I recently watched the movie Outsourced and despite being filled with cultural stereotypes and exaggerations, it highlights how a lack of understanding of another culture can create miscommunications and impact business results.  It also reminded me of my university course on intercultural communications where we looked at how different cultures influence people’s perceptions and interactions.

We did role-playing exercises where we were assigned specific countries and had to simulate business negotiations or casual conversations. I probably learned more practical and valuable lessons in that course than in most of my core business classes. Having now lived in three different countries, I am more aware of how the culture I grew up in shapes my communication style and what to be mindful of as I work with colleagues from diverse backgrounds.

We communicators need to build our own cultural awareness, as our companies become more global and are made up of more culturally diverse teams. In fact, CEC’s Competency Diagnostic found that building global perspective and cultural awareness is the biggest competency gap for communicators (Just only 13% of the communicators we surveyed excel in this area).

Cultural awareness is important in three scenarios:

1. Supporting leaders in business partners as they develop global strategies.  As one member told me, “As we expand in emerging markets, we really don’t have a good understanding of these cultures, and we have had to learn through painful mistakes.”
2. Collaborating with our globally dispersed teams:  Another member revealed, “We want to make sure everyone on the team has a voice, but this is not always easy—in some cultures, it is not acceptable to speak up, and we surface problems too late.”
3. Messaging to audiences around the world: How do we effectively customize messages so that we are sensitive to local culture and language limitations?

How can you as communicators increase your own awareness of other cultures? Of course you can’t possibly get to know every country in the world (and true, each individual is different), but you can start building the foundations of your own global acumen and cultural awareness through a couple of useful frameworks:

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Each November, the parent entity of the CEC, the Corporate Executive Board, releases to our members a widely read Executive Guidance briefing outlining management imperatives for the coming year. This year’s document addresses one of the most common challenges raised by Communicators – the promise and perils of globalization. The opportunity is clear: between 2010 and 2030 the percentage of global GDP from emerging markets is expected to grow from 37% to 59%; however, most organizations focus on market-level investments and fail to address how corporate center functions such as Finance, IT, Legal, and of course, Communications need to adapt. The Corporate Executive Board has outlined six management disciplines critical for long-term success in emerging markets (and members will have upcoming opportunities to digest them all); however, one in particular struck me as a place for immediate impact from a high-functioning global Communications department: Accelerated Collaboration and Innovation.

While access to new markets and talent should offer opportunities for market shaping innovation, less than 40% of employees perceive effective collaboration – even in just one location. The results are troubling: innovation vitality (the percentage of sales from new products) is troublingly low to keep up with the necessary pace of growth in these new markets and less than a third of R&D staff in developed or emerging markets report high levels of trust with their global counterparts.

So how is this all a Communications problem (other than the fact that everything is a communications problem!)? Corporate Executive Board research shows that most organizations wrongly attribute these deficiencies to the innovation skills of geographically dispersed R&D centers; however, leading companies instead focus on increasing 1) the willingness of global employees to share and receive information and 2) the strength of connections to actually identify and apply new ideas – in other words, the effectiveness of the communications environment. Two lessons from our research into global intranet platforms suggest some immediate solutions. Read More »

A short while ago I came across this article on the BBC about “Americanisms” in the English language (being a non-native English speaker, “ideas coming out of left field” confused me for many years too!). Given my personal fascination with languages, and also because our very own CEC team is split across the “pond”, naturally I shared this with my colleagues. After poking a bit of friendly fun at the phrases each of us in the UK or US say, at the end of the day we must admit that we all use these little catch phrases in our day to day speak, and that sometimes things do get “lost in translation” when interacting with people in other countries (sometimes, even when we both speak the same language!).

As companies become more and more international, communicators experience increased difficulties when crafting messages for their diverse global audiences.  I often hear members say things like “we want to make sure we act and sound as ‘one company’ and convey a consistent image, but we also want to sound sensitive to the local culture” or “we think we are being culturally aware in our messaging, but we’re still perceived as too American” [or too Swiss, Japanese, etc.].

How can communicators stay consistent in what they’re saying across markets to convey a unified company image, but at the same time be relevant? And even before thinking about content, how do you even prioritize communications for each market so that you’re not communicating too much and having your messages ignored? Read More »

In our recent toolkit for Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations, we looked at a flexible governance framework to help communicators make decisions in the moment about escalating situations centrally or handling them locally. Many of the activities that local communicators have to manage are pretty straightforward and low sensitivity.  As such, the corporate communications team doesn’t need to get involved with these decisions – things like handling a local media enquiry, creating a local press release, or organizing the regional office’s quarterly volunteering event. In these situations, the best solution is to equip local communicators with tools and support so they can “get on with it” and are not sitting around waiting for help from corporate.  This way, corporate also doesn’t need to get bogged down with minor decisions and can focus attention on bigger issues.

How can local communicators become self-sufficient so that corporate only gets involved in those most critical or ambiguous/sensitive situations? Below are four tips for effectively supporting local communicators:

1. Understand local communicator needs

• TIP: be an active listener – ask smart questions to understand what local communicators need and what kind of support they currently lack
• CEC Tools: check out these Quick Tips for How to be a Quality Listener and our other Dialogue Self-Service Tools Read More »

Job security does not exist. The only way to ensure your future employment, in my opinion, is to develop new skills continuously. Now on that somber note, I present you with some hope—a look into three critical, but typically weak skills for corporate communicators complete with resources to jump start your learning and application.

Note: This is the continuation from CEC’s Back-to-School Special where we explored 3 of the 16 critical skills for the modern communicator.

Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness

I consider and proactively prepare for how stakeholders in other countries or cultures will respond to a communication strategy.

