A key success for todays cross culture, cross border, cross organisation worker is to have”cultural intelligence”. This was one of the themes when Aker Solutions hosted a Business Forum on cultural awareness together with the IMD Business school in Switzerland. Watch interview with IMD Professor Martha Maznevski.
First published: 10.12.2009
Cultural intelligence can be described as "The ability to create an impact across different cultures by understanding the relationships between cultural issues, on the one hand, and business issues on the other."
On 24 November Aker Solutions hosted a Business Forum on cultural awareness together with the IMD Business school in Switzerland. Among the questions on the agenda were What does the latest research say? What knowledge and skills do we need to instil in leaders? And what does it mean for companies?
The seminar was interactive with around 100 eager participants from many different companies and organisations in Norway. IMD Professor Martha Maznevski discussed her latest research and work in the field of cultural intelligence. Bjørn Ekelund, Managing director of Human Factors addressed how to increase cultural intelligence in individuals. From Aker Solutions, Annemiek Friebel, Senior Advisor Learning & Development and Astrid Hildmann, Vice President, Learning & Development shared highlights from Aker Solutions global culture awareness programme that was kicked off in March 2009.
Since the start up in the first quarter this year, Aker Solutions has more than 130 connectors from over 20 nationalities trained through the programme. The participants have different background and positions with a range of different business areas and units.
“By having a group of culture connectors being active in our company we try to improve our organisations’ cultural intelligence. This way we can reduce risk and improve opportunities in our projects and in the end our company will become more profitable because we will become smarter in doing business around the globe” says, Annemiek Friebel, Senior Advisor Learning & Development in the Aker Academy.
Iimproving performance
As Aker Solutions people we work with clients, colleagues and other stakeholders from all parts of the world. By knowing how to handle and be more focused on the cultural differences we meet in our day to day business, we can easier understand how to cooperate together as a strong team. Culture itself is a shared set of assumptions, values and norms. By being more aware of it, it will help us to communicate across borders and priorities how are we going to get things done. Adapting to and understand other cultures is the responsibility of all of us who care about performance. If one person adapts, performance improves a bit. If everybody adapts, performance skyrockets.