How should a company coming to a new culture cope with cultural issues?

First, the company leader need send pioneers – people with international knowledge and experience working abroad. Many foreigners put the blame for their bad experience on the country they are going to, when it is really the fault of living and working abroad for the first time. Living abroad is not easy.

Whether you settle on a joint venture or take on a local partner, sit down and discuss your cross-cultural issues, and come up with a strategy. When you hire locally, first choose those who have experience in an international environment. It is much more difficult to open an office directly, rather than taking on a partner or creating a joint venture, due to the laws and regulations. Foreigners encounter difficulties in any country. Don’t jump to conclusions and blame your host country for your problems. First consider how foreigners are treated in YOUR country.

Text 5. Cross-cultural management in Russia.

In northern European cultures it’s considered professional to keep business and family separate, but not in Russia. Here, people expect to be able to discuss personal problems at work and think it’s fine if their boss calls late at night or on the weekend to talk about business. In other countries, at half past six workers are in private time.

This means what you, a foreign manager, might consider good business management, is actually not. Family and work are more mixed in Russia – it’s what you call a diffused culture – and this may create conflict.

In Russia if you want to succeed in business as a manager, you must show interest in your employee’s life. You must ask your employees how their granny feels and whether their children did well in their exams. And this goes both ways; employees also expect to take an interest in your personal life.

If you manage your staff in this way, should you ask an employee to come in Monday at 8 AM instead of 9 AM to settle important issues, the employee will agree gladly because he or she is grateful to help and feels connected to you personally.

Of course in Russia there is a style of management, called management by walking around, that builds on this more personal work environment. In this model, employees expect the boss to know everything; the boss is like a teacher. Overseas, your typical teacher may take time to think about a student’s question, but in Russia if you ask the teacher a question he is expected to answer at once, even if he doesn’t have the right answer. That what your worker will expect of you.

Relationships between manager and employees in Russia versus the West.

Work in Russia is very hierarchical. The boss always remains your boss, and you know and feel your status. In the West, business-unit like organization is popular. People work cooperatively on projects, adopting different roles at different times

This has a huge impact on performance assessments. In a business-unit-type organizations people are eager to praise their colleagues’ performance because they hope their colleagues will do the same for them in the future. In Russia one must be more careful and assessments may be muted – everyone looks average.

As some theorists assume there are inner-oriented and outer oriented cultures. Americans tend to be internally oriented, they manage by setting objectives targets: you do the job on time and you get a bonus, in other words: you control your destiny. Russians tend to operate with a more external orientation.

Problems arise as the foreign managers, looking critically at how each group operates, decide to assign cultural blame. Foreigners think Russians are lazy, Russians claim foreigners can’t understand their country. In the end everyone gives up, saying, “this is just how thing are in Russia”, which is the worst conclusion to draw.

The only way to handle such a situation is anticipate it; you know you are tasked with creating one effort across culture, so get ready to deal with it. At start, work out a flexible strategy for handling the cultural differences, coming up with several scenarios just in case one doesn’t work out. This is a great tool to use in all countries where people feel they are being controlled by nature, like in Russia.