“Most people tend to underestimate cross-cultural negotiations but at the same time a lot of people overestimate cross-cultural negotiations.” This quote shows exactly how difficult it is to communicate with different cultured people. Even in the same country there are differences in culture. Sometimes people make certain assumptions about the other person because of their national background, but that’s not the right thing to do. You don’t have to know everything about the national culture, you need to understand the person you’re communicating with. With people from other cultures, we should be more careful for not making mistakes. People often forget to tell certain things to the other person when they know that his culture is more or less the same as their own. This is risky because it can lead to misunderstanding, poor contracts, etc. A negotiation coach can help somebody in this situation, but when you want to learn the habits of a specific culture, a culture coach might be better.
Cross-cultural negotiations are far from easy and they will get more and more complicated, but when you want to be successful, patience could be the key. (Source:movie)
Nils Meul
I found a very good article about that video: Cross-cultural negotiations: avoiding the pitfalls. There are so many things you have to take into account: “People tend to only look at national culture when they go into international negotiations … but there is also educational culture, race culture, gender culture, a religious culture. All of these also impact the way people behave and they are all ‘cross cultural,’ which means that we’re underestimating the role of culture because we are only looking at the national one; but as negotiators, we need to try to understand all the others.” (Horacio Falcao).
BeantwoordenVerwijderenWhen negotiating with someone from another country, it’s clever to have someone from the other country who helps you to understand what normally goes on. That person is also a good help for the translation.
I think that this article could be very useful for the team assignment.
Stefaan Mels