Thrive instead of sitting out
By: Katrin Prakoonwit
Tags: International, Career Development, Crosscultural, Business Development, Business Coaching

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is rapidly changing our global business world. While initially a firefighting response might have been all you could think of, now is the time to find ways to ultimately manage the new normal. So don’t wait until “After COVID” to get your international business activities back on track. Let’s rather think about what you can do now!

When offering virtual business support at crossculture2go, we see global-minded entrepreneurs, leaders and executives in the urgent need for strategic shifts while also struggling with what daily international business life currently throws at them, e.g. contracts not being fulfilled, projects postponed indefinitely, supply chains disrupted, and a general fatigue to deal with all these issues.

How foreign business partners respond

While everyone needs to dismantle their individual roadblocks, the underlying challenge is quite often to comprehend how foreign business partners or team members — who might experience quite different COVID-19 crisis scenarios in their respective countries — respond?

A stressful event like the COVID-19 pandemic requires the individual to choose appropriate coping actions and cultural values are likely to influence someone’s attentiveness to certain factors in the appraisal process. That is why cultural differences in global business quite often sharpen during a crisis situation. Your business partners or team members from abroad might tackle hurdles in a completely different way than you because they might find other end states more worth pursuing.

Learn from national leaders around the world

Let’s look at an example we all can read about in the daily news. When considering nationwide lockdowns or developing local track & trace programmes during the Corona outbreak, national leaders around the world are facing similar conflicts between collective and individual interests, but in the end make different decisions.

Collective cultures (e.g. South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand or China) prioritise group benefits over individual disadvantages, whereas in more individualistic cultures (e.g. the USA, the UK or Germany), there is a strong demand to achieve maximum fairness for every citizen. This is why East Asian governments are better prepared to completely lockdown cities, track and isolate infected citizens and mobilise resources from all over the country to one local hot-spot. Any of these blanket approaches are widely supported by the general population due to their high group-orientation. They value the national benefits higher and accept individual discomfort. People in individualistic countries, however, rather focus on their personal inconvenience, potential disadvantages or disruptions to public life and demand more individual freedom and choice.

People deal with crisis in many different in ways

This is just one example showing how actions and reactions of your foreign business partners or team leaders dealing with the challenges that COVID-19 imposes on them might depend on their cultural background. Acknowledging that people deal with crises in many different ways is the first step to future success of any suffering international collaboration. If you are not aware of your foreign business partners’ motives and what influences them, misunderstandings and even mistrust might hinder what would be most beneficial right now: to join forces and get through this together.

Virtual business support

At crossulture2go.com, our focus is on supporting global-minded entrepreneurs, leaders and executives to create strong international business relationships that bridge today’s uncertainties. Our virtual business experts and coaches for 140+ countries help you to reach new levels of flexibility and adaptability, enabling you to respond with agility and to develop creative solutions when confronting unknown challenges in global collaborations.

Culturally adapted virtual communication skills

Working with international business partners or team members virtually on a longer-term basis, is most certainly another global business skill to be mastered rather sooner than later. A global business coach can support you in developing culturally adapted virtual communication skills so that you will manage difficult conversations with ease, foster higher levels of trust and engagement and ultimately collaborate more effectively.

A wider set of leadership skills

Last but not least, getting support to develop a wider set of global leadership skills that support you to better align the organization around new priorities, maximize strengths and performance of teams as well as tackle unknown leadership challenges is a great investment into your professional development too.

Our global business coaches cover 140+ countries and a huge variety of global business topics to select from, whatever your current situation. You can find your one trusted coach as a source of experience and expertise at hand that you can rely on anytime when going through the many challenges you are currently confronting in global business life. Or you can opt for a blend of several virtual business support solutions that match your needs at a time.

Crossculture2go offers the most flexible but still individual form of global virtual business support for everyone who wants to thrive instead of sitting out the current crisis.