Intercultural competence of managers

It is undisputable that, when it comes to arranging international business, the ability to constructively deal with culture-related differences is crucial to success. This “management of diversity” requires that internationally active key players possess a special form of social intelligence which is commonly referred to as “intercultural competence.” The scope of this intercultural competence meanwhile has been well described and differentiated.

osb international takes these requirements into account in several respects:

• Whenever “intercultural issues” affect the work process in a relevant manner (for example in strategy development, post merger integration, personnel development, executive coaching etc.), we explicitly bring these issues to the surface as a topic and offer various formats for resolving them.
• The art lies in the ability to differentiate genuine issues of culture* from other concerns that are “hidden” under the umbrella of this term, for example concerns about organizational structure, dynamics of influence, decision making processes, etc.; particularly these types of concerns cannot be appropriately dealt with on the level of “culture.”
• We purposefully develop the intercultural competence of people and organizations through a wide range of services:
• Assessment of the personal development level in dealing with foreign cultures with the aid of the IDI (“Intercultural Development Inventory”)
• Targeted development strategies for building intercultural competence: sharpening the perception of cultural differences and their effects (intercultural awareness), developing an appreciative attitude toward intercultural differences (intercultural mindset), enlarging the repertoire of methods to handle this in a managerial manner, for example in problem-solving processes (intercultural skill set).
• We offer this intercultural competence development as an integrated part of our international learning architectures, as independent in-house training modules, and in an open curriculum at the Management Center Witten in Berlin (MZW).
• Team building and support for multinational management teams: consulting services for team leadership for establishing multinational teams, kickoff workshops to create the “social basis” and work structures of international teams for virtual cooperation, workshops on balancing and optimizing collaboration (exploration of intercultural synergies)
• Coaching and providing support for expatriates and impatriates

* We are employing a cultural concept here that reaches far beyond an affiliation with national cultures. It includes greatly multifaceted aspects of identity-giving self-conceptions of people and organizations, for example, corporate cultures established over a long period of time, feelings of affiliation with a region of the world (e.g. “We Americans”), religious communities, professional groups, social strata, etc. Each cultural aspect determines the specific “glasses” through which one views the world, interprets phenomena, and acts accordingly.