to be problematic in terms of how the group interacted with each other. I think the discomfort in the group was due in large part to a couple of team members from our London office who are Muslim.
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Why was that an issue?
I’m not really sure. The whole group seemed ill-at-ease and I don’t know why. I think the rest of the group didn’t know how to react to Muslims with British accents. Later, I overheard the two Muslims talking about feeling a lack of respect from the group.
I’m not surprised that your colleagues feel that way. There is an interesting article based on data from the Gallup Poll. It shows that in comparison to British respondents, a significantly smaller number of Muslims in London (68%) report that they were treated with respect all day the day before the survey. In contrast, 90% of British respondents reported being treated with respect all day. In addition, London Muslims were twice as likely to have experienced religious discrimination. There was also an article in the Financial Times about Muslims integrating into Great Britain that concluded that after 50 years of being in Europe, Muslims have a high jobless rate, perform worse on the job market than native Europeans, and are viewed with suspicion. Check out these two articles:
Religious fault line in Europe
Europe can feel at home with 16m Muslims
I think that does help me to understand my colleague’s comments, but how do I reconcile this? I’ve never been in a situation where someone’s religious beliefs from another culture that is so different than ours influenced the work environment. I feel like the group needs to get beyond this and achieve a professional comfort level in order to come up with a viable strategy for our company.
Our team is responsible for developing a strategy to add 4 additional percentage points to our company’s growth. That translates into $12 million in the first year of rollout.
I’m already seeing this discomfort among the group getting in the way of our productivity.
The Gallup information intrigued me, so I went to their website and found some more data that could help you. Gallup asked people in 134 countries if “religion is an important part of your daily life.” For countries representing the Muslim world, those responding yes ranged from 99% in Indonesia to 74% in Iran. What do you think the response was in the US? 68%...pretty close to Iran, so the value of religion in our daily lives isn’t that far off, but there are differences.
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