Hello. Let's start this week with a little review. We spent our first course speaking all about culture and how teams work or don't work. Then last week, we added a layer specifically about how we communicate effectively or ineffectively. Let's hear a couple of stories of communication challenges from our panel of experienced professionals. Look back at your notes as you watch them though. What are you noticing? Perhaps you see opportunities or challenges for multinational cross-cultural teams. Perhaps you see the Iceberg Metaphor or Onion Model at work. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or Tuckman's Stages of Group Development. Big 5 Personality Traits or the 4 Communication Styles, SEER Skills, or Interpersonal Gap. Keep an eye out. We will be asking you to share what you saw afterwards. Referencing what you learned, where does the miscommunication come from in this next example, and using what you learned, how is it resolved? Take a look. You have this team, this person connected well and is shouting on the call. I'm like, "Why the hell are you shouting?" I had a one-on-one with that person later on. I literally took him out for lunch, not knowing what to expect. Why don't we just connect them? He was like, "Manisha I like you a lot, I like this team. This is great if you're talking so directly." I thought I could be as direct as possible and said, "But why loud? Why shout?" He said, "Well, we're loud when we like people." I said, "Okay. If you don't mind, next time we have a team meeting, would you mind just sharing this prospect?" So I did a round-robin the next time and I just made a fun element because there were some people who had walked away not feeling comfortable. The next time we had a meeting we said, "Okay, everybody talk to us how do you behave when you're super-excited and how do you behave when you're not happy at all with the world," and we shared that perspective. Let's do this again. Try to identify different frameworks, articles, or other items from previously reviewed material this time. In this particular case, the female was a Chinese national and the male was Syrian. The female felt very strongly that it was the male role in society in Syria would be the one who would actually assign all the things for the female to do, and the female would be in a lesser of a position irrespective of their terminal degree, and high academic achievements. The male, on the other hand, felt that the female, in this case, represented a typical "Top-down way of moving forward with things." There were gender issues, there were ethnicity issues. I had asked them to work on a project together and with clear outcomes that I had asked for, and my context in which I operate day-in and day-out is higher education in the United States. It became very obvious to me that they had a very different approach to matters. Approach is one thing, and you can overcome that, provided that you get to the outcomes. But what actually happened was, they use their own lens to evaluate the other person's behavior, and they assume. They did not ask. They did not stop and ask. They both ran to me and I became the mediator of what was going on. The funny part of it, if you can call it funny, but the unfortunate part of it, it ended up being a lot of wasted time for the two individuals who are very capable. Extremely capable. But they became so stuck with the assumption that they had for the other, that they couldn't get over that, and so I have to sit down and speak to them first individually and explain to them that, what's going on here so that I can understand and help you facilitate the getting to the goals a little better. I discovered that the Chinese had certain cultural lens that they used, and the Syrian, a certain cultural lens that they used, and they just totally collided. One assume the other, and the other one assume one, but not once in their own dialogue did they ask, "Can you help me understand where you're coming from? Can you help me to overcome the challenge that I perceive that you x?" They never spoke about it, and instead, they were running around the matter. What I did was, I sat down and I said that "I may be right, I may be wrong. But what I hear both of you sharing with me is that you assume off the other. But you lack ability to communicate like two human beings who are colleagues, who both respect one another. You know how capable you are." It took a little while. It didn't happen immediately, the outcomes. But I asked them that instead of trying to achieve the goals, their next step was to take a step back and explain to one another what their background was, where they came from.