Checklist: Self-assessment Working Culture

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You can easily discover diversity in your team members’ various working cultures. There are different ways of approaching a task, dealing with time, dealing with your team members, communicating with them, understanding rules, and understanding the roles in your team. Working culture does not mean national culture, so you can have people of the same nationality on your team who have different working cultures.

Culture has two effects: It helps us understand each other without using many words – as shared social practice or communication code. On the other hand, people who do not understand your habits or codes have problems gaining clarity about who you are. Culture often refers to things you cannot explain because you are not used to doing so. This often leads to misunderstandings in interactions.

One solution for reducing misunderstandings, is to try to talk about certain issues explicitly before work begins. How can I explain my habitual or cultural background to my colleague? Knowing that this is difficult, we prepared a self-assessment sheet to help you and your team with analytical criteria for your exchange. As a result, knowing your colleagues’ communication styles and their ways of dealing with a conflict or being informed in advance about their way of preparing a session can reduce chances of feeling frustrated.

Exchange in Your Team

Choose one to three aspects of self-assessment for one training. Exchange and share your working culture, your beliefs and principles in your team.

Self-assessment

The statements below characterize the opposite points of a continuum. Where is the point between the statements that describes you best?

Dealing with People: Individualism Versus Collectivism

In my society people are mainly judged by their achievements

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In my society people are mainly judged by the groups they belong to.

My family has no right to judge or comment on my life choices or dictate to me what to do since I am a grown up and live on my own.

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My family is involved in my life, I feel responsible for them and sometimes I make life choices only to please them.

When I participate in a seminar I always ask the questions I want to ask, without second thoughts about what will the group might think about me.

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When I do not understand something in a seminar I often do not ask about it in plenum and hope to find an answer from another source.

How well I feel in the group is mainly up to me, not others. If I am new in a group, I should make the first step to integrate myself.

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It is the responsibility of the group, or the majority, to integrate new people. I expect them to make the first step towards me.

I perceive “cooperative team work” as fashionable emergence of last few years. If I had a choice, I would rather work on my own. Then I could work more efficiently, more smoothly and wouldn’t have to waste my energy on other people in my team.

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I truly value “cooperative team work”. I learn a lot from other people, but also from the process and discussions with others. In my opinion I would never achieve such good results if I had to work alone.

In a conflict situation, a collectivist might think of an individualist as egoistical and difficult to work with, because they are uncompromising. An individualist might think that a collectivist cannot think for themselves and is not brave enough to stand up for their rights or values against the group.

Dealing with Time: Monochronic vs. Polychronic

Working on something with a deadline I always try to plan my work and do it step by step, so that the tasks are distributed evenly through the time.

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Working on something with a deadline I usually do all the tasks in the last minute, which means sometimes sleepless nights.

If I have several tasks to do during the day and all tasks are equally important, I have an order of doing them. So when I’m done with the first, only then I start the second one and so forth.

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If I have several tasks to do during the day and all tasks are equally important, I tend to work parallel on two ore more tasks, without any particular order. I tend also to have spontaneous ideas to the topic I was working on earlier.

Coming on time means to me showing my respect towards people I am meeting.. So if someone is not on time I get annoyed because I feel disrespected.

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Coming on time is stressful for me. I don’t need to be punctual because others won’t be as well. Stressing about the time spoils the relationship.

A monochronic person might think about the polychronic person as a chaotic and not reliable colleague. A polychronic person instead judges a monochronic one as being stiff and inflexible. Different dealing with time is one of the most often conflict fields in the team work.

Dealing with Power: High vs. Low Power Distance

When I participate in a seminar I expect from the facilitator to explicitly teach me about the topic or methods.

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When I participate in a seminar I mainly expect to learn from the group and broaden my horizons in discussions.

In team work, I automatically value the opinion of an experienced facilitator more than that of one not so experienced.

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In team work, I value the opinions of all facilitators on the same level and try to give them space to express their point of view equally.

When I facilitate a seminar and a participant knows more about the topic than I do, I feel insecure and like I am losing face in front of the group.

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When I facilitate a seminar and a participant knows more about the topic than I do, I try to give him space to share his knowledge and I am happy about learning something new.

In a conflict situation, a collectivist might think of an individualist as egoistical and difficult to work with, because they are uncompromising. An individualist might think that a collectivist cannot think for themselves and is not brave enough to stand up for their rights or values against the group.

Dealing with Emotions: Relationship vs. Factual Level

In my understanding of professionalism, one of the points is to be able to separate the relationship from the factual level in communication with my colleagues.

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In my understanding of professionalism there is nothing about this kind of separation.

I see the relations with my colleagues only in a working context. If there is a conflict between us, we discuss it on the factual level and it does not affect our relationship afterwards.

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My colleagues are my friends. If a conflict emerges between us and we talk about it, our friendship could be endangered.

I understand constructive criticism as something positive; you cannot develop and grow without it. While receiving feedback I always concentrate myself on the criticized points and don’t feel down afterwards.

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I feel that criticism is something negative, which I would like to avoid. When I get constructive criticism I tend to understand it on the personal level and feel the need to explain myself.

A factual person might consider a relationship person as not being professional at work and to be making friendships quite quickly. A relationship person might think about the factual person as being unfriendly and cold. In a conflict situation a relationship person tends to take a lot of things personally.

Dealing with Rules: Strong vs. Weak Uncertainity Avoidance

I need to talk about the roles in team, rules of working and communicating together before I start the seminar. This gives me the feeling of security and transparency.

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I don’t feel the need and doesn’t see the point in long discussions about working before even started working. The team will anyway evolve during the seminar in a direction we cannot predict and if problems arise then I’ll talk about them.

I am not good in improvising. If I didn’t prepared something in advance or when my plan does not work for the group, I feel lost and don’t know, what to do.

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I can improvise pretty well. I like working with people, which means surprises and unusual situations in the seminar. It is one of the reasons why I like this job so much.

When I plan a seminar I always try to write every smallest detail into the plan to be sure about the process. And this is usually how I implement the seminar.

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When I plan a session I usually write down a general list of methods. There is no need to plan more, because later on there are always changes and adjustments in the program.

A strong uncertainty avoidance person might think about the weak uncertainty avoidance person as an unrealistic, irresponsible and therefore not reliable colleague. A weak uncertainty avoidance person instead judges a strong uncertainty avoidance one as being not creative, boring and inflexible.


Reference

Working Between Cultures/E. Skowron in: H. Fahrun, E. Skowron, N. Zimmermann (Ed.): Diversity Dynamics: Activating the Potential of Diversity in Trainings; Berlin 2014; MitOst; ISBN 978-3-944012-02-5


Eliza Skowron

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Co-founder Working Between Cultures, born in Poland, studies at Jagielloian UniversityKraków (Polen). Facilitator and expert for constructive communication, Anti-Bias, train-the-trainer, author in Competendo.


From:

Working Between Cultures

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Diversity Dynamics: Activating the Potential of Diversity in Trainings Diversity-dynamics.jpg MitOst Editionen 2015: Read