THE LONG VIEW //
FONS TROMPENAARS
Founder and CEO Trompenaars Hampden-Turner (THT Consulting) Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Consultant, motivational speaker, and author Fons Trompenaars is known worldwide for his expertise on culture and business. He has spent more than 20 years helping Fortune 500 companies manage and solve their business and cultural dilemmas to increase global effectiveness and performance. He has authored and co-authored several books, including the award-winning Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business, which was translated into nine languages. Trompenaars studied economics at the Free University of Amsterdam and earned a PhD from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. In 1991, ASTD awarded him an International Professional Practice Area Research Award.
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HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED IN CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT ISSUES?
Photo by Dutch Eye Photography
After studying economics at the Free University, I had the great opportunity to do PhD research from 1979 to late 1982 at Wharton, where I studied social system sciences under some famous professors at the time—Russ Ackoff, Fred Emery, and Eric Trist. I was dedicated to doing cross-cultural research from the beginning and wanted to apply the knowledge about the methodology and deep thinking of systems sciences. And I certainly felt that my background of having a French mother and a Dutch father was just perfect in going into the direction of culture and management. Because I saw, as a young child, that my French family was quite different from my Dutch family, and that in fact, I was caught in between two worlds.
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HOW DID YOU COME TO WORK FOR SHELL?
I was paid one year by the Dutch government for my studies. The second year I was looking for a scholarship for the rest of my studies. I like combining things so I looked for a company where I could do the actual research on cross-cultural differences, and that happened to be Shell. I later worked for Shell in HR, and my last job was in job evaluation or job classification and management development. The cross-cultural topic got popular, let’s say, in the mid 1980s—in 1985 or 1986. I remember I was being interviewed like this for the Shell Magazine. It was amazing how many phone calls I got from competitors and companies asking me to do a lecture for them. And I did and really then discovered myself as a public speaker and how much I liked it; the rest is history as they say.
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IT’S BEEN SAID THAT LEADERS TODAY NEED “CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE” OR “MULTICULTURAL COMPETENCE.” DO YOU AGREE? HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE THESE?
I like to refer to it as transcultural competence. Multicultural competence is that you are good at adapting to the local culture. But I don’t believe anybody thinks that you can fully understand their culture. Transcultural competence, on the other hand, is the competence to take advantage of the cultural diversity you’re involved in, and it could be related to one country or five countries. Did you know that about 90 percent of the books on leadership are written by Anglo-Saxons? I have nothing against Anglo-Saxons, but only 5 percent of the world lives there. Individual countries often have their own definition and books on leadership. We need a new paradigm of leadership. What we have found in our research is that one of the few competencies that go beyond culture is the competence to deal with cultural diversity, which we call intercultural competence or dilemma reconciliation competence, and that consists of four elements of transcultural competence (4Rs): First is recognition: What is the dilemma? The second step is respect: There’s a dilemma, and both sides have legitimate opinions. The third is reconciliation: This is the art of coming to some sort of agreement. The fourth is realization: How do we translate agreement into actual behavior.
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WHAT ARE SOME COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT MANAGING MULTINATIONAL TEAMS OR WORKFORCES?
AUGUST 2011 | T+D | 63
The one I already discussed, and that is, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” I don’t think that works. So in other words, do the four Rs. That works much better. Another common misconception is that you should focus on diversity and accept the differences, ignoring what you share. It is much more important that you focus first on what you share. Then the third misconception is that everything is solved by shared tasks or strategies, end goals, or whatever takes place in the future. I think that helps, but that’s not a sufficient condition. The problem, very often, is how to get to the goal rather than what the goal is. There are different ways to get to the goal, and that’s where culture comes in. MORE / For an in-depth version of this interview, visit www.tdmagazine.astd.org.