Why it Matters: This skill is the least-developed among communicators, but it’s also the most important to work on for two reasons. First, most of our CEC members tell us that their company is expanding into new, emerging markets. Suddenly, their audience has shifted from being U.S.-only to include employees and stakeholders on five continents. Second, whether or not their company is expanding or contracting, many Communications functions are reorganizing. For example, Communicators formerly aligned to a specific region are now formally reporting to Corporate.  In short, broader and more formalized networks of communicators are being employed at CEC member companies, which creates a whole new set of collaboration and ownership challenges.

Featured Resource: Managing Communication Across Global Teams—Use a simple framework to reveal how best to communicate and collaborate with communicators worldwide. The advice and resources contained within will help to build your sensitivity for and appreciation of differences in your business and develop decision-making mechanisms to respond quickly to potential crises or issues.

Business Acumen

I have an understanding of my company’s “ecosystem”, including the industry, global trends, macroeconomic changes, and regulatory changes.

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Too often communicators create one version of every message and cascade it in multiple global markets. Efficient? Perhaps. Effective? No.

Every message isn’t relevant to every market, and when audiences continuously receive communications that don’t resonate with them, they stop listening and end up missing out on important, applicable messages in the mix.

You can help communicators overcome this by equipping them with tools to enable them to customize messages to resonate locally.

We’ve recently learned about one tool in particular that can help companies figure out which messages they want to prioritize, by timing their delivery based on the target audience’s receptivity. Communications teams can use a set of questions applying to the following steps to guard against over-communication:

• Step 1: Auditing your existing message mix
• Step 2: Assessing your message mix
• Step 3: Understanding local priorities
• Step 4: Adjusting your message mix

CEC members, access the complete set of questions to help you time your messages to maximize audience receptivity. Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

If you often feel like a “one man island”—you’re not alone. Communications teams dispersed globally often struggle to interact, share information, and collaborate across time zones and geographic locations.

One way that CEC member Novo Nordisk has overcome this challenge is by launching a simple, yet sophisticated suite of online networking tools to facilitate communicator-to-communicator peer learning across their global team.  It may seem obvious, but the reality is that despite the amount of effort that we in Communications put into creating communications tools for other departments in the company, we ourselves aren’t always the best users of this technology.

Of course, just because internal collaboration tools exist, doesn’t mean that they are in use or make life easier! However, there are some fundamental pieces of advice to consider to make an online network work for your team. We had the chance to speak with Tanya Wymer, Strategy Director at Novo Nordisk, who shared the secrets behind the company’s corporate communicator network. Elements of their network include tools that:

• Help communicators find peers in other countries with shared challenges or projects
• Facilitate discussion boards that help communicators get quick help on specific questions
• Formalize peer collaboration through structured mentoring programs Read More »

As part of CEC’s work on Managing Communications across Global and/or Virtual Teams, we’ve created easy-to-use tools to help you better collaborate and partner with your colleagues down the hall or in a different time zone. Here’s the first of many tools to help you determine how and when to cascade sensitive information.

Spotting Sensitive Information Issues
But first, how do you even know when something qualifies as “sensitive information?” The short answer is when it poses a risk to the entire company’s reputation or it could get you in trouble legally (e.g. potential insider trading issues, health and safety issues, etc.). For those types of issues, you need to have a coordinated and structured response from the center. Here are some quick points to help you spot “sensitive information”:

• If it affects stakeholders’ decision to do business with you
• If there is no stated company-wide view on the issue
• If you wouldn’t be comfortable with this information making front page headlines
• If the news will have long-term effects

Now that you know how to spot sensitive information, check out some guidelines for effectively cascading that information across the organization. Read More »

Summer seems to be a favorite for hit lists and the CEC Insider has featured quite a few lists recently (from summer reading lists to top 5 tools for communicators), so I thought I would add my own list. Across the recent weeks I’ve been writing about our latest research into managing communications in global and dispersed organizations. We are now ready to give you a sneak preview into our framework on different models for central/local partnerships, and the kinds of support tools and collaboration that are most effective in each model. (CEC members – join us for a panel discussion with Jo Alexander of HSBC and Tanya Wymer of Novo Nordisk on July 19 to hear how some of your peers are partnering with local communicators in each of these areas!)

What does this framework do?

It aims to assess different situations facing global and dispersed teams in managing day-to-day communications activities, based on two dimensions: degree of sensitivity (how sensitive is a particular issue or activity for the organization), and reach of impact (do we care mostly at the local level or as an entire organization?). We recognize that companies have different operating models and cultures that are not very easy to change, but you still have to work within those operating structures of your company to support your local communicators, and the type of support needed in each situation will vary by sensitivity of that situation and where the impact lies.

How can you figure out where you are on this grid?

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Earlier this week, I was reading through PR Week, and by sheer coincidence happened to come across one of the CEC’s very own members, Ray Jordan, Corporate Vice President of Public Affairs and Corporate Communications of Johnson & Johnson (J&J). As someone who hosted the ‘Guru’ meeting in February of this year, I certainly recognized Ray’s name, and I found myself personally engulfed in this story where he speaks of some of the recent organizational changes and reputational threats being experienced at J&J right now, notably ‘recalls and FDA, Department of Justice, and SEC investigations, in addition to the recent announcement of an acquisition with Swiss device make Synthes.’ Ray went on to speak about the effects this is having on Communications at J&J and his thoughts and approaches.

Jordan helped internationalize J&J’s Communications function and we at the CEC have been privileged to work on a few things with J&J, notably our competencies work. Although I was unhappy to hear that Jordan was going through these challenges, what was heartening to hear was that it sounded very much in line with what we’ve been hearing from the global membership. CEC research clearly suggests that many organizations are experiencing some sort of significant change within their organizations right now, (and many of these changes happening at the same time!). Ray’s story for me certainly highlighted that change REALLY does seem to be new norm. Read More »