Cross Cultural Training

Cross-cultural training seminars are designed to teach how to understand and relate to people from foreign cultures. There you learn about high context and low context cultures, sub-cultures, and co-cultures, the seven dimensions of culture, and increasing intercultural business competency. One year later, happily settled in any given country, you can look back favorably on your own cross-cultural training and try to remember what you learned.


Cross-cultural and intercultural training, a marginal idea 30 years ago, has boomed into mainstream acceptance in the past 10 years with international businesses tapping into a large and sometimes expensive array of cross and intercultural training programs for their outgoing expat employees.

Supporters of cross-cultural training, and there are many, say that it eases the stresses of relocation, wards off culture shock and smoothes cross-cultural business relations.

But even some intercultural professionals warn that the field is still unregulated and that trainers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. There are also those who question whether expats can really learn to communicate effectively with people of other cultures in one day.

Done well, expats say, cross-cultural training makes their moves easier, especially when it focuses on practical information about their host country. Done poorly, they add, it's a waste of money and time.

The study of global differences, once the province of social scientists and anthropologists, has made increasing inroads into the business community. According to the 2001 Global Relocation Trends Survey by GMAC Global Relocation Services, National Foreign Trade Council and SHRM Global Forum, 69 percent of the 150 companies that responded offered cultural training for their outbound employees, up 10 percent in one year and almost 50 percent in 20 years.

International human resource managers are now deluged with materials advertising cross-cultural training seminars, videotapes, CDs, workbooks and Web sites. The number of vendors is estimated at more than a thousand worldwide, ranging from housewives with a few years experience abroad to academics with doctorates in "intercultural studies." In recent years, big companies like Berlitz and Prudential have added intercultural service divisions.

Fortune 500 companies now routinely purchase one- or two-day seminars at a typical cost of around $5,000 for an expat family. Some highly sought-after trainers can make $25,000 a day

Intercultural training is no longer just for expats. It can be used in schools and in offices, anywhere that people from diverse cultures live and work together, Bennet points out. Training can be tailored for business people seeking to better understand their foreign colleges and clients or for the expat family seeking to set up home in a foreign land.

In its pure form, intercultural training seeks to teach people "the knowledge, skill and motivation to communicate effectively and appropriately in a wide variety of cultural contexts."

But most intercultural trainers working with overseas assignees take the more pragmatic "cross-cultural" approach, combining practical information about the assigned country with comparisons to the home country. While clients are happy to have some intercultural communication theory mixed in, most say they want specific information about the culture they are about to enter and that they are most pleased with that aspect of the program.

"Culture specific is what they want," I say "and I don't blame them."

Academics in the field complain that unless handled sensitively, such comparisons end up promoting cultural stereotypes like the peach and the coconut.

But even interculturalist experts admit that overseas assignees can not be expected to master effective intercultural communication in one weekend.

Barbara Schaetti, an interculturalist with a doctorate in intercultural conflict resolution from the Union Institute at the University of Cincinnati, says that the value of "pre-departure" training is limited and suggests followup training after the move overseas.

"Pre-departure training works to an extent but even the best can only go so far," Schaetti says. "Even the best is hampered by the fact that it is pre-departure. It's too short, too cross-cultural, too comparative."

While this training may not teach workers or their families to communicate effectively in all foreign cultures, several studies suggest it boosts confidence and can contribute to the success of an expat assignment.