Walking your Why: Mind the Gap recap!'
Checkpoints and a Cool Tool!
Hello, Dear Reader! Thank you for spending some of your precious time with me.
Welcome to our new Carer Mentor community members!
I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why?
The previous Walking Your Why article was packed with information.
‘Mind the Gap. Build a Bridge.’ Building awareness. Mindfully Showing up for Others.
It focused on thinking beyond ourselves:
Interacting and being with others is a species activity and part of our shared humanity, but are we building bridges or expecting the other person to align with our way of thinking?
What default assumptions and expectations are we holding?
A Recap of Mind the Gap checklists and an introduction to a tool to compare country's cultures.
The Mind the Gap Checklists.
What bridge and where?
The Culture Factor: The Country Comparison Tool
1. The Mind the Gap Checklists
A. Prompts I’ve found meaningful for me.
Am I the architect of my own experience or defaulting to others?
What is the basis for my assumptions?
Am I judging based on feelings (emotion perception) or evidence-based facts?
Am I anchoring to my values? What and why?
Or, am I abdicating responsibility to someone or something else?
B. What are our communication intentions
How can I communicate for the benefit of others rather than for my voice to be heard?
Am I seeking recognition, to be seen and heard, speaking up for myself? Am I advocating for others?
How can we help someone receive the message in the best way so that the receiver can understand it? Or am I trying to hammer our message and hope it gets across?
Are we communicating and connecting to prove something or to share something?
How can I reframe and adapt my communication to my audience?
Two experts whose research and publications offer solid base-reference points to build your cultural awareness and understanding.
Geert Hofstede1 and his Cultural Dimension’s Theory (Published 1980, based on surveys in the 1960s and 1970s)
Erin Meyer2 , who wrote ‘The Culture Map’ (Published 2014)
C. Cultural awareness
Am I staying curious and informed about different cultures?
Am I aware of how they compare relative to each other?
D. Your Audience
Am I being understood? Do I understand my audience?
Am I more low context (explicit) communication-culture or high context (implicit)?
Low context cultures present: I tell you what I’m going to tell you, then I tell you, and then I tell you what I’ve told you.
High context cultures assume a much greater, shared context. It’s multilayered and more implicit in it’s communication. There are higher expectations that the receiver uses all their senses to understand the meaning of what’s being communicated.
Is my audience/connection more low or high context?
Can I ask some general non-personal questions to figure out how to optimise my communication with them?
Where are your gaps? Can you start finding or building a bridge?
2. What bridge and where?
Thinking of the bridge metaphor. If you’re clear on the gap, are you sure about the type of bridge and how you’re constructing it to connect with someone?
Imagine two people committed to connecting. They live in different countries and communicate in different ways. Will the bridges meet or misalign?
Each of us is different, and the world is more diverse and smaller. I believe we don’t need to construct the bridge exactly the same way. Instead, we can curiously give each other space to recalibrate, empathetically share our intentions, communicate, and check our direction and path so our bridges of communication meet.
Agility and recalibrating for the greater good feels easier, natural and free-flowing instead of holding on tightly to a dogma.
The key is never to assume there is ‘one way’ to communicate or a ‘right way. Cadence, content, style, low context, and high context are just a few variables in our communication bridges.
Sometimes, a word in English is simply not translatable to another language. Culture and history have evolved idioms and metaphors in every language.
Here’s a tool that you can play with to learn more. I use this with all my mentoring clients.
3. The Culture Factor: The Country Comparison Tool
If you like interactive tools, you’ll love this one. CLICK HERE
Based on Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory, Data from more recent studies3 This website offers a free-tool and information for cultural comparisons.
The Culture Factor’s definition of culture:
We define culture as the collective mental programming of the human mind distinguishing one group of people from another. This programming influences patterns of thinking which are reflected in the meaning people attach to various aspects of life and which become crystallised in the institutions of a society.
Culture does not imply that everyone in a given society is programmed in the same way; differences among the values of individuals in one country tend to be bigger than the value differences between countries. Nevertheless, we can still use such country scores based on the law of the big numbers and on the fact that most of us are strongly influenced by social control. Please realise that statements about countries are generalisations and should be interpreted relative to other countries. Only by comparison a country score is meaningful.
Disclaimer: I’m not seeking compensation or profit by presenting this information. I highly recommend the website as the source of reference, and I appreciate the work done to keep this source freely available and up to date with new studies.
You can choose up to 4 countries for comparison. Go and Play ;-)
In the search bar on the website, I chose to look at France, Malaysia, UK and the USA.
Why those four? My second language is French and I’m very francophile. My parents were born in Malaysia, and my grandparents were born in China. I was born in the UK, and my mentoring business clients are mainly based in the USA.
This graph takes each dimension and offers insights per country. In the website, each dimension has specific information assigned to it. Here is the data on Power Distance
This dimension deals with the fact that all individuals in societies are not equal - it expresses the attitude of the culture towards these inequalities amongst us. Power Distance is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.
I’d love to hear what you’ve learnt from using the tool.
In CAPS, state the countries you chose to compare and share one or two learnings.
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P.S. The Carer Mentor Collaboration goes live soon
Erin Meyer is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business and co-author with Reed Hastings of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. She is also a professor at INSEAD, one of the world's leading international business schools. Her work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and Forbes.com. In 2023, Erin was selected by the Thinkers50 as one of the fifty most influential business thinkers in the world.
Hofstede studied people who worked for IBM in more than 50 countries. Initially, he identified four dimensions that could distinguish one culture from another. Later, he added fifth and sixth dimensions, in cooperation with Drs Michael H. Bond and Michael Minkov. These are:
Power Distance Index (high versus low).
Individualism Versus Collectivism.
Masculinity Versus Femininity.
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (high versus low).
Long- Versus Short-Term Orientation.
Indulgence Versus Restraint.
Note: in the original version of the book "Long- Versus Short-Term Orientation" was described as "Pragmatic Versus Normative."
FRANCE, MALAYSIA, UK, USA 4 countries.
Many years ago, I learned that Malaysia is the polar opposite of the other countries I chose regarding power distance and individualism. I can quote MANY situations where collectivism is deemed more important than an individual's choice.
Fascinated to hear what others find out ;-)
Such a neat little tool!!! Looking forward to checking it out in more detail tomorrow and thinking about the ways I can adjust my communication for people in different countries (but also with different perspectives).