Essential to any sort of cultural awareness training are the two key concepts of stereotypes and bias.
As we touched on in an earlier blog, a common trap many of us naturally fall into when we are working in cross-cultural situation is to let our own cultural lens get in the way.
Why do we focus on culture in corporate training? Is it really all that important?
Understanding the role culture plays in our lives is very important.
Having gone viral across the globe many US and other news outlets described the lady as Professor Kelly’s ‘maid’. Her ethnicity clearly contributed to the rather preconditioned assessment that she was working for Professor Kelly. The fact that this lady, Jung-a Kim may have been Professor Kelly’s wife failed to register.
This is, unfortunately, as clear a case of Unconscious Bias that I have witnessed in a long time.
Seriously, who uses the word ‘foreigners’ as a brush reference to the diverse nationalities living in and beyond the borders of the UK? This word surely is a relic? Something from the past?
Sitting on my perch last night in my normal nightly semi-comatose state after a hard day's work in front of the TV, I was aroused from my stupor by the following reaction of Norman Tebbit when discussing the right of EU nationals to remain in the UK post Brexit:
One of my colleagues recently caused a rather difficult situation when he unwittingly fell victim to his unconscious bias.
My colleague and I were talking to a client regarding the need for intercultural leadership training for their CEO based in the Middle East.
