Module 1 : Cross-cultural awareness, a key factor for international meetings

1. Acknowledging the cross-cultural impact in business relations

• Understanding how cultures and values are build, why and how they impact meetings
• Clichés and stereotypes: avoiding the prejudice trap
• The real meaning and implications of « English » as a common language
• Culture-free and culture-fair: the two main layers of any good business relations
• How and why different cultures have different perceptions on methods and processes
• When stress arises: assessing and understanding the main communication clashes
• Understanding the different steps in cross-cultural adaptation: from choc to synergy
• Assessing various levels of interaction between cultures: individual, functional, organisational and national

2. How international meetings are affected by cultural bias

• Identifying each participant’s business, professional, and personal expectations
• Establishing trust: relative importance of tasks and relationships (individual and group)
• Managing the agenda: how cultures value and manage time
• Decision making: how individuals view their relations with their team, hierarchy, and risks
• Identifying the bedrocks of a culture thinking and reasoning: adapting one’s communication, presentation and argumentation style (empirical, theoretical, importance of facts, explicit or implicit communication, simple vs complex, etc.)
• Analysing one’s cultural profiler: where one stands culture-wise
• Recognizing, respecting, reconciling, and making the best of cultural differences

Module 2 : Succeed in hosting international meetings

1. Preparing an international meeting

• Checking each participant’s cultural profile (tasks, processes, team work, relationships)
• Fostering a common objective: making sure steps, tools and objectives are culture-free and fair
• Establishing a strong agenda: realistic and culture-fair

2. Conducting and hosting: best practices for an efficient international meeting

• Cross-cultural communication: integrating the « 4 Pillars »: Preparation, Purpose, Process, People
• Starting the meeting : welcoming, connecting, agenda, objectives, processes
• Roles: chairman/woman, manager or host?
• Making the most of the verbal and non-verbal communication tools
• How to use both a common language and a specific cultural communication
• Putting across one’s message : how to avoid misunderstandings
• Best practices in speaking turns, discussions, debates, questioning, summarizing, interpretation, decision making and next steps
• The last and lasting impression: how to conclude and international meeting
• Walking the talk: best practices in writing and circulating minutes.

3. How to embrace remote meetings

• Understanding and managing the impact of remoteness upon international meetings
• Creating a strong meeting structure
• Fostering a clear and common working framework
• Telecommunication channels: considering their impact on quality of content and exchanges
• Optimizing remote meetings: how to use the « 4 Pillars »

4. Managing a difficult meeting & sensitive situations

• Cultural attitudes toward confrontations, tensions and clashes
• Managing international tensions: key causes of tensions and appropriate defusing techniques
• The 3 steps of tense situations management: anticipating, preventing, solving
• Managing inappropriate behaviors and confrontations in international meetings
• Communicating well in tense moments : best practices
• Closing well: acknowledging the proper value of any tensions/ confrontations