Our Clients

Photo

When a Swedish based retail company sets up business in a new country, it wants a rich blend of new local recruits and experienced staff to concentrate on getting the business up and running according to the timing plan. They don’t want personal and/or cultural differences to get in the way. A mix of classroom style and individual sessions provides the basis for healthy team building and promotes understanding within the new venture.

At face value, integrating existing teams from France, Belgium and Denmark doesn’t look as if it presents a major cultural conflict. Right? Wrong! Attitudes to risk, uncertainty and cultural ambiguity are quite different in those countries. So are the ways that people relate to authority. Having a strong central team combined with local experts on the ground helps KamelionWorldTM deal with the finer aspects of cultural integration – even when the visual signs of difference are hidden.

Integrating an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ style of management by objectives (MBO) into different cultures needs to be done with understanding and care. For an American company manager integrating a Chinese representative into his global team, it means intercultural counselling at both ends, with a focus on communication styles and getting results. Each interaction is quite specific and different from the other, yet both will be carried out within the policies and ‘brand personality’ of the parent company. In this particular case, getting the understanding right between the diffuse and the specific will be what moves the team forward.

More and more companies are finding it important to link their internal cultural values to the overall image of their company or brand. Sellers of jeans don’t want anything to do with manufacturing in sweatshops just as coffee manufacturers don’t want to be associated with non-ethical growing and production methods. So at an early stage, companies find it important to instil their cultural and ethical values into the minds of their new recruits. Often, new employees gain motivation and pride of association with their new company - but the degree to which that succeeds is determined by the awareness and understanding of how company values and those norms prevalent in other cultures merge together. With a recent banking client, issues of trust, respect and loyalty were discussed and interpreted through the excellent guidance of our multicultural experts. Success was obtained (using a musical analogy) by not getting everyone to sing identically in unison, but to sing in harmony so that the different but similar voices augmented each other well.