Cultural Management Assessment- Leading a Brainstorming Session with a Cross-Cultural Team

Cultural Management Assessment

Case Scenario/ Task

Leading a Brainstorming Session with a Cross-Cultural Team

Livermore, D. (2016) argues on the point that brainstorming sessions conducted in various workplaces to develop new ideas does not yield effective results every time. Traditionally it is been said that, the more diverse is the team or a group, the possibility of generating more number of innovative ideas or solutions is higher. But according to Livermore, D. (2016), brainstorming sessions are more effective for a certain group of individuals who are extrovert in nature and tend to speak out loud in a session to prove their point.

In order to conduct brainstorming sessions in the organization, it is equally important to understand and apply the concept of business communication. It is basically a process to generate, transmit, receive and interpret messages in public, or a group, interpersonal and mass communication via verbal and written formats. (Conrad & Newberry, 2012)

An in – depth research was conducted by Livermore, D. (2016) and his colleagues from the past fifteen years on Cultural Intelligence and have successfully researched more than 55, 000 professionals across the World in more than 98 countries. Their research mainly focused on understanding the problems or challenges faced by the teams or individuals in the context of brainstorming. The article stated above considered each challenge individually and provided an insight about the issue. Few challenges covered in the journal article are – (1) choice of first idea presented, (2) fluency of language, (3) saving face and (4) big picture versus the detailed analysis.

In other words, it is described that the ideas or solutions presented at first are generally accepted and this idea is generally presented by the most powerful participant in the brainstorming session team. Also, another significant factor which affects the brainstorming efficiency is the fluency of language. It is extremely difficult for the non – native speakers to keep their point in the brainstorming session as the process of translating the idea or solution in their native language and then translating it back to English is a time consuming process. And also, participants hailing from regions such as Latin America or Asia find the brainstorming sessions very challenging as it is against their cultural norms of conformity and harmony.

In addition to the above mentioned challenges, another challenge faced by the team members include cultural collisions depending on the approaches used in the brainstorming sessions. For example, Germans mainly focus on detailed analysis but, whereas, North Americans focus on the big picture. In order to reduce the challenges or problems in brainstorming sessions as defined above, it is important to consider few steps such as clearly defining the aims and objectives of the session to the team and warning the participants in advance regarding the global collisions and request them to participate 100 % in the discussions and provide their views on the chosen topic.

Recommendation

A particular set of skills can be developed for the team considering the number of participants and their origin and must be trained accordingly to communicate effectively within the team and enhance their effectiveness and efficiency at the workplace and thus, participate in the brainstorming or similar sessions actively.