{"id":21207,"date":"2019-02-02T12:06:01","date_gmt":"2019-02-02T20:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=21207"},"modified":"2019-02-02T12:06:01","modified_gmt":"2019-02-02T20:06:01","slug":"living-cross-culturally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/living-cross-culturally\/","title":{"rendered":"Living Cross-Culturally"},"content":{"rendered":"

During my childhood, I experienced a life based on the community I was raised in called Kivagala village. I knew nothing else apart from what was happening in the town. When I went to high school away from my home, I encountered many different young people from different communities. Erin Meyer has actually touched the area that is genuinely affecting the whole world that is full of many different cultural practices. I am encouraged by Meyer’s systematic step by step approach to understanding the most common business communication challenges that arise from cultural differences and offer steps for dealing with them more effectively.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Africa Ministries Office of Friends Church in Africa is a multicultural mission in East Africa, where I am the Director of the Ministry. The ministry includes Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, DRC, and American who are employees of the organization. What Meyer is writing in his book\u00a0 “The Culture Map” is being experienced in our ministry.\u00a0 We have recently experienced some cultural behaviors and believes which continually impact our perceptions, cognition, and actions to each other as Meyer describes the challenges of cultural patterns.\u00a0 Recently we engaged an American pastor to handle the communications within our ministry. The American pastor assumed the responsibilities with American culture in mind, and things did not go on well with others from different cultures in the office. The pastor felt he is being disregarded and disrespected and the others felt the pastor is arrogant and not sensitive to what needs to be reported out to churches. \u00a0The assumption by his colleagues that he knew what to do yet it was not, appeared to be out of context. His (pastor) assumption that \u201cthey are aware that I am still learning and I do not understand the culture well\u201d was wrong hence all ended blaming and counter blaming each other for work not done. My team in the office failed to apply the principle of both cultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence to understand each other, knowing that they are all from a different cultural background. It is clear here that in developing world cultures such as Kenya, the cultural practices place the person and the relationship first before any process or agenda.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Meyer continues to punch more holes into our continental cultures as far as time management is concerned. In the chapter \u201cHow late is late?\u201d sincerely speaks to our Kenyan cultural perspectives. When we schedule our meetings with church leaders, we set our time of starting the session at 10:00 am, but the meeting will begin by either 11:00 am or 11:30am when we usually get the quorum for the meeting. Most of our friends from the USA will arrive at the venue five minutes to 10:00 am and wait until 11:30 am when the meeting starts, and still, you will find those who came late are also leaving early before the meeting fully discusses its agenda. Meyer writes that scheduling scale is profoundly affected by many historical factors that shape the ways people live, work, think, and interact with one another.[3]<\/a> \u00a0Meyer is bringing a contrast through cultural mapping of different cultures and how they can blend in working together. The eight scales that maps the world cultures helps to address the understanding of each others culture which is embedded in our DNA but helps to blend them in achieving the common objective of the organization. We have used the same eight scales mapping recently after reading this book this week and addressed some of the issues that have been affecting us in our office culturally. When we did the cultural mapping of the Kenyan, Ugandan, Tanzanian and American using the eight scales of communicating, Evaluating, Persuading, Leading, Deciding, Trusting, Disagreeing, and scheduling; it was apparent that the Africa cultures and the American one do not cross each at all neither do they connect anywhere on the scale. The right and left side of the range was evident where they belong. \u00a0We have all come to an understanding as Meyer further wrote that; Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness, and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator: \u201cIf you do not understand it\u2019s my fault.\u201d [4]<\/a> \u00a0We connected with what we have written in our book \u201cLessons from Cross-Cultural Collaboration\u201d on cultural humility and intentional listening as one of the ways to resolve what we were experiencing in our office. Intentional listening also allows us to learn from multiple perspectives. Intentional listening means that we must slow down.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> (Meyer 2014)<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> (Eloise Hockett and John Muhanji 2017)<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> (Meyer 2014)<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> (Meyer 2014) pg 31<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> (Eloise Hockett and John Muhanji 2017)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During my childhood, I experienced a life based on the community I was raised in called Kivagala village. I knew nothing else apart from what was happening in the town. When I went to high school away from my home, I encountered many different young people from different communities. Erin Meyer has actually touched the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1433],"class_list":["post-21207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-erin-meyer","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21207"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21208,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21207\/revisions\/21208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}