HOW TO CHOOSE AN INTERCULTURAL MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT/COACH?

 By Olivier Soumah-Mis CEO of Olivier Soumah-Mis Services

Explaining a culture to an expatriate and his or her family is not easy because a lot of information has to be transmitted in a very short time. Explaining the complexity of the Mexican culture, for example, in 8 or 16 hours, is a great challenge.

We prepare executives/managers who have to understand the society in which they are going to live, understand the country in its political specificities and its economic environment, to make good strategic decisions, understand the new social norms in the country and the city where they are going to live and finally, adapt their leadership, their management, their communication to the local reality, if they want to succeed in their mission, it is a real challenge.

Intercultural management is a discipline that requires the intercultural consultant/coach to have multidisciplinary knowledge. To understand a culture, it is necessary to approach it under several facets:

1-Social Sciences:

History: It allows to go to the roots of behaviors, ways of thinking, beliefs. History answers the question: Why are they the way they are? This is valid for any country. To understand the Japanese, you have to know a bit of their history.

Anthropology: It studies humanity from a holistic perspective, its present and past societies, as well as the various cultures and forms of organization and social interaction it has created.

Sociology: To understand a culture is to understand how society, as a group, functions. Sociology gives us answers to the functioning of any society.

Psychosociology: It is the discipline that studies, analyzes and intervenes in the processes of human interaction and communication, studies the individual and his behavior within a social context.

Cognitive psychology: Investigates internal mental processes, such as problem solving, memory, learning and language.

Ideally the good intercultural consultant/coach should have knowledge of all these disciplines about a particular culture. If he has them then he has a very good basis to make an expatriate understand how the culture of the expatriate country works from the roots.

 But it is not enough.

2- At the country level:

You must also explain how the country works at a political and economic level. Convey to the expatriate the subtleties of local political life and the state of the economy. This information allows the expatriate CEO/Manager to understand the general context of the country and thus make better decisions.

But it does not stop there:

3-At the corporate level:

The expatriate managers we prepare are very experienced people, but their big challenge, every time they change country, is to adapt their leadership/management to the local culture. So, the role of the consultant/coach is to transmit the “know how” of cultural adaptation in the chosen country on these issues.

Once the expatriate has the basics that are the social sciences of the country, plus the reality of the political and economic life and finally knowing how to adapt his leadership and management, this expatriate will strongly optimize the success of his mission of development of the local subsidiary by a deep knowledge and understanding of the local culture.

So how to choose a consultant/coach specialized in intercultural management?

Cultural training cannot be a series of anecdotes that the consultant/coach would have experienced. Anecdotes only serve to set the mood of the seminar. Intercultural management is a discipline that is learned in business schools in Europe and the United States, with its concepts, rules and norms. In these countries you can study for a Masters in Intercultural Management.

Clearly contained in what I wrote above, consultants who tell you that they can prepare their expatriates in any country in the world, are charlatans even if they use the studies, the matrices that put each culture in boxes, such as the studies of Geert Hofstede or Fons Trompenaars or Erin Meyer. To teach in a business school may be enough but to prepare a CEO, an executive of a multinational who will lead 500 people locally, or more, who will have to negotiate with local customers, perhaps according to their business, be in contact with senior officials of the country, it will not be enough, and it is not serious. I would even say it is intellectual dishonesty.

This consultant will not be able to answer very precisely the very specific questions that the CEO will ask him.

How to explain to a CEO how to work, how to negotiate, how to lead, how to communicate with Vietnamese if the consultant has never lived and worked in Vietnam?

The knowledge acquired by reading is not enough at these professional and hierarchical levels. You speak well of what you have experienced.

The good intercultural consultant/coach is a person who knows very well his culture of origin and that of his country of specialization.

Another important point is that in order to understand what an expatriate goes through; you must be an expatriate yourself. We will be able to support the expatriate more easily if we know what the stages of cultural adaptation are and above all to have lived them with our guts, it is essential to have made the journey before. To have experienced the fears, frustrations, misunderstandings, misinterpretations and their consequences that all expatriates experience at the beginning.

The international dimension is something that is lived with the guts, the credibility and quality of the intercultural consultant/coach also depends on his/her international experience.

The characteristics of the consultants/coaches who collaborate with the Olivier Soumah-Mis consulting firm:

• There is no international certification in Intercultural Management, but after 33 years of experience preparing thousands of expatriates, we have developed our own certification. Our consultants followed this certification so that we all work under the same standards, norms and quality.
• All have a minimum of 10 years of international professional experience.
• They are native speakers or are or were expatriates in their country of expertise.
• They all speak the language of their country of specialization: We prepare Japanese managers of Nissan to the Mexican culture but in Japanese.
• Speaking of our team of interculturalists in Mexico, most of them have more than 20 years in Mexico and are married to a Mexican.

What we sell and transmit to expatriates and their families is our knowledge of the country, its culture, its gastronomy, its traditions, its political, social and economic life and our experience of having worked, negotiated, led, communicated with colleagues, clients, partners, local suppliers.

We are not a Relocation or international moving company that has integrated cultural preparation services for expatriates, without being specialists. Our core business, our difference and our strength are to be true specialists in intercultural management and the only ones in Mexico.