Improving communication

Rick Ross, in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, refers to three ways you can improve communication and avoid climbing the ladder of inference:

• Become aware of your thinking and reasoning (reflection)
• Make others aware of your thinking and reasoning (advocacy)
• Use active listening to become aware about what others are thinking (taking into consideration their values, views and ways of living and thinking), and test your assumptions (inquiry).

Mutual respect, clear communication, unambiguous understanding about expectation,s and critical self-reflection build a culturally inclusive environment. At the individual level, there are five elements of cultural competence:

1. Acknowledge cultural differences
2. Understand your own culture
3. Engage in self-assessment
4. Acquire cultural knowledge and skills
5. View behaviour of self and others within a cultural context

In an inclusive environment, people of all cultural orientations can:

• Freely express who they are, their own opinions and points of view
• Fully participate in work and social activities
• Feel safe from abuse, harassment or unfair criticism.

The following model of building cultural competence provides a sound plan for working effectively and respectfully with people from diverse backgrounds:

• Learn about culture and important cultural components 
• Learn about your own cultural biases 
• Take time to learn about the people you interact with and to learn about other perspectives outside of your own
• Learn as much as possible about important aspects of the cultural backgrounds of the people you interact with
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood, in order to create an environment of mutual respect.

Simply put, effective cross cultural communication requires you to acknowledge and respect difference and to strive to understand why a person might react to you in a particular way.