Alliances & Mergers: When Cultures Come Together

[Today’s post is by my friend, Ken Wilson with Globe Consulting, and continues our theme on mission-advancing alliances and mergers]

Have you ever been in a meeting and though everyone is using your language, everything seems foreign and unintelligible? Maybe it is your first day at a new firm and none of the acronyms or terms make any sense, or the meeting is just run differently, or nobody participates the way you are used to. Often, we think of culture in terms of nationality or ethnicity, but organizations have culture too, and they can be just as hard to navigate and understand as landing in a foreign country and figuring out how to get to your hotel, order dinner and assimilate to your new surroundings.

When organizations come together to collaborate in a partnership, joint venture or even merge to form one new entity, a clash of culture is bound to arise. We all gravitate to our base culture, whether we think we do or not, and it is normal to feel dissonance and displacement when things change and feel unfamiliar. The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) uses a continuum to describe the stages involved in moving from a mono-cultural to an intercultural mindset. It is helpful in showing that gaining competence in working with others, who are different than us, is a process that involves skills and attitudes that can be acquired.

Not everybody starts in Denial, or even Polarization, but testing of hundreds of thousands of individuals has shown that we typically think of ourselves as much more accepting of others than we actually are. Working with staff from a different organizational culture or bringing two cultures together takes deliberate and thoughtful action to get to a place of Adaptation where differences are celebrated and absorbed into a new worldview.

Over time I can adapt to the lingo and rationalize how meetings are run by telling myself that, we all want the same thing and it is not that different. But in doing so, I may miss the richness of why things are different. Culture emerges out of history, tradition, shared value and even mission. Becoming intercultural means comprehending the differences and the reasons for them, not just finding common ground to minimize the discomfort I feel.

When you feel out of place or can’t figure out how things are working, stop to ask why before assuming your way is better and seek to understand a different perspective. Working together means understanding the other from their paradigm and respecting it. Acceptance won’t always mean changing your own attitudes and behaviors, but fully understanding and engaging another pint of view enriches our own and builds deeper collaborations.