Cultural Awareness Five Phases of Team Building

By Marc Servos

If you’re a new leader in Singapore, you may find that setting up a team overseas can have unique challenges. The increasing reality of market globalization requires today’s business leaders to adapt to working and interacting with others from diverse backgrounds. This involves staff members from these differing backgrounds having various work-style preferences and practices, which necessitates leaders and staff to develop a global mindset and be culturally competent.

Cultural awareness comes into play when building a cohesive team. This can be a challenging task for business leaders, factors include not only developing a cross-cultural and multi-national team, but they also involve cross-functional and cross-organizational ones as well. In general, building a team comes in several phases.

Selecting

Selection of team members is done in the first phase, appropriately known as selecting. Who to select involves a number of factors to consider. These include their professional and cultural backgrounds; possible communication barriers (which can include technology and language barriers); varying levels of experience and expertise; any past experiences they had with one another; and time zone differences. After team selection, a means of communication needs to be chosen, such as by phone or online if the members are geographically dispersed.

Forming

Once the team is selected, it goes through a forming phrase. This is when communication gets underway and expectations are addressed about how team members are aligned. Just before the introductory meeting, it is a good idea to take the cultural orientations assessment to ascertain their work-style preferences. After this and during the introductory meeting, highlights of their workstyle preferences can be addressed, including any gaps that could cause potential problems. The team leader should inform members that the results are neither positive nor negative, using inclusive and non-judgmental language. This should be conducted at least one week prior to the team kick-off, to smooth out any problems that may arise.

Storming

The third phase is storming, beginning with the kick-off meeting. Despite preparations, there still could be issues where work-style preferences conflict with the possibility of friction and misunderstandings. This could be a good time for the team leader to acknowledge this and address them effectively. He or she can use the cultural orientations assessment to help resolve these problems and continue to mentor team members throughout the project.

Functioning

The team can begin functioning at the fourth phase, which is known as norming, as the team conforms to mutual goals. By this stage, the cultural gaps along with the technical, practical and communication issues have been addressed. Despite no apparent conflicts, small problems can still arise, and they need to be periodically handled as they can affect team cohesiveness and productivity. It is recommended that team leaders continually use the models of cultural competence, openmindedness and inclusion to help foster teamwork.

Performing

By the fifth and final phase, known as performing, the team can now work towards its goal without friction. Team leaders can delegate and assign roles for the members. Despite the cohesiveness having been developed by this stage, leaders still need to be prepared to handle issues which can include taking note of interaction-style preferences and conducting feedback sessions. Consideration of the group’s preference should play into feedback styles in a way to keep the group focused and functioning at a high level.

Understanding cultural awareness applies in many realms of conducting business. As indicated here, it is also critical to apply such principles even when team members see the initial commonality, such as not only being part of the same company, but also those of the same culture or nationality will find it beneficial as their preferences could also differ.

Marc Servos is certified with Berlitz as a Cultural Orientations Approach Practitioner. A Fort Wayne native, Indiana University graduate and US Army vet, he is married to a Singaporean and has been living here for a number of years. He has two children, ages 19 and 11.